£9.99 using https://store.cyberghostvpn.com/848/?scope=checkout&cart=143877



EDIT:

$9.99 actually by changing the currency parameter in the URL


That makes it about £6

Admins should disable the link for this deal and switch if for safe anon link.

The link/website is storing the last person to sign up! As it has session info in the url.

Last person to sign up at the time of post.>>>

Welcome, Dav brow !

Summary
Everyone is ordering from the same account based on the link in the deal. This is leaking personal details!!
For example:
https://store.cyberghostvpn.com/848/?scope=mycboverview&id=5gL4c3mul6&progress=checkout

normally about £5 a month, this is a steal - I got the black edition, less servers but 8.99

any good for XBMC?

Does anyone here use this and how do they rate against others?

HUKD

~I use it
Its fast, and just works.

I've got this currently and it's faultless. simple to use and never had an issue. would happily pay full price!

Unlike hotspotshield etc. it doesn't crash and stays connected

Plus if youre wondering on price, you wont beat that price, expect normally to pay £5+ a month, this is unlimited and £1 a month!

I'm not Hamzair!!! Anyhow, can you access Netflix regions and Pandora with this, like you can with Unblock Us?

ps im also not hamair!! lol

doesnt seem to work for existing customers? which is anoying

i pay roughly £10 a month for the premium 5 user service so this is a great bargain

Meant Hamzah!

Comment

Thank you, will give it a try then cancel unblockus if it's as good and easy.

only site i have found that it does not work on is nbc, but "hola" the extention for chrome works, and thats free, to be fair, hola also works for netflix, but sometimes you end up with a buffering message

Link not working for me. Can't see this deal on their website

not that great. In the last month they have given this away for free and also for $9.99.

i think if you hold off it will come round free again

service is not good... Google asks for captchas when u connect on some of their servers.... speed is no good as well... But price is fair for what u get

Decent service, but not great. Good deal at this price, though.

£9.99 using https://store.cyberghostvpn.com/848/?scope=checkout&cart=143877



EDIT:

$9.99 actually by changing the currency parameter in the URL


That makes it about £6

http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-services-take-your-anonymity-seriously-2014-edition-140315/2/

Great, download your torrents and do your illegal stuff with no knocks on the door.

I switched from privateinternetaccess to cyberghostVPN and applied for a refund after 10 days, they granted the refund.

Reason why I preferred privateinternetaccess: speed - in my experience cyberghostVPN was much slower (got on average 4-6 Mbps down instead of 14 Mbps on privateinternetaccess).

But this is pretty cheap, so good deal.

Just use a different email address, I did even though existing customer and it worked

Or set up your own free VPN in Amazon cloud if all you want is a US geographical output. If of course you want to use VPN for nefarious means then your own Amazon VPN would not hide you

Woops sorry, am using PIA now. Tried cyberghost and it wasn't bad at all but for me PIA was faster.

I can't access any of the Vpn sites. They all come back with blank pages. Anyone else see the same issue, if so how do you resolve?

Fast if you try other locations. Had it for two years and is free for some traffic

Is your name Hamzah Qaisar by any chance? lol

That's what free WiFi in coffee shops is for.

Signed up - Switching from VyprVPN

EDIT: Just found out after signing up the only countries available are Czech Republic, Germany, Netherland, Romania and USA. There is no UK which sucks when I am travelling and want to watch some UK TV...

How many device

1 device as in 1 router or 1 computer?

I'm confused :disappointed:

I'd not installed on your router, it's an application

Makes sense, so it's just my laptop. Cheers!

£5.51 if you use Canadian dollars.

Just clicked on the link and got the order details for someoene called Chris Richardson, living in the Portsmouth postcode area! This is not me..

So much for protecting privacy....

Anyone else?

Have Netflix started blocking VPN access recently?

Same name here.

"Chris Richardson
Po119nz"

Someone asked if this is good for XBMC.

In a word, no.

It will certainly work if you have it running on a Windows or Android platform, but if you're using Openelec or Linux you're out of luck.

It can be achieved apparently, but it's fiddly.

I love Cyberghost but will be moving soon precisely because of this.

great deal.

Work VPN and PIA VPN are fast but cyberghost seemed to be slower (still possible my ISP throttled cyberghost only)

What about "hola vpn"?? That's free.

i use unotelly - but going to give this a try.
always worth having a backup in case one starts blocking stuff

Try 143vpn.com. I'm on their lifetime package and has been great for me so far.

I use Cyberghost but only get a max of 20Mbps on a 100Mbps steady connection but .that too only on 1 Uk server ,any other I get a max of 4 Mbps, they are trying to figure out why , but I purchased a 1 month of PIA and that gets over 80+ Mbps, I can only figure Cyber ghost servers are overloaded , but mind you you are only paying $9.99 for the whole year PIA monthly I paid the same
Just a thought..

Admins should disable the link for this deal and switch if for safe anon link.

The link/website is storing the last person to sign up! As it has session info in the url.

Last person to sign up at the time of post.>>>

Welcome, Dav brow !

Summary
Everyone is ordering from the same account based on the link in the deal. This is leaking personal details!!
For example:
https://store.cyberghostvpn.com/848/?scope=mycboverview&id=5gL4c3mul6&progress=checkout

Will this work with multiple netflix regions?

incorrect, Netflix actually said there had been no changes to how they enforce their terms of service, their terms of service do not allow artificial geo-relocation, so they could simply be starting to enforce it, their statement was very amibigous deliberately.

also Netflix will never publicly say you can use these services to access US Netflix from the UK or be seen to condone this, because it is totally against their rights agreements with the media providers!

I bought this a few months ago but find it causes my NBC stream to buffer every single time I have tried. I end up resorting to either Hotspot or Zenmate.

This lot are awful, do not use.

The speed of many of the servers is slow.
Even when you have a paid account, you still get popups when connecting trying to sell you stuff.
Torrents dont work on a lot of the servers.
For no reason, one of my machines lost its authorization so was no longer considered a registered acct.
Plus the software is slow and clunky.

Wouldnt touch with someone elses bargepole.

Does using this cause any drop in your download rate/speed? If I get 50 mbs currently, what kind of speed would I realistically get using this?

Don't know much about vpn. Doesn't Zenmate do this for free?

Link not working?

Following

Whoever published the purchase URL did also publish his personal login information, because the session id was part of the URL. Usually it's hidden and not visible even in the browser's navigation bar. So the one who published his personal unique purchase URL has ripped it with Fiddler or any other HTTP sniffing tool. So he "hacked" his own account and made it public. That's not very clever.

It's like publishing a session cookie.

Anyway, we are investigating how to improve the process and make the purchase URLs one-time useable only. We recommend not using the purchase URL as it will never result in a successful purchase.

How do you set it up manually?
Their software takes about a minute to connect to VPN then another minute to go back to 'normal'.
Presumably with manual setup you can choose either to have CyberGhost on or off?
Sorry for noob questions!

This offer includes "Most Wanted Servers: USA, DE, RO, NL, CZ." Does anyone with experience of CyberGhost know how this will affect the experience? As a UK resident, am I missing out on much (speed-wise, specifically) by not having access to a UK-based server?

I do broadly understand VPN, and geographically, I'm just as close to the NL servers (assuming they're hosted in an Amsterdam datacentre as I am to London.

I'm interested to hear people's stories.

Either way, <£6 for a year's unlimited bandwidth VPN service is a great deal!

Im new to VPN's, I have an asus rt ac666u router, could I use this to just make my apple tv think its in the US for netflix and my iphone for browsing blocked sites?

If you change the currency to Canadian Dollar or use the link below, you can get it even cheaper! It's about £5.33 according to Google but not sure how that works out exactly when using any payment method.

https://store.cyberghostvpn.com/848/?scope=checkout&cart=143877

Anyone know if it's got a UK server (I want to get the BBC iPlayer from France)?
TIA

Thank you for the heads up. Seems to out perform Hotspotshield

Im in the uk and choose to pick a server in another country - which is often Czech or Romania - no slowdowns for me, I get 16mb full speed on TalkTalk wholesale (primus saver)

Hmmm. I'm getting a ping of 2,500; and down and up speeds of 0.07Mbps :laughing: I'm connected to an Amsterdam server, and testing from a local speedtest server.

I think I have some tweaking to do.

Speedtest result

Might give private internet access a shot.

According to their interview on Torrent Freak, CyberGhost claim that all of your information would be passed onto the authorities should they be asked to do so by the courts. They obviously keep logs and don't take your privacy very seriously.

£6.81 for me with PayPal, thanks OP!

I did get this message though, after I'd left PayPal...

"There will be a slight delay in the delivery of your license key. We are in the process of correcting this technical issue which may include waiting for information from the software publisher. This should be resolved within 1-2 workdays, although it is generally much faster. We will contact you via email as soon as further information is available. We apologize for any inconvenience."

The biggest annoyance for me is that Cyberghost disconnects after a certain amount of data has been downloaded. Most people who are light users wouldn't notice because it's a fairly large amount before they disconnect you. If I'm just browsing it stays connected all the time because very little data is being used. It's a huge annoyance for relatively heavy users though.

I also get the occasional captcha thing with Google. And the slooooow connect, disconnect is infuriating.

On UK servers my 17Mb connection never gets more than 14Mb. When I tried USA and one other foreign server the most I could get was 2Mb!

Oh and their customer service is slooooow! Always a minimum of 4 days to respond to emails!

Appreciated, use this a small bit and only have a few months left, adding this to my account will top me up.

USA servers for me were only around 1mb,on my 50mb connection,barely useable on xbmc,

If they has NZ server I would be interested, HOT deal still though!

I am running 100mb will the connection be slow for me

I have a scientist friend involved in who says he wants to research how people watch football of the american variety. Does anyone know this could be used to achieve such an objective?

Would this be useful if I wanted to watch Fox sports for example. Or other channels that might show 3pm PL kick offs?

Siogned up with these people, it started acting strange, reinstalled it now it says my serial is being used. YES - by me. Their "help" is disgusting. Thney just keep telling me the key is being used and not making any attempt to assist
Wouldn't touch this with a barge pole

Not just to you but everyone else: I doubt it will affect speed much (but I'm no expert). But what I wanted to say is that if people are intending on keeping the VPN on all the time, then this wouldn't be a great VPN to choose without a UK server. As otherwise when you're casually surfing the web you'll be redirected to that country's version of the site. So think things like, Amazon.com not .co.uk, dutch Google etc.

thanks, i will have to look at something I can use on my router then as i only want specific ip addresses to use it.

Hello,

if you activated a key it's like a voucher, which you can't use twice. But you created an account before you activated the key on that account, so you simply log in with that account.

Regarding our support: Our support is working hard, but they are not able to process requests within minutes.

ok , so regardles, you just go to site, download the app, and get the offer that way - URL corrected to reflect this so job done.

isthis better thrn private internet access vpn service ?

Ordered - thanks!

My thoughts after two hours of usage:

Initially, I saw very poor performance (2,500ms ping and 0.07Mbps up and down). This was when connected to an Amsterdam server.

I've seen varying performance from all other available locations. I'm currently connected to a server in Hamburg, and speedtest results are actually better than my normal results (9.3Mbps down, 0.2Mbps up) Real-world performance is on par with what I expect from my connection (I live in rural Yorkshire and am on basic non-fiber BT "broadband," and have seen 6.5-7Mbps down over the past seven months).

So far, so good. I'm happy with performance based on what I paid for a year's subscription.

A pop-up appeared offering an upgrade to premium servers for $19.99 for 12 months. This includes UK servers. I'm highly tempted actually...

Private Internet Access is one of CyberGhost's competitors.


Aside from my work VPN, I have no experience of VPNs beyond the last couple of hours with CyberGhost. I'd be interested to hear from more peopel who have used both though.

Signed up and paid via Canadian Dollars (Post #72). Cost £5.51 for the year.

After downloading, installing and activating the software, I launched it and selected a Dutch Server. Checked my IP address online and verified that I was now 'in' the Nethrlands. I ran Speedtest.net and my usual download and upload speeds were pretty much unchanged 18Mb/0.9Mb.

Kicked of a couple of uTorrent downloads and speeds appear to be down to around 50% of what I was getting previously, but I'm happy enough with that for the anonymity and I will try other server locations in the future to see if there are any improvements.

Thanks OP.

nbc doesnt like cyberghost or unblockus?

I have just downloaded Tunnel Bear on my Ipad, I am currently working in Holland, I connected to hotel wifi, tunnel bear and watched the football Monday, Tuesday and last night on skygo app. No dropping out and picture was superb.
Not sure how much tunnel bear is for year, but I just paid £2.99 for the month (unlimited)

Saw this the other day but put off by the unfriendliness towards torrenting, they don't allow port forwarding.

I can confirm that the nbc sports add-on (for XBMC), at least, has no problems with unblockus

I've got an Amazon Fire Tv with XBMC on it. How would I be able to watch NBC on it? Is there a VPN you can install on the device to get round the geo-locking?

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

Sounds good, but you only really get one server to chose form. If you want proper unlimited, top safety, and all the servers, you need to buy the normal version at £45 a year. If it was 35 I would have gone for it but not 45.

"Sometimes people report very slow download rates. This is due to CyberGhost not allowing portforwarding, meaning, all ingoing connections are blocked.

This behavior leads to unavailability for other clients, users can't connect with your P2P client anymore and you get a low ID (because you don't seed and just leech). Then it won't help, if you adapt your router’s and/or your software Firewall and open the respective port needed for the client or activate UPnP or NAT-PMP (which accomplish portforwarding).

If CyberGhost allowed portforwarding, a user would be identiable, because a port can be assigned to him."

Just letting you know.

cheers

What did you use to check it?

I'd recommend you try it with: http://ipleak.net/

Which will also check you for DNS leaks (I've seen VPN clients with DNS leaks before). There's also a feature on there to let you know that your torrents are also going through the VPN. (Again, seen these outside the VPN when people thought they were covered.)

If you're gonna pay for a VPN, it makes sense to ensure that you're getting full benefit from it ....

Can I use this to access US Netflix on my Apple TV?

No probs, hope it goes smoothly was just enough to put me off and go for shademe.

which torrent program for windows are you guys using nowadays? thanks

Not strictly true, if you have a capable router it can be run on that, or really anything that supports the configuration files you get from 'other devices' section in your account. you'll just need to configure it manually in some cases. There is a link a couple of pages back to the knowledgebase on the cyberghost website.

Why you all still recommend and use a US service like PIA is beyond me. This place is just the same as /r/VPN, full of shills.

A lot of these questions are easily answered with a quick search - half of you may as well not even use a VPN since I guarantee you won't use it correctly.

lol, ok can you point us in the direction of 'VPN for dummies' please?

Is this only 1 device? Im on 5 devices option and need that.

You joke but it's pretty rare to actually see someone use one properly when torrenting for example. Logging into all their personal accounts, browsers still riddled with cookies, using PPTP etc.

Btw cyberghost is great they wont snitch on you like hidemyass did.

Has anyone else not received their code yet or is it just me?
thanks

Why pay £11 a year for a vpn when you can get a vps (lowendspirit?) for £2 a year? I run a TS3 server (handles 30slots easy) on mine while occassionally using it as a VPN

maybe this will help?

Thanks I must have missed that. I did receive a couple of pdf files as confirmation, just no key as yet.

Yeah looks like this offer is zapped.

1-2 days then, we're just going to have to wait :wink:

Happy that I got the offer when I did anyway.

Has qtorrent got the same kind of encryption that uttorent has?

Thanks. I might give unblock us a go then

some questions answered, and no I do not work for cyberghost, and I have no axe to grind :smiley: - except i was severely throttled by Sky at one point

yes rhis will bypass uk isp restrictions. but if the DNS but your still may have restrictions of the country where your new dns is located.

With this product you can view xbmc and use 1channel plugin.

for torrenting generally use vuse because you can encrypt transportation, and your isp possibly will not pick it up, but they may recognize the port used. Vuse can also apparently accept both encrypted traffic and not encrypted traffic simultaneously possibly enlarging the number of peers - you have to set all of this up yourself :wink:

For torrenting via vpn use vuse because if your vpn breaks, all your torrents, browser queries, and shared file are leaked for all to see. Vuse has the option if the vpn dies, or is terminated, vuse recognizes this and halts all torrent traffic - you have to set all of this up yourself :wink:

unlike utorrent, vuse is a bit of a beast to get your head around.

Gybergost is not the fastest, but it is not not bad at all. There always will be some data speed loss as encryption takes time. some nodes are also more reliable and less prone to connection loss. My last vpn supplier was more reliable and slightly faster and over 10 times the cost.

Some isp (definately sky) do throttle traffic to certain vpn servers, and this will badly effect torrents too. Torrent through a vpn cant be throttled by our isp as the data is anonymized, but your isp can throttle the anonymized data.

With vpns some sites will not work, as the servers may be set up to restrict certain ip ranges. For example i can not search in depth in autotrader.co.uk and I get horrendous postage charges on ebay. Some search engines do not work, or captures are generated and certain downloads do not come down.

Also with PIA, they are based in the states and there is a level of uncertainty. Legally they may be forced into saying that they do not collect any logs. No one really knows! They are reasonably priced and have good service reports, just I do not trust them. I do trust cyberghost a bit more because they have gone out of their way by using a third party payment processor, and in Germany apparently you can pay cash in select stores and pick up your code without leaving details.

There also are a number of free vpns out there, but some do openly collect data

I got premium plus for £8 for 12 months a year ago. but I wasn't allowed to post because cyberghost weren't UK company. I guess they have their referral deal sorted now lol. hotukdeals - making money off the communities efforts.

Be interested to hear what speeds people are getting out of this as and when they get it up and running.

I checked mine last night. I have 150mb Virgin cable. Most exit nodes were giving me 30-50mb down (UK nodes and some Dutch ones). But one of the Dutch ones maxed out. Full 150mb down on it. Not sure if that's down to the node, or if the traffic on it was simply light at the time, but I was impressed either way. It's my goto guy now when I need fast!

I don't use CyberGhost by the way. I'm with AirVPN. I absolutely trust them to be secure, given who operates it.

When I turn on the VPN I lose my remote desktop connection to the machine cyberghost is installed on. Can anyone help me solve this?

You are absolutely correct. I misspoke.

It's possible, but certainly not an "out of the box" solution though:

"There are certain disadvantages to be considered: All functions regarding your VPN are part of your router's firmware. CyberGhost 'just' provides its network to get anonymized and secured. That means, that even though all server settings like the integrated firewall stand at your service, you can't use client features like secure disconnections, DNS leak protection, exception lists, anti fingerprinting and so on. Furthermore you need to open your router’s configuration page for every change in your configuration, e.g. if you want a different server/country, which usually requires a few steps and is more time consuming. Also some devices slow down your Internet traffic, depending on the built-in CPU, that has to handle the encryption." - CyberGhost on a router

i would not trust this company , they are a romanian company and as such have to store some information.

Yup.

Check out OpenVPN, pretty easy to install on your VPS and use

Yes :smiley: it takes a whole minute to install OpenVPN-AS and about 2 for standard (with a script)

don't forget to write to your MP and complain about government intentions to control crypography

https://routingpacketsisnotacrime.uk/

down the rabbit hole we go

Still not had anything from them...

Think I'll give it till Monday and then claim my money back from PayPal :disappointed:

does this open up the whole dark internet thingy?

Bought but no activation code forthcoming. A scam ?

Same here... No code after 1.5 days.

Just used that tactic. Let's see if it works. Apparently there are serial number problems right now.

Has anybody received activation code from this deal yet or is it scam?

Has anyone used their customer support?

No codes yet for me. Got fingers crossed though!

Correct me of I am wrong but that was just/mostly TorGuard subscribers. Netflix has stated they haven't changed their policy on VPN usage (which is they aren't allowed as per the ToS subscribers agree to when signing up ever since Netflix started) and there haven't been any widespread reports or updates from VPN users saying they are now blocked.

Yes it will suck if they do but nothing is definite with regards to currently blocking or future blocking of VPN usage.

I got no code either -scam?

NO code for me either bought on Thursday

probably a scam hope my paypal details are ok :disappointed:

I have not recieved a code, but also nothing has been taken off my credit card yet. Surely this is a genuine cyber ghost link though, we all havent been that stupid surely?

[email protected].
[email protected]

I have emailled them on the above, having a moan

Here is a different link picked up from another forum which offers it priced at £8.99 for 12 months but with only a limited number of servers :-

"12 Months Prepaid - Most Wanted Servers USA, DE, RO, CH, CZ; 1 Device".

The £9.99 link earlier in the thread also offers limited (but slightly different - NL in place of CH) servers :-

"Access to Most Wanted Servers: US, German, Romanian, Czech Republic and Netherlands"

There seem to be a fair number of these offers floating around, which do seem to be genuine. However, they may offer a more or less subtly different service.

It is notable that the £44.99 deal offers :-

"Access to Premium servers"

It seems, therefore that whilst the deal is genuine, it is a reduced price for a reduced service.

not really a point in buying this.. when you can get a vps for $5 per year and install openvpn (anyone can install it its simply a copy and paste)

you can also be traced using this vpn (and they will give over info infact they have to)

$5 will get you natted vps not a static ip.

the point you ask.

You have complete control (if you wanna log or not log), and less change of packet sniffing/monitoring & it's less than half the price of this.

I can assure you this company holds records of connections etc. so it's not going to protect you from torrent downloading etc

EU law & Romanian law.

Applied for refund via PayPal.

PS. Netflix have sent a statement out on the 12th January it reads,

"The claims that we have changed our policy on VPN are false," said Netflix's chief product officer Neil Hunt said in response to complaints.

The police do not track torrents, the NSA do for the copyrighters of the USA.

do you think Russia care about the copyright of the USA? how about Turkey?

No.

Cybergghost keep logs for a week, they keep who connected but not 'what' .

Has anyone received an activation code when subscribing from any of the special offer links ??

Emailed asking for a refund.
This is poor service.

Thank you for your message.

Please note that cleverbridge is the e-commerce partner of CyberGhost and only handles order and payment related inquiries.

We regret to inform you that your account has not yet been activated due to technical problems.
The software provider CyberGhost has been contacted and will effect delivery as soon as possible.

Please apologize for the inconvenience caused.

CyberGhost can be contacted directly at:

https://support.cyberghostvpn.com

Sincerely,

Mariangela G.

cleverbridge Customer Support

I think that if people are going to express views on the legal position, they should inform themselves properly as to what it is :-

"On 8 April 2014 the European Court of Justice ruled that the Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data. The Directive is declared invalid.

A. The Directive

Directive 2006/24/EC strives for harmonization of the Member States' national legislations providing for the retention of data by providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of a public communications network for the prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of criminal offences. The initial intention was that service and network providers would be freed from legal and technical differences between national provisions.

The Directive and national laws implementing the Directive were often criticized. The main argument being that massive data retention was said to endanger the right to privacy. The advocates of the rules, however, argued that these rules were necessary for authorities to investigate and prosecute organized crime and terrorism.

B. The Court of Justice

By way of preliminary rulings referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Irish High Court and the Austrian Constitutional Court asked the Court of Justice to examine the validity of the Directive, in particular in the light of two fundamental rights under the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, namely the fundamental right to respect for private life and the fundamental right to the protection of personal data.
•Analysis of the data to be retained

The Court of Justice verified the data which providers must retain pursuant to the Directive. This data includes data necessary to trace and identify the source of a communication and its destination, to identify the date, time, duration and type of a communication, to identify the location of mobile equipment, the name and address of the user, the number called, IP addresses, etc. The Court observes that the retention of this data makes it possible to know the identity of the participants in communications, to identify the time of the communication, the place from where the communication took place and the frequency of communications with certain persons (§26).

This data, according to the Court allows very precise conclusions concerning private lives of persons whose data has been retained, such as habits of everyday life, places of residence, movements, social relationships and social environments frequented.
•Analysis of the interference with fundamental rights

The Court comes to the conclusion that both requiring the retention of the data and allowing competent national authorities to access those data constitutes in itself interference with the fundamental right to respect for private life and with the fundamental right to the protection of personal data (respectively articles 7 and 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union) (§ 32 - 36).

The Court agrees with the Advocate General when it states that the interference is "particularly serious". The Court in this respect holds that "the fact that data are retained and subsequently used without the subscriber or registered user being informed is likely to generate in the minds of the person concerned the feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance" (§37).

This interference is according to the Court not only serious, but moreover it is not justified. Besides the fact that the retention of data as required by the Directive does not as such adversely affect the essence of the respect for private life and protection of personal data (content of the communications as such may not be reviewed) and the Directive genuinely satisfies an objective of general interest (public security), the Court is of the opinion that the Directive has exceeded the limits imposed by the proportionality principle (§69):

•The Directive covers all persons and all means of electronic communications as well as all traffic data without any differentiation, limitation or exception being made in the light of the objective of fighting against serious crime (§57);
•The Directive fails to lay down any objective criterion by which to determine the limits of the access of the competent national authorities to data and their subsequent use (§60);
•The data retention period is set at between a minimum of 6 months and a maximum of 24 months without any distinction being made between categories of data and not stating that the determination of the period must be based on objective criteria (§63 - 64);
•The Directive does not provide for sufficient safeguards to ensure effective protection of data against the risk of abuse and against unlawful access and use (§66);
•The Directive does not require data to be retained within the EU and thus does not meet the Charter's requirement that compliance control by an independent authority is ensured.

The Court of Justice thus declares the Directive invalid.

C. What's next?

Following the Court's invalidation of the Directive, one could wonder how this will affect European legislation and national legislation.
•Europe

The invalidity ruled by the Court applies from the day where the Directive entered into force. It is as if the Directive never existed.

The European Commission stated in a first reaction that it "will now carefully asses the verdict and its impacts". It is not clear whether the Commission will draft new legislation replacing the invalidated Directive. Taking into account the fact that the current Commission's term only runs until 31 October 2014, it is not much anticipated that new law will be put forward soon.
•Member States

Member States having transposed the Directive into national laws may now consider the future of these laws.

In case their national law is a literal transposition of the now invalidated Directive, the national laws meet with the same fate. One may consider that in such situation Member States should redraft their laws in order to be in line with the relevant Directives (95/46/EC and 2002/58/EC) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

If national law deviates from the Directive, Member States should assess whether the deviations are in line with the relevant Directives (95/46/EC and 2002/58/EC) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

The Court of Justice's ruling may also have an impact on national cases concerning the legality of national laws implementing the Directive, as there are several cases pending before the constitutional courts.

•Romania: In 2009, the Romanian Constitutional Court declared the national law on data retention unconstitutional as breaching, among others the right to privacy and the secrecy of correspondence"


This could well be why Cyberghost if based in Romania.

Cyberghost has always been in romanian. and i can assure you data collection is still in affect...

Having not heard anything I decided to email them just this second and got my serial almost immediately!

Installing now...

Thanks OP!

Got my activation code

I did not suggest that Cyberghost had moved to Romania, so I am not sure what point you are making at the start of your reply. ADDED: In fact if you look at the last link below in this post, you will see that they were in fact originally based in Germany.

Can you tell us the precise basis of your statement that "data collection is still in affect (sic)" ? This does seem a little improbable where Romania's Constitutional Court declared the local law on data collection unlawful, as long as 5 years ago.

In addition the website states :-

"The service http://www.cyberghostvpn.com (hereinafter called CyberGhost VPN) is a product offered by CyberGhost S.R.L. (hereinafter called CyberGhost), Romania.

CyberGhost has an unequivocal company policy: the strongest observance of data protection and uncompromising protection of the user privacy. Therefore, the user’s personal data is not monitored, recorded, logged or stored.

Many companies state that they take your privacy seriously – we state that too and we really mean it! CyberGhost is a service which protects privacy. We act accordingly when collecting and storing data.

We collect and store only the data needed to operate the service. In order to improve the quality of the service, we store data such as the utilization degree of the servers. However, we do not store statistical data, which can be linked to a user account. Also, we do not store data on who had used which server and when."


The full policy is set out here: http://www.cyberghostvpn.com/en_gb/privacypolicy

This page sets out detailed information on the requests for info received by Cyberghost and their responses to them: http://www.cyberghostvpn.com/en_gb/transparency-report

My code has just come through!

Also just got my code, woot woot!!

Didn't contact support but can reiterate what others have said - my key has come through.

I went for the 12 month 'Special Edition 4' plan on the 21st January. I got my code straight away and I had instant access to the Czech Republic, Netherlands, Romania USA and German nodes.

It's not a scam and it's already been posted that there is a problem with the codes being issued. I'd recommend that you wait a bit longer as the codes are clearly starting to come through. Perhaps the influx of accounts being set up through this site took them by surprise?

As for the service, it does take a few moments to get connected via the software and I've primarily used the Netherlands VPN servers. I get up to 2Mb/sec download on a fibre broadband connection. If I max out my broadband through my ISP, I get up to 10Mb/sec throughput.

I still want a refund as I can't RDP to my computer from outside when it is on.

Sorry if stupid question, but will this also help to access certain websites that certain ISP's have blocked. If so, once activated will it do it automatically or do I have to set it up? Is that easy to do?

Thought it might be a scam but got my key today. Not sure what all the legal issues are about in the chat thread but everyone needs to chill out. VPN's are important for our personal privacy which is something that is being eroded constantly by governments around the world. So dont worry about the VPN's.

Does Cyberghost work in China? Will be travelling there soon, but need my Facebook fix.

Mine came thrPugh straight away on checkout.
I'm currently running a free 3 month trial, does anyone know how long we have to activate the keys?

You keep saying this but also repeatedly fail to offer anything substantial to back it up. Perhaps you know of a court case where they've revealed logs?

I got my key today as well.

I'm a bit of a VPN newb; will this cover me when downloading torrents on my phone? I've read that Express VPN is best, but it's so much more expensive - about $9 a month.

read my reply they have to store logs (as per romanian and eu law). and running servers itself cause logs.

I'm having trouble with this. I've twice tried to pay (Canadian dollars) and it's going through, giving me a reference number but not allowing me to pay?

Anyone else had this?

I signed up last night. Changed currency to Canadian Dollars so paid less that £6.00 for the year. Authentication code came through immediately (both via the web page as I signed up, and a separate email). I am using it now and very impressed. I resisted for a while as it sounded complicated, but isn't when you see it!

Not sure why it is expired as it looks like it is still on offer at 9.99 (whichever currency) and I certainly used it late last night with no problems.

OK, this is doing my head in!! On my account details, it's saying FreePlan which never expires, I presume I'm doing something wrong, shouldn't it be saying premium plan, or something along them lines?

Still available....... dunno why this is expired.
https://store.cyberghostvpn.com/848/?scope=checkout&cart=143877

However, I've ditched it. Worth a try for a fiver, but in all honesty 1mb is awful - it's unusable.
I thought it might be Virgin, but it's clearly not.

Also, you can't use the US server for P2P or Torrents (didn't bother me, that's not what I wanted it for).

Live streaming/Netflix/Hulu? Forget it!

any one on sky using this?

OK, this is doing my head in!! On my account details, it's saying FreePlan which never expires, I presume I'm doing something wrong, shouldn't it be saying premium plan, or something along them lines?

Really? I sue the Czech servers and get full speed.Maybe you needed to try more servers.. Romania quick too.

Not sure why this is expired. I signed up last night and got the product key though immediately.

Paid less than £5.50 by changing the currency to Canadian dollars.

So far it seems to be working quite well. getting 35meg on my normally 50meg connection.

still works

Anyone seen any deals since - this just ran out for me