got a DMCA notice on my vpn account

It's US-based. They wouldn't have bothered if they saw the canuckistani IP behind it. The irony is that I have the movie on my ziplist (cdn. equiv of a netflix queue), but i was bored on xmas and needed something to watch and my movies didn't arrive before the weekend. Has anyone else ever gotten a notice?

I actually support their right to go after people (how are they supposed to protect their IP?), but I think it's pretty damned impossible to ever prove anyone downloaded something illegally. An IP address/time is not a person. And it's It's unreasonable to expect average users to know a damned thing about securing access when experts in the field have to spend all their time keeping up with a changing security landscape. If I was a prick i'd just hack my neighbors wifi and never worry about it again. The whole thing is a rather pointless exercise. Even though i'm a canuck, I'm just going to leave my account suspended and get a new vpn service. I don't want to acknowledge in any way that i DLed anything.

I use a vpn because my ISP throttles p2p downloads at like 30KB/s. Since all the packets are encrypted to the tunnel endpoint, they can't do deep packet inspection, and traffic passes through without being throttled.

Also, the vpn lets me have a US ip address, which is useful for some sites that only let americans see certain content.

I was using strongvpn for months. Throughput was good and service was cheap. Pretty much any US-based service is gonna have to respond to those DMCA notices, so you may want to look outside the country for a company that can ignore those requests if you're doing a lot of p2p.

The movie industry hasn't made a decision to start suing people like the RIAA yet. They do send out notices but I don't think they've done any mass lawsuits yet. I'm sure that I could just acknowledge the notice and not worry about it, but it's just as easy to find a new provider, so why acknowledge i've done anything illegal? Not worth it.

Could write an entire article on the service, but bottom line, don't place TOO much faith in it unless everything you're doing is legal and all you're trying to achieve is privacy. It's a US company (or at a minimum has significant operations in the US) and to my knowledge they do log, but they won't provide access to just anyone at any time. They would probably react the exact same way strongvpn did, but this is bad on old info on my part because it's been a while since i've thoroughly looked at their services. Also, you have information on your machine that can give you away, even when you think you're anonymous, such as information stored in cookies. Depending on what you want to do, you need to be super careful if you really want to stay anonymous. you can get plugins for some browsers that will disable all scripts and cookies and anything else that could identify you. If you really want to be anonymous, the Tor network is the best i've seen, but it's slow as fuck. People are loathe to run servers because nobody wants to be on the receiving end of an fbi raid because some guy coming from your IP is serving child porn, trying to hack a government site, or posting in hamas forums saying he's gonna blow up the whitehouse. Ultimately nothing would come of it but I wouldn't be surprised if they seized all your electronics in the meantime, so it's a major disincentive for most people using it and so instead they just consume instead of share bandwidth. Plus, you have to assume that when your traffic comes out the other side, it's being captured, so certain cautions are still merited.