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.
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.
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.
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.