I just assume i need one and have occasional arr moment. Not much real viruses and malware threat. Oh and of course communist posting which can get me in trouble in Poland.
I would recommend starting by figuring out why you personally would use a VPN. What specific threats are you facing? What can a VPN help you mitigate? The marketing ("makes you private online") is mostly nonsense, you just move your implicit trust from your ISP to the VPN provider. For example, when you're going things online your local government doesn't like, a VPN may not mitigate that risk.
They just said they're a communist in Poland. That's a pretty decent reason.
And a VPN will indeed mitigate that risk. They're not trying to set off a nuke in NYC after announcing their intent a week ago, they don't need to immediately worry about VPN providers being honeypots for NSA/CIA/eyes agreements as Poland is frankly not a central member of NATO, it's an attack dog, it's fodder on the eastern flank, it's not white enough to get the good stuff.
VPNs have been proven to be private in court in the past. ISPs log and will hand over all your data and info to authorities and that's not even a secret, no operation will be blown by their ISP handing over years of records on them on request. That's a fact. VPNs will not necessarily do that and most of them make it a business model not to have that data available to hand over and were they to be proven to be doing that would instantly collapse as a business and their utility as a honeypot for intelligence would also vanish. If one were a central figure in a communist uprising I indeed wouldn't count on it keeping you safe from that info being passed from one intelligence agency to another but for an online poster and maybe minor activist? The risk is much lower.
Are there VPNs that are scum? Is there a lot of spamming and dishonesty in the business? Yes. Does that mean there is no utility, it's all futile, it won't help you at all? Fuck out of here with that. Millions of pirates who can't be identified every month say otherwise. As does the fact Proton closed down port forwarding because someone used it for a malware campaign.
Indeed does the poster need a VPN or are they over-worrying? Maybe but the fact is they need to make that call. I can't say "oh don't buy into the fear-mongering of VPN providers" because the world can change and ISPs can keep logs for years. I think given they use a US-centric website the risks are lower than if they happened to use an equivalent to lemmygrad for organizing Polish communists but still not zero.
Tor can be de-anonymized by regular police as it was in Germany only recently using a timing attack but that's not the best for retrospect attacks on a mass scale for unmasking various people like say warrants to all the ISPs to deliver data on anyone who visited <list of communist sites> would be. Safest option right now would probably be stacking a VPN and Tor as it's even more correlation to perform and makes timing attacks much harder but I wouldn't bother at this point for just posting communist takes. Deranged option would be stacking two separate VPNs paid in cash mailed in envelopes sent using gloves and under that Tor or another onion routing proxy and while doing that running a random traffic generator through the two VPNs. But that's obviously massive overkill for the amount of effort anyone here is likely to be worth.
I would recommend trying to get service from one of those providers on sale then in the future if you think it's wise to hide your communist activities. Only you can decide how dangerous records of access to given websites are for you now and in the near future given the legal and political situation in your country.
Access to lemmygrad is encrypted by HTTPS so they shouldn't be able to see what your username is or what you're posting but they would see you accessing it. VPN providers may have sales for whatever holidays are regional to your area otherwise many have sales around Black Friday for the US and/or Christmas/New Years.
I don't think you necessarily need an AV, that said Kaspersky does have a VPN built into their premium tier offering which I believe admits in its privacy policy that it scrapes your activities to sell to advertisers. I also wouldn't trust them not to hand over your data to the Polish authorities on request as they are very much cop-lovers there. They make a good AV product, consistently ranked top 1-3 but they're not comrades.
BUT for most people I would just recommend free options like Windows defender, a second opinion scanner for eye-patch stuff like I recommended (or uploading it to virustotal), and back-ups. Have an external hard drive or flash drive that you don't leave connected to your computer that you backup everything important to every 3-6 months so on the off-chance something happens you're covered and this unlike an AV covers your hard drive failing.
Get your gaming arr from a place called skidrow reloaded dot org and your video arr from the stremio app with the torrent plugin (you'll have to Google it too)
Sound arr you can get from real Spotify but install spicetify on top of it and in "marketplace" remove ads.
I just assume i need one and have occasional arr moment. Not much real viruses and malware threat. Oh and of course communist posting which can get me in trouble in Poland.
I would recommend starting by figuring out why you personally would use a VPN. What specific threats are you facing? What can a VPN help you mitigate? The marketing ("makes you private online") is mostly nonsense, you just move your implicit trust from your ISP to the VPN provider. For example, when you're going things online your local government doesn't like, a VPN may not mitigate that risk.
They just said they're a communist in Poland. That's a pretty decent reason.
And a VPN will indeed mitigate that risk. They're not trying to set off a nuke in NYC after announcing their intent a week ago, they don't need to immediately worry about VPN providers being honeypots for NSA/CIA/eyes agreements as Poland is frankly not a central member of NATO, it's an attack dog, it's fodder on the eastern flank, it's not white enough to get the good stuff.
VPNs have been proven to be private in court in the past. ISPs log and will hand over all your data and info to authorities and that's not even a secret, no operation will be blown by their ISP handing over years of records on them on request. That's a fact. VPNs will not necessarily do that and most of them make it a business model not to have that data available to hand over and were they to be proven to be doing that would instantly collapse as a business and their utility as a honeypot for intelligence would also vanish. If one were a central figure in a communist uprising I indeed wouldn't count on it keeping you safe from that info being passed from one intelligence agency to another but for an online poster and maybe minor activist? The risk is much lower.
Are there VPNs that are scum? Is there a lot of spamming and dishonesty in the business? Yes. Does that mean there is no utility, it's all futile, it won't help you at all? Fuck out of here with that. Millions of pirates who can't be identified every month say otherwise. As does the fact Proton closed down port forwarding because someone used it for a malware campaign.
Indeed does the poster need a VPN or are they over-worrying? Maybe but the fact is they need to make that call. I can't say "oh don't buy into the fear-mongering of VPN providers" because the world can change and ISPs can keep logs for years. I think given they use a US-centric website the risks are lower than if they happened to use an equivalent to lemmygrad for organizing Polish communists but still not zero.
Tor can be de-anonymized by regular police as it was in Germany only recently using a timing attack but that's not the best for retrospect attacks on a mass scale for unmasking various people like say warrants to all the ISPs to deliver data on anyone who visited <list of communist sites> would be. Safest option right now would probably be stacking a VPN and Tor as it's even more correlation to perform and makes timing attacks much harder but I wouldn't bother at this point for just posting communist takes. Deranged option would be stacking two separate VPNs paid in cash mailed in envelopes sent using gloves and under that Tor or another onion routing proxy and while doing that running a random traffic generator through the two VPNs. But that's obviously massive overkill for the amount of effort anyone here is likely to be worth.
A bit ignorant your post tbh.
I would recommend trying to get service from one of those providers on sale then in the future if you think it's wise to hide your communist activities. Only you can decide how dangerous records of access to given websites are for you now and in the near future given the legal and political situation in your country.
Access to lemmygrad is encrypted by HTTPS so they shouldn't be able to see what your username is or what you're posting but they would see you accessing it. VPN providers may have sales for whatever holidays are regional to your area otherwise many have sales around Black Friday for the US and/or Christmas/New Years.
I don't think you necessarily need an AV, that said Kaspersky does have a VPN built into their premium tier offering which I believe admits in its privacy policy that it scrapes your activities to sell to advertisers. I also wouldn't trust them not to hand over your data to the Polish authorities on request as they are very much cop-lovers there. They make a good AV product, consistently ranked top 1-3 but they're not comrades.
BUT for most people I would just recommend free options like Windows defender, a second opinion scanner for eye-patch stuff like I recommended (or uploading it to virustotal), and back-ups. Have an external hard drive or flash drive that you don't leave connected to your computer that you backup everything important to every 3-6 months so on the off-chance something happens you're covered and this unlike an AV covers your hard drive failing.
Get your gaming arr from a place called skidrow reloaded dot org and your video arr from the stremio app with the torrent plugin (you'll have to Google it too)
Sound arr you can get from real Spotify but install spicetify on top of it and in "marketplace" remove ads.