Deutsche Welle (DW) is Germany’s international news organization that provides accurate and independent coverage and analysis of events worldwide. While DW is state-funded, it’s governed by the Deutsche Welle Act, which is intended to keep it independent and free of government interference. 

DW is available in 32 languages, making it an invaluable news source, especially in countries where authoritarian governments censor objective reporting. These regimes often see DW as a threat and the governments of Turkey, Iran, and Russia have blocked DW’s TV channel and website.

In the fall of 2022, DW came to Proton to see if we could help them make their independent reporting available all around the world. Proton VPN is one of the most widely used VPNs when people need to bypass online censorship. We’ve become the VPN people turn to when all others are blocked. We view this as a vital part of our work to build a better internet.

That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with DW to ensure that the people who need it most can access a credible and objective news source for free. Simply look for the specially-labeled DW servers in all our Free locations (United Sates, Japan, and Netherlands), or search for “news”.

Connecting to a DW server will provide you with direct, unlimited, high-speed access to the DW website, including all live streaming and video-on-demand content.

Fighting for a better internet

Internet censorship is unfortunately becoming commonplace, but we believe our partnership with DW, which is the first of its kind, is an effective way to fight back. Given DW’s work in the face of persistent internet blocks, our partnership is a natural extension of our work, even if it has no precedent. 

We believe we all have a responsibility to stand up and defend human rights, especially in places where they are under assault. Together, DW and Proton are dedicated to providing everyone with the ability to access the information they need. And because these servers function as VPN servers, they also protect DW’s readers from government surveillance. 

“We are very happy to be partnering with a company that is just as dedicated as we at DW are to protecting the online privacy of activists, journalists and others while providing them with free, unrestricted access to the open Internet,” said Guido Baumhauer, the Managing Director of Distribution, Marketing, and Technology at DW.

We’ve focused on turning Proton VPN into one of the most censorship-resistant VPNs currently available. Thanks to the support of the Proton community, we’ve been able to develop novel anti-censorship features, including:

• Smart Protocol — Detects attempts to block your VPN connection and automatically selects the VPN protocol and IP port that will bypass the block
• Alternative Routing — Bypasses advanced VPN block attempts by routing your connection over hard-to-trace third-party networks
• Stealth VPN protocol — Obfuscates your VPN connection to make it look like a standard internet connection

We hope that through this partnership, we can help DW deliver accurate news to people living behind the veil of state-imposed censorship. 

The post Deutsche Welle and Proton VPN team up to fight censorship appeared first on Proton VPN Blog.

Completed improvements

Over the course of 2022, we delivered the following improvements:

• We improved gaming and video-conferencing performance by introducing support for moderate NAT (network address translation).
• We introduced two-factor authentication to Proton VPN to improve your account security.
• We introduced native support for third-party WireGuard clients and routers.
• We had independent experts audit our no-logs policy.

However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the start of 2022 required us to revamp our plans for the year. Shortly after the war began, millions of Russians chose Proton to bypass government censors and access the truth. We became the most widely used VPN in Russia because we provide a trustworthy, open-source, and fast VPN service for free.

In response to the clear social need for us to maintain our service in the face of challenging censorship conditions, we focused most of our development efforts in 2022 on developing stronger anti-censorship features.

Improved anti-censorship features

From the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February to the recent Mahsa Amini protests in Iran, 2022 has been a momentous year for Proton VPN. Around the globe, millions of people suffering the attacks and censorship of repressive regimes have turned to Proton VPN to bypass censorship, express themselves, and report the truth.

We developed Proton VPN to make sure everyone could access the uncensored internet in security and privacy, no matter what. To achieve this goal, we put most of our engineering resources into developing and launching our unique Stealth VPN protocol, which was released in October. Stealth makes Proton VPN even harder to detect and block by making VPN traffic look practically identical to regular web traffic. We released Stealth in Iran and Russia before making it available in the rest of the world. It’s been widely released, but we’ll continue working on it to bring it to every major platform.

What to expect next

To deliver Stealth as fast as possible, we necessarily had to deprioritize some of the other features and improvements we’d originally planned for 2022. Now that Stealth has been released on most platforms, we can resume working on these other improvements. Below we discuss what you can expect from Proton VPN over the next six months.

Proton VPN browser extensions

We believe everyone deserves privacy online, which is why we’re working to develop Proton VPN apps for every device and platform. This led us to develop native Proton VPN browser extensions for the Firefox and Chrome browser families, which should be released for beta testing by the end of 2022. These extensions will make it even easier for more people to protect their browsing and bypass censorship with Proton VPN.

Service improvements

Privacy and security should not come at the expense of browsing speed or usability. To achieve our mission of building a better internet where privacy is the default, we must make Proton VPN connections as fast and unobtrusive as surfing the internet without a VPN. This has led us to target several service improvements.

Expanded streaming support

If you pay for a subscription to a streaming service, you should be able to watch the shows and movies you pay for, even if you are traveling in another country. We’re currently working on expanding the number of streaming services we support and the locations we can make them available in. This will let you stream your favorite shows and movies, no matter where your travels take you. The streaming services we add support for are guided by requests from the Proton community, so let us know.

Continued network improvements

Proton VPN today is already present in 64 countries with over 1,800 servers. Going forward, we will continue to expand our global network into even more countries, and we’ll continue to roll out more 10 Gbps servers. 

This year, we expanded our infrastructure so much that the majority of our network is now 10 Gbps, an important milestone. Thanks to these improvements and our unique VPN Accelerator technology, which provides up to 400% faster speeds compared to our regular VPN service (especially when connecting to distant VPN servers), Proton VPN is the best in class when it comes to performance.

We’re also increasing the diversity and quality of the IP addresses we provide. VPN services can unfortunately sometimes be abused by bad actors, which is one reason we separate our free server infrastructure from our paid server infrastructure. This preserves the highest network quality for our Proton VPN Plus users. Our upcoming improvements in anti-abuse will improve IP quality further for all users. You can expect fewer instances of VPN detection (for example, when you connect to a streaming service) or CAPTCHA prompts from third-party services over the next several months.

Improving NetShield Ad-blocker

NetShield plays an important part in keeping your browsing secure and private. It blocks ads, malware, and trackers before your browser can even load them, keeping your device safe and making web pages and other internet content load significantly faster. For this reason, it has long been one of Proton VPN’s most popular features.

In early 2023, we’ll improve NetShield to make it even more useful, allowing you to see exactly how many ads, trackers, and malware have been targeting you, where they are coming from, and how NetShield has blocked them.

An internet that’s private by default

We want to thank the entire Proton community for your support. Not only have you allowed us to build a VPN network with servers in over 60 countries worldwide, you’ve enabled us to help those most in need. The access to the uncensored internet that we’re providing in Ukraine, Russia, and Iran, which is direly needed, would not be possible without your support. Thank you.

We of course have much more planned for Proton VPN in 2023, and the roadmap above is just what we plan to release in the first part of the year. Next year, we look forward to sharing another update about the other exciting features we have planned.

If you have questions or feedback about our plans, we want to hear from you! We take your feedback seriously and use it to make sure Proton VPN meets your needs. Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, and let us know what you think.

The post Proton VPN’s roadmap for the first part of 2023 appeared first on Proton VPN Blog.

Now available for our Windows VPN app, port forwarding is a new feature that dramatically improves download speeds when using peer-to-peer (P2P) software. It can also help performance on online gaming platforms. 

Port forwarding is available for every Proton VPN user with a paid plan. If you are on our free plan, upgrade now to start benefiting from it.

Why do I need port forwarding when using P2P?

Peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols such as BitTorrent are used to download and upload files using a program called a P2P client.

If you don’t share (seed) your own content with others (your peers), then no content will be available for anyone. P2P protocols were designed to encourage sharing by tying download speeds to upload speeds. So the more you seed, the faster you can download content. 

When you seed content, other P2P users will attempt to initiate a connection with your P2P client. It is likely these incoming connections from the internet will be blocked by the firewall we use on our VPN server.

This is not a problem if the peer trying to initiate a connection is not using a VPN or is using a VPN with port forwarding. Your P2P client will be alerted that an incoming connection has been blocked and will attempt to initiate its own connection back to the peer instead. Since this is an outgoing connection, our firewall will not block it.

However, if that peer is behind their own VPN firewall without port forwarding, you will not be able to initiate a connection or share files with them. This can impact your overall upload speeds. 

As long as other peers sharing the same content are not behind firewalls with no port forwarding, you can still torrent those files, but your download speeds may be slower. 

VPN firewalls without port forwarding also make the entire P2P network less efficient for everyone, an issue that is becoming increasingly important as more and more filesharers use VPNs such as Proton VPN to protect themselves while downloading.

Port forwarding explained

Port forwarding routes incoming connections through the firewall that Proton VPN uses to protect our customers. 

Internet traffic enters and exits your computer through ports. These are endpoints designated by your operating system to handle incoming and outgoing connections and are identified by a number. 

Many ports have a specific function assigned to them: port 443, for example, is used for HTTPS traffic, while port 6889 is used for BitTorrent traffic. Because ports are endpoints that connect the internet to your computer, they can be exploited by hackers and other malicious actors. 

Your router has a built-in firewall, a piece of software that helps protect you from intrusion attempts by monitoring incoming and outgoing internet traffic and blocks access to any ports that have not been earmarked for legitimate use.

However, using a VPN bypasses your router’s firewall as it creates an encrypted tunnel that runs directly from your computer to the VPN server. This prevents the router firewall from seeing any connections made through the tunnel.

To protect our customers, Proton VPN therefore implements our own firewall on the VPN server. This performs a similar job to your router firewall, blocking suspicious incoming connections before they can enter your device through the VPN tunnel.

By default, our firewall also blocks incoming connections that you might want or need. Port forwarding solves this problem by routing incoming connections you want through the firewall and directing them to an available (open) port on your computer. 

How to set up port forwarding

Proton VPN implements port forwarding in a way that works with all BitTorrent clients and is available immediately upon setup. The feature is available to everyone with a paid Proton VPN plan. 

If you are on a Free plan and would like to use port forwarding, you can upgrade today.

To enable port forwarding in our Windows app, go to Settings → Advanced tab and toggle the Port Forwarding switch on. You can then connect to one of our many P2P-enabled servers. To benefit from port forwarding, you will need to configure your P2P client to use the port shown in our VPN app, which is reserved for you by Proton VPN for this purpose. 

Please see our Port forwarding support article for further details and instructions on how to configure popular P2P clients to use port forwarding with our service.

Final thoughts

If you are a Windows peer-to-peer user, port forwarding can greatly improve your download speeds. We therefore encourage you to experiment with the feature, and would love to hear your feedback on our usual social media channels.

Please note that Proton VPN does not condone the use of P2P to illegally share copyrighted material.

The post Supercharge peer-to-peer speeds with port forwarding appeared first on Proton VPN Blog.