I recently found myself in need to work around a geoblock, since Humble Bundle had a book bundle the publishers apparently did not want my money for, but I was dead set on giving it to them.
After scouting around for a provider I settled on Xeovo (no affiliation, just as fan as you will shortly see), and was in for a surprise.
The entire sign-up process was:
- Type (or generate) a username
- Set a password
- Retype the password
- Done
Wait, what? Where's the terms of service agreement? (Upd: it's there, but just as a mention without a checkbox or a popup) Where's the 'confirm your email' email? Wait, I didn't even give an email? I think the signup did not even require JavaScript to succeed. Surreal.
Of course you can set up email, 2FA and other such account protection mechanism, but it is not required to get up and running. It's been ages since anything on the Internet has been as frictionless.
Paying was equally trivial, with options for PayPal, card, various crypto providers and cash. No idea how the last one works, as I opted for a one time payment with PayPal (convenience was the priority, not privacy), but interesting to see nonetheless.
And to top it off, here's a guide for setting the VPN on a stock Steam Deck:
- Open the OpenVPN generator once account is activated with a payment
- Download the OpenVPN config for your preferred country and other settings, such as ad blocking
- Excecute the downloaded file - it opens in the default network manager
- Set credentials in the freshly opened configuration
- Done
So with all that out of the way, I was able to give my money to the reluctant book publishers and start reading. I'm sure other VPN providers have similar processes (upd: and Mullvad goes even further with practically zero input required), but with e.g. Proton you have to go through a bunch of dialogs before starting the actual process of account creation, and the first required input is your email address. The contrast is blinding.
Thoughts, comments? Send me an email!