I bought two years of VPN on Black Friday, as I really like the policies of Proton and they seem, well, trustworthy.Unfortunately, their VPN doesn't actually work — and it won't tell you.I'm on macOS, and I was using the VPN application here. Connecting to a server, checking my IP address in Firefox, and seeing that it indeed switched to the chosen country. In System Settings, "ProtonVPN" is registered and active.In Terminal, I can also use curl and confirm that here, too, I'm using the VPN. Crucially, though, in qBittorrent I'm NOT using the VPN. I use "checkmytorrentip" to check, well, my torrenting IP. This reveals to be my actual, non-VPN'ed, IP address.How this is even happening, I'm not sure. Neither is the friendly support guy I spoke to, Zoran. He could confirm, though, that this is a known issue, and that enabling the "Kill Switch" fixes it. I can confirm that it does fix it — but then your local network is 100% inaccessible, and you can't access network shares, use Airplay, use SSH, etc. Nothing. So that's useless.I've been given a refund, so that's good, but it's seriously disconcerting that the VPN works like this. I'm a retired developer myself, and I cannot fathom how code like this gets greenlit and built for production.I also have to think that the VPN code itself actively chooses to route the qBittorrent traffic outside of the VPN. The VPN is correctly registered at the system level with macOS, so ALL traffic WILL go through the VPN. It's not macOS that's deciding to not use the VPN for some apps (as evidenced by Proton working correctly when configuring the kill switch). It's Proton itself.I won't be going back to Proton, even if they fix this, because honestly — any development team that produces code like this and behavior like this is completely untrustworthy. If it were my employees, they would, well... Not be my employees anymore.That said, stay CLEAR of this VPN. And thank you Zoran for a friendly support, and no hassle for issuing the refund. I'll look for a proper VPN elsewhere.
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