- Deloitte confirms PIA’s no-log claims, with servers running on RAM-only system for maximum privacy.
- Independent audit verifies PIA’s infrastructure is not vulnerable to third-party exploitation, ensuring online activity remains private.
- PIA offers full transparency with open-source apps and regular third-party audits, proving its commitment to data protection.
How is windscribe?
I tried it for awhile. Speed was good, unfortunately for my use case had some show stoppers.
Pros: -It worked good on Linux. -Custom pricing plans (you can pick exactly which nodes you need and only pay for those) available month-to-month, makes it easy to try
Cons: -Android app couldn’t remain connected as I move from mesh WiFi pod to pod. It would think its connected still but I would have no internet connectivity until I manually reconnected the app. (Everytime I crossed my house I would have to manually reconnect). -No port forwarding (torrents)
Ended up switching to airvpn. Use “openVPN for Android” which handles the mesh pods, and openvpn on Linux as well. Works perfectly.
I am also interested in the Lemmy opinion of windscribe. My wife really likes them but their app used to brick my computer requiring a hard reset so I don’t use them.
their app used to brick my computer requiring a hard reset so I don’t use them.
Which OS?
I wonder, is there a way to ensure they work the way they advertise to besides being investigated by the police and observing the result? It has to be blatant in order to force the VPN service to comply if they can.
It’s a case od who do you believe more. The provider or the police.
Hey, if your adversarial model does not include nation states, it’s a great service. Totally fine against basic IP tracking, and I haven’t received a nastygram for sharing movies in years.
Which one is good against nation states? Asking for a friend.
If you need to ask, you probably don’t know enough to keep yourself anonymous. But it starts with tails, tor and not doing anything stupid like reusing user names that you use on the clear web or signing into something like Facebook. If a nation state has reason to find out who you are, they most likely will. All it takes is one little mistake that you most likely didn’t even know was a mistake.
Use the one they’re using: Tor.
There’s a long list of reasons why you might not want to use it though.
By default, Tor doesn’t protect you from nation states. It’s a start, but you have to be an intelligent user who understands statistics to have some protection from nation states.
Let’s assume there’s two teams, because in geopolitics, it seems like we divide into “west” and “east.” Let’s assume team 1 controls 10% [1] of the relays, they have more than enough budget to pay for the entire network 100x over. That means, on entry, there’s a 10% probability that you will land on their entry node.
Now, to do traffic analysis, they need you to also land on their exit. The probability of that is also 10% in the example. In other words, 10% of the time that you have their entry, you will also have their exit. (or, for 1 in every 100 circuits, you will have a compromised circuit) If you use Tor everyday for a year, you’ll likely have a fucked circuit at least once. If you use something like Whonix that spawns like 10-20 circuits at start, you’ll have a compromised circuit weekly.
A compromised circuit isn’t the end of the world. Most internet traffic today uses end to end encryption, [2] so as long as the service is outside of team 1’s jurisdiction, your communications are safe… but team 1 knows who you are, and that you are talking to someone they don’t trust. If it’s in their jurisdiction, they can get a warrant, and they can fully de-anonymize the traffic between the service that you were using.
All of this is to say, it’s hard to stay in the dark if your adversary is information intelligence. The best way to stay invisible is to use the network as infrequently as possible, and to make the time correlation very far off. (Use custom relays that delay when the traffic travels so that traffic analysis like this example is not possible)
By the way, in the US, the NSA has multiple sites where they copy the traffic on the backbone for analysis. They’re performing some deep packet analysis. These systems are going to improve in the future with machine learning. As an example, in China, it’s not exactly simple to connect to Tor as some methods of concealing Tor traffic result in detection from machine learning that they’re performing on all traffic.
[1] This is a hypothetical. They could control 0%, 5%, 25%, etc. It’s publicly unknown how much they control or if they try to control the network at all.
[2] Be careful with your assumptions about https. Where are the root authorities? Why should we trust them? It’s better security to never trust them.
They don’t actually need to control the entrance nodes if they control the ISP. You can track TCP fingerprints through Tor with just exit nodes
Fascinating. Thank goodness my life doesn’t depend on that kind of threat modeling.
Go on
Biggest problem is that it’s free. That means you’ve got very little bandwidth that’s usable since it’s being supplied out of generosity for no direct compensation that could be reinvested into the network. There’s just too many users and not enough bandwidth.
And because it actually works, it’s very difficult or impossible to police how it’s used. That means your precious bits are just as important as the 100,000 spam emails that another user is trying to send with the service.
Finally, you might not want to use it because you’re sharing the same exit nodes with many other users. This means services tend to block those IP addresses outright, limiting what you can use it for, and if you leak and identify such as your name maybe you don’t want that tied to an IP address that actual terrorists might have used.
I write this as someone who owns a bunch of official Tor merchandise.
Spam emails are about the tamest dark part of the dark web though…
I’m trying to be nice for the general public that could be reading this post. But yes, there’s a lot of bad stuff out there, and VPN service providers aren’t just getting paid to invest in tons of bandwidth, but they are also doing some policing of their service. They just don’t talk about it. It’s bad for business. And yes, you can police a service without technically logging any data.
What is “official tor merchandise” btw?
The solar powered RPI jump box you installed on a telephone pole outside the McDonald’s.
Exactly. If all you want to do is torrent then it’s by far the best option. $2.22/mo ($80 for 3 years) which is less than half the price of anything else, has portforwarding, and with wireguard I can saturate a full gigabit no problem on private trackers.
And while they have a sale it gets down to 68 for three years…
I am dedicated to Proton to be honest but PIA always seemed good to me based on these type of situations and audits.
I think there was some bad vibes when they got bought by a less than reputable company a while back. I know a lot of people, myself included switched to Mullvad. I am on Proton now though for the port forwarding.
What is the benefit of port forwarding?
The most common use case is probably bittorrent. Without port forwarding, you won’t be connectable. But anything where someone might need to connect to your local machine from the internet, like hosting game servers or other self-hosting.
I recently switched to Mullvad and have had no issues torrenting
You have no problem downloading because your client is initiating the connection. But people won’t be able to initiate a connection to you. If you’re just leeching off public trackers and don’t care about your ratio, then that might not matter to you. But if you’re trying to maintain a ratio on a good quality private tracker that’s a no go.
You can use a site like this with your VPN ip and the port you have configured for bittorrent while your bittorrent client is up to see if you’re connectable.
PIA was good until they got bought out. That’s when my friend and I switched our VPNs (me to proton, him to express).
A shady parent company isn’t what you want in a VPN.
I’m on Express VPN only because they apparently specialise in avoiding geoblocks and VPN detection for overseas TV sites etc. (Plus three months free for being a TWiT.) So far it’s true for BBC iPlayer, RTe Player and UK Channel 4. For this purpose I’m not overly worried about how log-resistant they are, but interesting to keep up with the score here. The integrated ‘ad blocking’ is also useful, but slower than AdGuard as it seems pages have to wait for assets to fail to load before displaying rather than just being 404’d.
I wonder how they manage to bypass the geo-location blocks? I would if they frequently rotate their IP Addresses with fresh ones.
PIA got bought out
switched to expressOh no
On September 13, 2021, it was reported that ExpressVPN had been acquired by Kape Technologies, an LSE-listed digital privacy and security company
… um……Express is also owned by Kape
It wasn’t at the time he switched … I think he looked at some other options after that, but might have just stayed.
For whatever reason he wasn’t getting the performance he wanted from Proton in Texas.
PIA got purchased by Kape Technologies a couple years ago. With their track record, you can choose to believe the report issued by consultants they paid, or you can just go to companies with better track records, like Mozilla VPN or Mullvad.
Seems like an easy choice to me.
Yeah as soon as I saw Delloite I knew it was shit.
I used Nord VPN after a lot of research when I initially started using them years ago. What have you heard about them?
To counter some of the other comments, them being based in Panama is a huge plus imo, if you’re inclined to do things deemed illegal by local authorities. They have no incentive to comply with government issued search warrants or the like. Most western country-based companies are legally obligated to comply with those requests, or even store information for a number of years. With quantum-based decryption there’s no saying how long even encrypted data will be safe.
That was my rational too when I initially did my research.
Nord had a very bad incident a few years ago https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/nordvpn-confirms-it-was-hacked/
They were also REALLY late to the disclosure and tried to play it off as “them being responsible”:
NordVPN said it found out about the breach a “few months ago,” but the spokesperson said the breach was not disclosed until today because the company wanted to be “100% sure that each component within our infrastructure is secure.”
They at least were also very aggressive about advertising (all over YouTube at one point sponsoring all kinds of stuff)… Which is typically the opposite of what you want.
Proton has had write ups in the past about the VPN review market as well and how a lot of reviews are “whoever pays us the most money is the top VPN.” Proton has a strong enough track record in their other software for doing the right thing and truly valuing security, privacy, and open standards, so I’m inclined to believe them. VPN was one of the first spinoff products they launched when it was still mail, and they did so because some of their more sensitive customers (think journalists in some bad parts of the world) were having to rely on third party VPNs of questionable integrity.
I trust Mullvad and Proton at this point for VPNs, nobody else.
I trust Mullvad and Proton at this point for VPNs, nobody else.
Any reason you can state not to use AirVPN? I switched to them from Mullvad because they support port forwarding. So far I’ve been very happy with their service.
Having ads and sponsors blocked I can’t be 100% sure, but I don’t think they advertise at all. I only tried them because of a recommendation on Lemmy. Their site design is very old school which really says “run by nerds and not marketers” to me.
I do not know anything about AirVPN specifically.
Proton does provide port forwarding these days FYI.
I think “run by nerds not marketers” is a good thing … though I don’t know if a site looking old really means it’s run by nerds lol
Yeah I know, but have you seen their site? It’s like an old 90s static HTML page. The main thing I see is that it’s clearly not a glossy “marketing first” service. They’re surviving off of their actual product.
Personally I don’t trust companies who aggressively advertise like they do, but that’s not a real reason grounded in evidence. It just tends to be correct. I recommend Mullvad.
They didn’t aggressively advertise when I first started using them like 6 years ago. I have yet to see evidence of their no-log policy being broken but it’s hard to trust most companies these days.
I feel like 6 years ago was the height of their marketing. Literally every podcast I listened to had them as a sponsor and maybe half of the YouTube sponsorships were Nord.
It is because of them most people probably now know what a VPN is, but I feel like their marketing budget is a hundred fold smaller than it used to be.
They advertise aggressively because running a VPN is ridiculously profitable. I do agree with your apprehensive feeling, but at the same time their advertisements do make sense.
Right,but their YouTube ads also contain a bunch of misleading statements and outright lies about streaming services, privacy and military grade encryption.
Mozilla VPN vor Mullvad
I mean, Mozilla VPN is Mullvad, so yeah. You can trust Mullvad.
Does Mullvad let you use a custom DNS?
yes :)
I loved mullvad but they removed port forwarding and now I don’t know where to go sadly.
I think Air VPN supports port forwarding
Do they but unfortunately they are alsi slower. I could get max 600 Megabits per second with them. I now use proton with supports at least 2,5 gigabits
Actually I mentioned AirVPN because I forgot that Proton supports port forwarding 😄
Can we trust them though (I mean as much as mullvad) ?
I am inclined to say see. But probably just because I bought a three years subscription and need a peace of mind. Sadly their vl8ent is crap but at least wireguard works fine.
I rarely use VPN, but personally I would trust them, although not as much as Mullvad
Or Proton.
I use Proton vpn and love it. I actually like mullvad more as a standalone vpn, but Proton vpn is still great and I use it because of the whole bundle. It’s a great deal and VERY convenient. The unlimited email aliases built in seamlessly to the password manager is a game changer for easy to use privacy.
Hey so I just looked up Proton and see no mention on their main marketing page for email aliases or password manager. Where can I find thst? I’m intrigued obviously haha. I’ve been woth Norn for a couple years but dont do anything crazy or get additional benefits.
It’s right there on proton.me
It’s possible you checked protonvpn.com instead.
You know what thats EXACTLY what I did. Thanks for the clarification!
Look for simplelogin
Others have linked it to you but let me tell you why I like it. It lets you generate a new email alias and password instantly whenever you make a new online account somewhere. Or just whenever you want. I’ve been slowly changing all my accounts over to their own unique email alias that can’t be tied back to my main email. My main address is known by nobody at all.
The main benefits are if someone steals a password, the email address that comes with it will only be useful for that one account. (I don’t need to go over the benefits of a standard password manager.) and so if that email is leaked or added to a spam list, I simply delete that address after changing the address for the single account it was used for. I can tell exactly which address is getting spam easily. 0 spam. Ever. Spam email has been solved for me.
Proton remembers which sites use which email/password as well.
Other than that, it’s just good for privacy. Having a different email for each account makes it harder to track a user across accounts.
These addresses are somewhat auto generated, with the name of the site along with a random word and a few numbers. But if you want to create another email address, you get a handful of custom ones for free with the subscription too. You can revoke these the same way, so you can have a professional looking email to hand out to people that’s not auto generated, without giving out your account’s root email address.
Edit: I also want to specify that while all of this is technically possible through other means, Proton makes it easier than any other option. Plus access to a good vpn, a nice replacement for Google drive (for storage and basic editing, at least) in addition to the email service and password manager mentioned above. A very good deal, in my opinion.
Edit 2: it sure sounds like I’m a paid shill but I can assure you I just really fucking love Proton and I get too excited about things.
I appreciate your type up! Thanks for taking the time. Didnt come off as a shill at all was explanatory and informative which is what I was looking for. Thanks again and habe a great weekemd!
Yeah the moment Proton developed a password manager I switched. Very convenient and the price ain’t bad if you use all their services.
Do they have port forwarding?
Awesome, thank you !
Proton also, unlike PIA, doesn’t routinely crash and break my VPN access on iPhone.
My sessions go until I disable them (for stuff like sports betting that legally has to restrict VPN usage).
I understand the sentiment about the inherent conflict of interest with paying someone to audit your software, but it’s highly unlikely that anyone is going to do that work for free. I’d want some evidence before taking your comment for anything other than opinion/bias. I don’t use any of these products so whatever the reality is doesn’t affect me, it just seems like nuance is too easily lost.
What’s wrong with PIA’s track record?
Kape used to be a malware company or something. Also, a few years ago PIA made a negative statement about Proton but instead it backfired. I can’t remember exactly what it was
Ah right. I was totally unaware.
https://restoreprivacy.com/private-internet-access-kape-crossrider/ for those that want to read a bit more.
This just reads like an ad. There doesn’t seem to be any journalistic value to this article and it’s got a clickbait title. At minimum, it should have noted results for competitors.
Lol what the hell does Deloitte know about technical infrastructure.
Remember when Google wasn’t evil?
Nah, it’s time for something other than email that does what email did before but without the ability to spam or inject bad stuff.
Yeah, I dunno if I’d trust Deloitte about anything, not to sh!t on PIA’s tech which I have no knowledge of.
How to you syslog or net flow to identify malicious actions if you’re not logging?
Only 1 more year left on my PIA subscription. /sigh
