Are you connecting to Japan, Italy, Australia, Mexico, Singapore or Hong Kong?
> Increasingly, datacenters around the world are banning services with heavy BitTorrent traffic due to the vast amount of copyright infringement notices they trigger.
> In response several VPN providers are now only allowing P2P traffic on specific servers. Private Internet Access (PIA) is also presented with this problem, but the solution they chose is different.
> Instead of banning torrent traffic, PIA has decided to route it through BitTorrent-friendly regions instead.
> The policy affects a few servers in Japan, Italy, Australia, Mexico, Singapore and Hong Kong. Subscribers who are connected to these servers may notice that their BitTorrent traffic is rerouted through another region.
Don't get me wrong PIA is still an awesome service. 5 sim accesses, mobile VPN Client and perm VPN access from a route made me switch from StrongVPN. But when they sell the following service they should cite the lack of support again geolocating:
"UNBLOCK WEBSITES Unrestricted US, UK, NL, CA, Romania, Germany, France, Sweden and Swiss based Internet Services Our VPN services provide unrestricted and uncensored access to the complete internet. If you are blocked by strict censorships by your ISP or firewall, this service will bypass the censorships and firewall, effectively providing you unrestricted access via a United States based IP address. In addition, our Swiss gateways provide the strongest levels of privacy available."
Plus I find many of the UK2Net IPs are tacked as SPAM IPs and so get you get captcha wherever you visit. You don't get these problems on cyberghost. Thus conclusion = victim of its own success.
The ability to run P2P/torrents for one. The free Cyberghost does not allow P2P/torrents.
?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/562/0/my-torrents-wont-work
Also, PIA allows P2P/torrents on all their VPN servers. The paid CyberGhost VPN service only allows torrents on certain VPN servers of theirs, not all of them.
> You have to set the local one and they assign you a public one.
This is not how it works at all. The local port box actually selects the local port on which OpenVPN itself will bind. This is useful if you use strict firewall rules and need the port OpenVPN uses for UDP traffic to not change. It has nothing to do with port forwarding.
The way port forwarding works is that a random port over 10000 is assigned to you, and it is a 1:1 mapping (so, if you get port 12345, then you have to connect to the PIA gateway on port 12345 and the traffic will come to your computer on port 12345). The reason it works this way is that since the IPs are shared, it is not possible to let people select which port they want as everyone would fight for the default ones, but it is also pretty bad for security because it would make it trivial for someone to portscan the gateways and identify common services.
If you can't change the port Plex uses, a possible solution to this could be to use your firewall or a reverse proxy software to relay it back to the correct port. I don't know how Plex works in particular, but you can also use nginx or HAProxy to forward the traffic to the right place.
Personally I use the firewall option, as it is pretty easy to do on Linux. I don't know if the Windows firewall can do this however.
No data would be exposed because the VPN application is what encrypts all information going to and from your computer. However, it's possible that the mirror server could record and retain all encrypted data. I don't believe the authorities could accomplish anything by attempting to mirror the server because the data retained by the mirror server would be useless.
I'm told the official PIA app has preventative measures to protect a user against connecting to an attackers "server"
"Our clients do not require any updates, because the application has preventive measures to protect against connecting to a malicious server. Additionally, assuming that for a different reason a VPN client could connect to a malicious VPN server, the fact that the VPN client is vulnerable to heartbleed does not harm it in any additional way. Given that all modern operating systems we support through our client have memory protection that prevents a process from reading memory from a different process, the malicious server would only be able to read data that belongs to the OpenVPN client, that is, the data that the client is already sending to the server.
To be clear, even if for some reason your adversary was able to obtain your Private Internet Access login credentials, they still would not be able to decrypt your data transfer."~ quoted from
I'm also having problems with the proxy. I use Torguard's "checkmyiptorrent" file to check to see if the connection is masking the IP. The past week or so it's been reporting "Not working" where it used to say "Success!". I haven't changed anything, anybody else having this issue?
Yes, the last few months speeds have gotten terribly slow. On both PC, MacOS & iOS device. Here's my recent test this morning (PC Win 8): ping 0 ms, DownL 37.31 Mbps, UpL 10.79 Mbps (off VPN) ping 115 ms, DL 4.46 Mbps, UpL 6.47 Mbps (on PIA VPN thru US East) ping 105 ms, DL 0.38 Mbps, UpL 7.33 Mbps (on PIA VPN, thru US Midwest) ping 82 ms, DL 0.43 Mbps, UpL 6.88 Mbps (on PIA VPN, thru Texas) ping 58 ms, DL 0.65 Mbps, UpL 7.47 Mbps (on PIA VPN, thru US West) ping 116 ms, DL 5.83 Mbps, UpL 9.28 Mbps (on PIA VPN, thru US East)
Do any PIA support staff monitor this reddit btw? The Support site directed to this sub, but none of the posts show comments by em. I'm thinking of switching to PureVPN or VPNUnlimited at this point as much as I don't want to both switching out on my devices.
Regarding privacy and Private Internet Access, don't forget they are a U.S based company (Based in Denver). And usually when you have "u.s based" and "privacy" in the same sentence it's not a good sign.
For the ones which would argue PIA is based in London, UK... sorry but "London Trust Media" is the name of the company owner of PIA and they operate from Denver, US (do some digging on their website "about us" section, etc...)
london trust media Denver
They posted on Facebook :
Reminder: Private Internet Access #VPN and London Trust Media are not based in the UK and are not subject to the #InvestigatoryPowersAct
That's a good question, /u/waveform. The PIA team does see comments here but this subreddit is for the general discussion of private internet use, of which Private Internet Access is just a part.
You are welcome to discuss PIA with other users, help each others with issues, make suggestions, and more. I hope this helps clear things up!
Hello ZimmerFrameThief,
The PPTP protocol does not encrypt your data, and just masks your IP address. If you wish to have your data encrypted, please use the Private Internet Application or OpenVPN protocol with our service.
For more information on the encryption that our application provides you can visit the following link:
If you have any further questions, please contact us directly at helpdesk@privateinternetaccess and our support team will be happy to assist you further.
Thanks,
Hailey E, Retention Specialist
Hello VPNUserGuy,
We have confirmed that the newly-released v59 installs and connects with Linux Mint 17.3.
With your description of the software center and updates manager, it seems as though your system may be corrupted. The members of the forums may be able to help you fix this corruption on your device.
Once that's been dealt with, could you please try a fresh install of the application with the installer found here:
Afterwards, if you're still encountering this issue, you may need to reinstall your OS to resolve this.
Thanks.
Hailey E, Retention Specialist
Hi /u/Carl-The-Cuck,
Thanks for this. We're working with Cloudflare directly to get this taken care of. I will report back when there is more information. Thank you very much for your patience and reporting of the issue. In addition, thank you for choosing Private Internet Access.
Best, Andrew