this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
293 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
61227 readers
4326 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If they provided port forwarding I would also use them...
Hey they did support it until they were getting difficult legal contacts because some users were abusing it, and getting turned away by different hosting providers.
They shut it down to protect the rest of us who use it without abusing it.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports
I know the port forwarding thing can be a deal-breaker for some people, but it's not Mullvad's fault that they needed to remove this to be able to continue providing quality services for the rest of their customer base.
This is sadly one of those "this is why we can't have nice things" type deals because when enough people abuse it, it becomes a problem. I have no ill will towards Mullvad for taking it away when it became financially and legally foolish to continue doing so.
How are other VPN services able to do port forwarding without having this problem?
They force you to pay with KYC money... No Pedo is stupid enough to be spreading CSAM on that VPN
Given how often I see articles where a pedo was caught because they were sending photos over telegram unencrypted or similar. I do think many are that stupid.
Much like other criminals, only the stupid ones get caught. Look at how many of those articles say that they'd been doing it for decades. Many more of them are out there right now.
AirVPN doesn't.
I think that's another reputable VPN?
Then my theory might be debunked or they will get forced to cut off port forwarding too
I'm not sure. Some people say that because they're in Italy which is part of the N eyes, they're not trustworthy.
Then there's the fact that they haven't been audited independently. The admin says it's because audits are security theater not real proof of privacy, so he'd rather not give some 3rd party root access to the servers.
This is to be honest a huge barrier for me.
What’s the benefit of port forwarding when using a VPN?
When you torrent you can only connect to peers that have open ports, if your ports are closed. Which means it makes it a lot harder to upload if you rely on private trackers and maintaining a good ratio. One can still download and upload, but for especially older torrents it has a good chance to affect your speeds and ability to download.
This is accurate when using the BT protocol. However if you have uTP (Micro Transport Protocol) enabled, it has "support for NAT traversal using UDP hole punching between two port-restricted peers where a third unrestricted peer acts as a STUN server."