Long title, wopsi.
Recently been checking out PIA VPN service(for research purposes), and they advertise their services to be 100% open source. However when checking their Github they don’t seem to have their code base for website there.
So this have had me wondering, when you hear the term 100% open source. Do you expect ALL of what they do, including website part, to be open source? Or just the application / service that they offer?
Lemmyknow your thoughts!
It’s pretty common for companies like that to advertise that their app is 100% open source, but then stop short of guaranteeing anything beyond that. In PIA’s case, I would point out that their infrastructure (the servers that they use to route your traffic) are closed, so they could be doing literally anything in there. Their desktop client being open source doesn’t actually do much to guarantee your privacy.
If you want real transparency, Mullvad is the only real option: https://mullvad.net/en/help/open-source
Having said that, I personally use PIA because it’s cheaper and I don’t care enough.
I think that the client is what really matters, because AFAIK you have no way to verify what’s actually running on their servers.
Right, you can’t be 100% sure, but there are measures that they can take to make you trust them a bit more. For example, I believe Mullvad runs systems in RAM and keeps no records of who uses what. You don’t even have to give them your email address; they don’t want it. And they submit to regular audits (provided you trust the auditors).
Also, if the client matters, then don’t use their client. Use the OpenVPN client instead.
Thanks for the insight! Yeah aware that Mullvad is pretty much the closest to “state-of-the-art” as it gets, compared to the rest of these services in the market.
just pay 3 eurs more for better service tbh
I mostly use a VPN for torrents, and not much else honestly. And Mullvad isn’t very friendly to torrenters (for good reasons), they don’t allow port forwarding.
Mullvad website isnt open source (https://github.com/mullvad/mullvadvpn-app/issues/5392)
No, I don’t expect a company’s website to be open source, just their primary product or service
Personally, I consider PIA to be very low on the trustability scale, thanks to where they operate from and who owns them. That’s the most important part: not the stuff you can see, but the stuff you can’t. Especially when, from a privacy perspective, the VPN servers get the same data that your ISP would usually get, ie what domains you travel to, and when, and how often, and where you are.
At that point, it doesn’t really matter to me whether there’s a repository somewhere for the website. Compared to pretty much anything else, it’s very easy to audit them for sketchy behavior (except, of course, for the server-side stuff, which could easily be excluded from their source code even if they published it).
Only if the website is part of the product. Like if to use the product I have to login on the website or am forced to regularly use it or whatever. Then if it is advertised as 100% open source I’d probably be like ‘is it though?’.
The whole idea of a service being “open source” sounds like nonsense to me. “Open source” refers to code, not services.
Might as well call my cat “100% open source.”
I might use a term like “open source friendly” for a service to mean “can be used without using any proprietary software.”
Lol are you like 85 years old?
Open source is a term relating to software. Software is created using code. This isn’t a hard idea to track.
Software as a service is common. Feel free to read up.
yes
