I know there was a reason I didn't pick up Proton years ago when PIA got bought by Kape but I don't remember what it was. I'd read something on /r/VPNTorrents but that place has since been banned so I can't refer to it again.

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[–] Ilandar@lemmy.today 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Mullvad stopped doing it because it can't be done anonymously.

Where did Mullvad give this as the reason? There was no mention of anonymity in their announcement post. It was a decision driven by legal issues and the blacklisting of their IPs.

Why are we removing forwarded ports?

Port forwarding in general has added value if you are wanting to allow a friend or family to access a service running behind our VPN. This could be a legitimate website, a game server, or even access to your self-hosted server.

Unfortunately port forwarding also allows avenues for abuse, which in some cases can result in a far worse experience for the majority of our users. Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.

The result is that it affects the majority of our users negatively, because they cannot use our service without having services being blocked.

The abuse vector of port forwarding has caught up with us, and today we announce the discontinuation of support for port forwarding. This means that if you are a user of forwarded ports, you will not be able to add or modify the ports you have in use.

We have removed the ability to add port forwards on all accounts.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 week ago

Ok, you're probably right. It wasn't "the reason". It was part of the discussion at the time though.

"By simply banning ports, we get rid of abuse of content hosted by our IPs via ports, and can focus on giving better privacy for the broader mass of people," said Jonsson.

He said: "Statically linked port-forwards are not good for privacy, it can be linked to a user account. A VPN service that can identify a user, is not a good option for using port-forward with, if anonymity is important."

https://www.techradar.com/news/mullvad-removes-port-forwarding-on-security-grounds