My apologies. Your comment came off (to me anyway) as the former.
EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted
joined 1 year ago
So, I just looked it up and apparently their official stance is that auditing is questionably effective and thus unnecessary:
Our software is free and open source, while we repute at the moment [it's] not acceptable to provide external companies with root access to our servers to perform audits which can not anyway guarantee future avoidance of traffic logging or transmission to third parties. On the contrary, we deem very useful anything related to penetration tests. Such tests are frequently performed by independent researchers and bounty hunters and we also have a bounty program.
In other words, their reasoning seems to be:
- Their software is free and open source, so if it does logs anything, the community would find out, so in this sense the community is the independent auditors;
- There's no stopping an audited party from ceasing to log right before the audit and start up again after the audit ends, so an audit is kind of toothless anyway;
- Regarding penetration tests, they already have independent testing done as well as a bounty program.
Personally, I don't entirely agree with points #2 and #3 (though I can see their points), but point #1 is fair I suppose. In my opinion, though, it should not be up to the users to hold the company accountable; and there is a difference between penetration tests and log auditing, as the former I believe are merely to check the resilience against outside hacking.
My end impression is that judging from their other documentation and forum posts, the fact that their software is fully open-source, and their past behavior in accordance with their stated values, I think I'm inclined to believe them. However, it is somewhat worrying nevertheless that there isn't log auditing involved regardless of their actions.
Edit: Clarification
What do you mean? Are they not good for privacy or security? They seem definitely more zealous about that on their FAQs and forum pages than, say, ProtonVPN, for sure.
Fair enough. We all have our preferences. :)
Oh yay. :)
That is so weird. Haha.
ProtonVPN also has port-forwarding.
That being said, last time I tried it, their Linux GUI was abysmal, though I hear they recently did a revamp. I haven't used it yet though so I can't speak on it beyond that.
Just something to keep mind.
Edit: Syntax.
I don't mind self-learning. Hell, if I'm interested in the subject matter, I usually find myself experimenting and researching.
I'm all about that "wait, I wonder if..." mindset. 😎
I work as a cashier at a dead-end retail store in a town of 5000. (Seriously, the closest reasonably large city is like 30 minutes away.) So I don't think there's much of an opportunity at my current workplace. Haha.
But you still make an excellent point and it sounds like a good starting-off point. Thank you!
There's a certain point where it just comes down to trust. And if you distrust a company enough that you think they aren't posting the same code to the git repository that they say they are, then maybe that's when you shouldn't be doing business with them.
This is the case with all organizations, corporate or otherwise.