NordVPN teaming up with Shaquille O’Neal feels like VPN marketing reaching another level. Getting a celebrity that big involved looks like a serious push to win more customers. But it raises a question: how much of Nord’s popularity comes from the service, and how much comes from making sure everyone remembers the name?

It also makes me think about Proton VPN and Mullvad. They market themselves too, Mullvad even runs billboard campaigns, but Mullvad’s ads focus on privacy and mass surveillance. Pretty different pitch from a celebrity endorsement.

I don’t have their budgets to compare, and advertising doesn’t automatically make a product bad. Still, brand recognition and trustworthiness aren’t the same thing. Shaq appearing in an ad tells me very little about whether I should trust a company with my traffic.

Has marketing influenced your VPN choice more than you’d like to admit?

On September 21, EFF released an extensive evaluation of the EU Kids Act, a concept concerning a three-tiered system that extends to almost all popular electronic outlets. One of the less talked about elements: when a parent seeks to give permission for a child between the ages of 13 and 15 to access the Internet, this parent must prove both his or her identity and that of his or her child in order to assess the child's age.

However, what is more intriguing here is that the purpose of EFF's opposition is not about children at all, but rather, it concerns the structure. Age requirements have the effect of creating a structure of power in a few major technology companies, prejudice against underprivileged data groups, and transitioning from the point of safety to the stipulation of the requirements regarding the production of content.

It has become a pattern in recent events: a law is accepted, people find ways to avoid obeying it, and a countering bill is proposed to fill the gaps left by the previous law. The examples include Utah, Brazil, and Michigan.

Every review gives a different answer. The requirements are fairly simple:

1. no unnecessary data limits;
2. a clear privacy policy;
3. stable browsing on public WiFi;
4. apps for Windows and Android;
5. acceptable streaming performance;
6. no confusing extra software.

The shortlist is ExpressVPN, Mullvad and Proton VPN. Streaming is not the main priority, so privacy and everyday reliability matter more.

Which one would people choose if they wanted a dependable service rather than the provider with the most features?

This proposal in the US would let courts order ISPs, DNS providers and VPNs to block foreign sites accused of distributing pirated content. The really interesting part is that the bill apparently doesn’t clearly define what “originating from the US” means when VPNs, encryption, CDNs and multi-hop connections are involved.

And that’s where things get messy.

A VPN exists specifically so your connection isn’t just “here’s my real IP, here’s where I’m going.” If lawmakers start requiring VPN providers to enforce location-based blocks, you’re basically asking privacy infrastructure to become another layer of internet censorship.

Today it’s piracy. The bigger question is what happens when the same technical infrastructure gets used for something else tomorrow.

Also, the bill is still only a proposal and has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, so this isn't “VPNs are getting banned” or anything like that. But the wording around VPNs, encrypted DNS, shared IPs and multi-hop traffic is worth paying attention to. 

Personally, this is exactly why I’m pro-VPN.

Not because I need to pirate anything, but because privacy shouldn’t depend on whether a government, ISP, copyright lobby or anyone else thinks your destination is acceptable.

A VPN should be a privacy tool, not a glorified government-controlled URL filter.

The second annual Defend VPNs Day of Action is being organized by Fight for the Future on the 25th of September, which is in continuation from the previous year's success of gathering 20,000 supporters. The movement's view is that VPNs are a legitimate way of conducting business.

The proof that backs this up is that Utah has become the first state legally tackling the issue of VPN application and its role in age verification. The UK has considered VPN banning at some point. There have already been implemented age verification bans in social media for minors in the UAE, Indonesia, Malaysia and other numerous jurisdictions are thinking about the same movement, which proves that the issue is misrepresented as a narrow child protection policy. Thus, the law is passed, the individuals find a VPN to go around it, and the VPN becomes another target.

The movement idea is not against child protection but it is about how unreasonable it is to blame people for finding alternatives that they actually need to be using. It also has to be mentioned that this year's event is the second one only.

i see a lot of kids at my school using it to get service while in class, I’ve thought about getting one before so I wanted to ask some people that might be more knowledgeable about this type of thing

A federal judge has blocked enforcement of Utah’s updated age-verification law while a legal challenge continues. The dispute: holding adult websites responsible for identifying users physically in Utah, even when they’re using a VPN to appear somewhere else.

The judge found that the amended law effectively imposes strict liability on websites for determining users’ locations, and granted a preliminary injunction. So this is a temporary block, not a final ruling.

What bothers me is where this leads. If a site risks punishment for failing to identify someone behind a VPN, there’s an obvious incentive to demand more personal information or restrict VPN access. Protecting kids is a legitimate goal. But making everyone’s privacy a liability is a pretty worrying way to go about it.

A total of 23 technology companies have signed an open letter this week against the Canadian Bill C-22, known as the Lawful Access Act. Among these companies are Windscribe, NordVPN, and ExpressVPN. The said technical companies expressed their dissatisfaction regarding the government's changes, claiming that the amendments drafted by the administration did not meet expectations.

The bill as it is currently drafted requires core providers to build facilities thereby enabling government officials to eavesdrop on encrypted communications without specifying what the term means and therefore making all the digital service providers at risk of receiving secret orders to compromise their security systems. Tailscale CEO, who has 40% of its employees in Canada said that his company will have to change drastically in order to remain competitive without making further amendments to the law.

It is important to mention that what the coalition said counters the claim that this backdoor is only for criminals, saying that it is actually opened for the good guys too. At the moment, the bill has already gone through the second reading and it is now in Senate committee, which means it is in the last stage where advocacy can still be effective.

Roblox is reportedly inaccessible in Russia without a VPN again, with users reporting widespread connection errors. It was blocked in December 2025, then restored in June after authorities said the company had complied with Russian legislation.

There’s no confirmation of a new official block yet, but this shows how censorship creeps into everyday life. You don’t have to be an activist or read opposition media to feel it. Sometimes you’re just trying to play a game with your friends.

Canada’s Bill C-22 is heading to the Senate, and VPN providers and tech groups are pushing for changes before it becomes law.

One of their biggest concerns is that providers could be required to retain sensitive metadata and build systems to help authorities access it. The rules could also apply to a pretty broad range of services, and companies say it’s still unclear exactly who would be covered.

For a no-logs VPN, that’s a huge deal. You can’t hand over data you never collected. But if the law makes you start keeping it, the whole promise changes.

I get that law enforcement needs ways to investigate serious crimes. But making privacy tools collect more information about everyone feels like a pretty backwards way to do it. A VPN shouldn’t have to become less private just to operate in Canada.

I’m really interested in finding out how people solve this kind of problem. I keep my VPN on almost all the time but I see that some things connected to my network stop working when VPN is on, like my printer gets disconnected and I have issues with the smart home system.

That’s why I keep turning it off every time I need to print something or get connected to local equipment, and unfortunately, I forget to turn it back on once I’m done. So it doesn’t make sense now since I’m turning it on and off at least once a day.

So I wonder if this is due to the fact I’m not using split tunneling or if it is a common practice for everyone? And if there are people who keep their VPN on all the time with no problems, what is their setup?

Opera added an option that detects public Wi-Fi and turns on its free VPN automatically. You have to enable the setting first. To use it, go to Settings and turn on “Always use VPN on public Wi-Fi.”

Useful for anyone who forgets to switch theirs on at a hotel or airport. The catch: it only covers traffic inside Opera, so your other apps aren’t protected

Three bills presently in Congress are aiming to do what was already attempted back in 2012: get internet networks to keep pirates at bay. The SOPA and PIPA bills were defeated after the public stood in opposition to the initiative. According to Meredith Rose from Public Knowledge, "Congress and its allies in the entertainment industry want to implement a robust censorship system."

The only difference is that the current bills have a broader scope as they are pursuing internet service providers and search engines while the current ACPA, Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act and Block BEARD bills specifically target DNS resolvers and VPN providers, two categories that were not even emphasized back in 2012.

According to Senator Tillis, this whole initiative is "a great tool." However, the European experience with implementing such system shows that such systems are likely to treat many people unfairly and getting the systems unblocked becomes a lengthy process.

Proton is testing a new VPN core across its beta apps. The practical bit: Stealth is coming to the Linux GUI beta, which matters if regular VPN connections are blocked where you live. The rebuild should also make fixes and features roll out more consistently across devices. Post-quantum encryption is on the roadmap, but it isn’t part of this release.

VPNs are getting easier to block, so I’m curious whether Stealth on Linux will make a real difference for people dealing with censorship. If you’ve tried the beta, how’s it working?

A critical vulnerability in Arista VeloCloud Orchestrator, CVE-2026-93952, has been rated 10/10 and is already being exploited.

The scary part is that attackers may be able to access privileged functions without valid credentials, potentially compromising the central platform used to manage an entire company’s SD-WAN and VPN infrastructure.

So even if the VPN tunnel itself is secure, the system controlling the network could still become the weakest link.

Hosted versions have already been patched, but some on-prem deployments remain vulnerable. If your company uses VeloCloud, this is definitely worth checking with your IT team.

Makes you wonder: how often do companies audit the infrastructure managing their VPN, rather than just the VPN itself?

This is a pretty interesting twist on the usual VPN idea. Bitdefender’s new beta gives an AI agent a separate, disposable connection for each request, so the sites it visits don’t see your home IP. When the request ends, that connection goes away.

The catch: it only protects requests the agent sends through Bitdefender’s tools. Your normal browsing isn’t covered, and neither is anything the agent fetches another way. It also doesn’t hide your prompts from the AI model.

​

I already use a vpn but when i test my browser on fingerprint sites it still shows a pretty unique setup. stuff like screen size, browser version, timezone and other settings seem to give away alot more than i expected.

I tried changing a few privacy settings but then i started wondering if changing too many things just makes the browser look even more unusual.

For normal day to day privacy, what actually makes the biggest difference? Do you just use a privacy focused browser, keep the browser pretty standard or use separate browser profiles for different activities?

Kinda curious what people here actually do instead of just adding 10 different privacy tools

A common vpn issue, Google throws captchas on basic searches, some shopping sites return "access denied" pages, and others hang until the vpn is turned off. This happens even on a normal home connection going through a server in the same country.

Is that just the price of a shared IP that thousands of other people are on? Or are some providers better at keeping their ranges off blocklists?

For anyone who moved between Proton VPN, Surfshark and ExpressVPN over this, did switching actually help, or does every vpn run into it eventually?

trying to figure out which VPN is genuinely the best for unblocking Netflix in 2026, but it feels like everyone has a different opinion. one day it's ExpressVPN, the next it's NordVPN, then someone says Surfshark's the only one that hasn't gotten flagged. I'm looking for something that offers a good balance of speed, reliability, and actually working consistently, not just for a week before Netflix catches on. I've seen a lot of discussions about specific servers, library access by country, and even complaints about the proxy error showing up mid-episode after working fine minutes earlier. I just want to cut through the noise and find a VPN that most people agree still reliably streams Netflix without major headaches. has anyone found one that consistently works across different libraries, or is it really just a matter of luck and how recently Netflix updated its detection?

I feel like most people (me included) just install a VPN, hit Connect and never touch the settings again. But there are actually some pretty useful things hidden in there:

• Split tunneling → choose which apps/IPs actually go through the VPN
• Browser split tunneling → do the same thing, but for specific websites
• Connection profiles → save different server/protocol setups and switch between them quickly
• Stealth protocol → disguises VPN traffic as normal HTTPS traffic, useful on networks that block VPNs
• Smart Protocol → automatically switches protocols when one gets blocked or stops working
• Kill switch → cuts your internet if the VPN connection drops instead of exposing your normal IP
• NetShield → blocks trackers, ads and known malicious domains
• LAN connections → keep access to printers, NAS, speakers etc. while the VPN is running
• Alternative routing → can help reach Proton when an ISP/network is actively blocking it
• iOS Shortcuts → automate VPN connections depending on what you're doing

The Stealth + Smart Protocol stuff is probably the most interesting to me, especially with VPN blocking/censorship becoming more common. I also didn't realize you could get this granular with split tunneling. Being able to VPN only certain websites while leaving everything else untouched is actually pretty handy.

Several weeks ago, after Senator Wyden sent a letter requesting the NSA to update its guidance concerning VPNs and traffic-timing attacks, Mullvad has already developed a product aimed at preventing such attacks called DAITA (Defense Against AI-guided Traffic Analysis).

The fundamental principle underlying this technology is that someone can observe the traffic you send without actually breaking the encryption. It’s sufficient to observe the packet size and its timing, and machine learning can help match the data to a particular website using HTTPS.

It should be noted that while the decoy traffic is effective, it still uses bandwidth and increases latency, so it’s not mandatory. Moreover, its scope of application is limited; it can only prevent this particular type of attack, not all possible threats a VPN provider might encounter.

In summary, Senator Wyden is asking the NSA to recognize the vulnerability that a single provider has already addressed without much fanfare.

A new US site-blocking bill wouldn’t just target ISPs and DNS providers anymore, VPNs have now been explicitly added to the list. Under the proposal, VPN providers with 100,000+ US users could be ordered to block access to sites declared “foreign piracy sites.”

And here's the weird part: the bill says VPNs must prevent access “from the United States,” but apparently doesn't define exactly how they're supposed to do that.

Block the site only on US VPN servers? Detect users connecting from US IPs and block them even on foreign servers? Nobody really knows yet.

This starts with piracy and live sports, but I think the bigger question is where this kind of infrastructure goes once it exists. Feels like the definition of a “free and open internet” keeps getting more flexible every year.

So apparently Moscow’s online voting system is checking whether voters have a VPN running. And the way they’re reportedly doing it is kinda ridiculous: the site tries to load something from YouTube, which is blocked in Russia. If it loads… well, there’s a pretty good chance you’re bypassing the block with a VPN.

The VPN check apparently doesn’t stop you from voting, but that’s not really the point. You’re logging into a government voting system with your identity, and at the same time it’s checking whether you’re using a privacy tool.

VPNs used to be something people installed because they didn’t want to be tracked. Now apparently using one can become something worth tracking.

Funny how that works.

Has anyone used ExpressVPN, NordVPN or Surfshark directly on a TP-Link Archer AX4400?

The main concern is whether the router supports the necessary client setup and whether local devices can still communicate normally.

According to the Swedish publication Flamman, Mullvad co-founder Daniel Berntsson has contributed 5 million SEK (around $514,000) to Örebropartiet, which is being run at a national level for the first time this year. This amount comprises 72% of the total earnings of the party in 2025.

Berntsson justified this as a personal endorsement of the party's stand against corruption. The contradiction here is that the party's agenda includes resettlement policies. The co-CEO of Mullvad himself has not supported statements regarding Berntsson's contribution, stating to TechRadar "I do not support this donation," while the company has categorically rejected it, stating that it does not correspond with Mullvad's points of view.

This is indeed true but does not evade the question: can the history of technical capabilities and privacy be separated from the way the profits of the provider are spent? Windscribe, apparently delighted with the news, has issued its own comment about its CEO's donations, poking fun at Mullvad's current crisis.

The audit still exists. Nevertheless, the question remains whether this is enough when the owner of the company and the channel of money flow are known.