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It's usually desired to select a server outside the country you live in to fulfill the purpose of using a vpn: e.g. someone trying to watch your activity. Choosing one tin the same country provides 0 protection against a local adversary, which we assume is common to trigger and easy for the to watch. The recommendation to use a server outside your home country is obvious in my opinion. I don't know exactly why the client (I guess you mean Eddie) prefers a Canadian server, but my guess is that it selected the least loaded server as per AirVPNs load balancing policy. You can opt out that country if you don't like it. Even so, if Canada is obvious not a "bastion of privacy" it has significantly more advantages than using a server in your own home country.

@pj I love to read such posts that condense news and developments of a time, the experiences and their impact in a few lines. It would be impossible to find out the author (unless historic WHOIS records show real name or email) with what's left. Maybe chloe.re is a long-term nickname, but I'm doubtful. The snapshot from Oct, 2016 shows that Chloe made another post on May 15th. I assume she deleted the IPredator blog post between these two dates for unknown reasons: https://web.archive.org/web/20161024000532/http://chloe.re/tag/english/ pj is probably right about "I find it not implausible that it's just one of the secondary consequences of those tactics." One her other article is titled "Why I hate to distrust Edward Snowden". Other than that, she seems to be very competent in web security as an administrator (many HTTPS-TLS related topics) and speaks Swedish, there are posts in Swedish. Oh just before submitting the post: Someone can contact the friend and ask for contact information or that article specifically. Edit: Used "intchloe" on Github. However the account is currently inactive. Edit2: dotchloe on twitter I will remove these if she's contacted and the article restored or an answer is provided

@Gabi Hello, I am an AirVPN founder and could never find a reliable confirmation to the article linked by Zhang888. Today it can't be retrieved, not even from the WayBack Machine, which holds only one useless copy. Checking zhang888 messages I must note that on other two occasions he/she seemed inclined to bring unsubstantiated accusations against various persons related to Wikileaks. https://airvpn.org/forums/topic/42920-airvpn’s-twitter…/?do=findComment&comment=97424 Today, in 2023, we know that all the persons who worked for WikiLeaks in key positions (Assange, Appelbaum, Fitzgibbons...) or were developers in the Tor Project or Bitcoin Core (Todd) who were investigated but never indicted after dubious (to say the least!) reports of sex related crimes were all innocent, or even victims of a smear campaign orchestrated by intelligence and private entities (Palantir, HBGary...) in a huge, worldwide and long effort to achieve "character assassination", distract citizens from the horrendous crimes disclosed by the official documents published by WikiLeaks and send a message to journalists all over the world ("this may happen to you too if you don't stay silent, no matter where in the world you live"). In 2016, the year zhang888 created this topic, the smear campaigns had been organized since years earlier (check for example Maurizi's book "The secret power" or https://www.commondreams.org/views/2011/02/15/more-facts-emerge-about-leaked-smear-campaigns-aimed-wikileaks-supporters-and) and had been working in full force. Anything related to WikiLeaks support as well as WikiLeaks supporters had to be attacked, online and offline. The Pirate Bay and indirectly IPREDator, also known as "The original Pirate Bay VPN", as it was founded by Sunde and was important for monetary funding, could be targets at least (but probably for other reasons too) because of the key role played by at least one TPB founder to spread the "Collateral Murder" video footage against any censorship attempt. https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-helped-wikileaks-on-several-fronts-130205/ Also note how The Pirate Bay was under special surveillance, as revealed by documents leaked by Snowden https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/18/5421958/leaked-nsa-documents-show-debate-over-tracking-wikileaks-pirate-bay when NSA/CSS started forming the idea to treat journalists and publishers as "malicious foreign actors" I do not think that this specific event is part of one of the smear campaigns, but I find it not implausible that it's just one of the secondary consequences of those tactics. Since any other documentation is missing and was missing at the time, I do not see how the alleged accusations against the old IPRedator can be taken seriously. Let's see whether anybody can produce a substantial documentation supporting the allegations.  Kind regards

too many USA servers but the servers are busy? sounds like there aren't enough USA servers then. ;)

@AVPN0815 Hello! That's not entirely correct because we use RAM disks. It is true that an HDD or SSD is used to boot, and it contains a working boot record, grub software or similar, used in turn to load a kernel which must provide TCP/IP, network and basic services support, but anything else is downloaded via network (after the network is up, obviously). At each (re)boot the server can not start, because it is barred from downloading any relevant file until we authorize the reboot, so it will miss even the essential configuration files, scripts, keys... This allows us to check the kernel (once the network is up) and any relevant storage file against a pristine copy, especially if the reboot is unexpected. Once the TCP/IP stack, the network and their essential services have come up, and a manual authorization has been dispatched by AirVPN management, the server starts downloading any other file needed for normal operations, and all of that remains in RAM disks. Kind regards