- 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.
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.
Mozilla VPN vor Mullvad
I mean, Mozilla VPN is Mullvad, so yeah. You can trust Mullvad.
Does Mullvad let you use a custom DNS?
Yeah as soon as I saw Delloite I knew it was shit.
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?
I used Nord VPN after a lot of research when I initially started using them years ago. What have you heard about them?
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 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.
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.
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.
I loved mullvad but they removed port forwarding and now I don’t know where to go sadly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who told you about that?
That is… I don’t know what you mean…
Yeah, I dunno if I’d trust Deloitte about anything, not to sh!t on PIA’s tech which I have no knowledge of.
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.
How is that a clickbait title?? If this is clickbait, there is no possible title that wouldn’t be…
Lol what the hell does Deloitte know about technical infrastructure.
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.
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.
Only 1 more year left on my PIA subscription. /sigh
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.
How is windscribe?
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?
Windows 10. I’ve since moved on to 11 but haven’t tried it since then.
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.
Port forwarding is available with Windscribe. A temporary, resetable one is included in pro plans. Permanent port forwarding is available for additional costs
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How to you syslog or net flow to identify malicious actions if you’re not logging?
You don’t, which is why VPN ips get blacklisted so much.
