Riseup vpn is a free, donations based VPN, that doesn't require an account and has no logs policey. They doesn't have lots of serves like Protonvpn for example but they're running for years and support P2P, so if someone is too short for paying for a VPN, I think its a pretty good for some use cases.
It's a volunteer and donation run anarchist collective that has been around since 1999. They have fought a number of legal battles against governments to varying degrees of success.
The people involved have close ties to basically everyone involved in Tor and should be regarded with the same level of trust (what ever that means for you). There's also a lot of overlap with some core Debian contributors.
That said, I wouldn't use them for P2P other than occasional use. Or if you do, consider making a substantial monthly donation. It's a lot of resources to pull from a small organisation at the expense of people who need their services for political organizing, which is their primary focus.
Yeah that's fair, I hope people realize I meant that you don't have to pay to use the service, and not that I'm discouraging donations in any way. They deserve every penny!
The catch is that free services like this are run for people who need them, not people who want to save money. In my opinion it is very scabby to use something like RiseUp for potentially data intensive tasks like torrenting if you can afford a paid VPN service. Leave it for those who genuinely need it.
From Riseup: “Due to Thanksgiving and other deadlines, our lawyers were not available to advise us on what we can and cannot say,” the collective member told me. “So in the interest of adopting a precautionary principle, we couldn’t say anything. Now that we have talked to [counsel], we can clearly say that since our beginning, and as of this writing, riseup has not received a NSL, a FISA order/directive, or any other national security order/directive, foreign or domestic.”
Intercept article: "And yet, when I asked if riseup had received any request for user data since August 16, the collective did not comment. Clearly, something happened, but riseup isn’t able to talk about it publicly. The riseup collective is currently having internal discussions about when it will be able to update its warrant canary."
In the beginning it was just blocking Facebook& Twitter so it wasn't a big issue. Now it's almost completely isolated.
At this level is just self harm, as a VPN is no more optional but is mandatory for everyone.
Even the director of the gfw program was spotted with some VPN icons on his desktop during a PowerPoint presentation from his laptop
This allows for easy supply chain attacks to companies because when employees need to download huge packages from the internet like xcode, they a presented with a choice: download from official website at 5 kb/s and finish next week or download an hacked version laced with malware from a shady website at 5 megabytes/s? Even Tencent was hacked in this way...
Riseup is free because it is made by people who want the internet to be better. The same way tor is free.
But you should be donating if you find it useful. And I could nearly guarantee that a service that is used for censorship resistance that gets used for P2P will go from nice and fast to ungodly slow
Kinda remember there being similar discussions about people should not use TOR for P2P and for similar reasons.
Anyway, I thought I read something awhile back that P2P and torrenting were eyeing I2P for future anonymousness. Is thhat still a work in progress or am I remembering wrong?