PIA before the Kape acquisition was owned by parent company London Trust Media. The owner is Andrew Lee, who was best buddies with Mark Karpeles responsible for the MtGox collapse and defrauding all the users of the exchange. Unfortunately the Japanese government let him out of jail and Andrew Lee decided to make his old friend the CTO of the company. Andrew Lee is also the guy behind the shady "sale" of the nonprofit Freenode that caused everyone to jump ship to LiberaChat.
I feel like it's probably more trustworthy under Kape than a CEO and CTO surrounded by a long history of lies, fraud, and general scumbag behavior.
PIA continues to prove in court over and over again that they do not keep traffic logs. The extreme fear mongering over Kape has never been backed up by any evidence other than "they used to do bad things under their previous management." As I always say in these threads, all the people who shill Mullvad over everything probably just use them for web-browsing or adjacent activities, and not anything that requires a specialty product like p2p or bypassing national firewalls.
>all the people who shill Mullvad over everything probably just use them for web-browsing or adjacent activities, and not anything that requires a specialty product like p2p or bypassing national firewalls.
On the contrary. Mullvad gives you more flexibility than PIA in that regard and doesn't limit you to whatever features are built into the client like PIA does. You can build tunnels to whatever endpoint in whichever country you want. You can associate multiple ports to your tunnel or separate tunnels for inbound connections. It's very convenient if you want a P2P tunnel where you can get a wireguard interface on the client and then configure your P2P application to only use that tunnel so that there's no chance of leaks (Up to you if you want to also configure the P2P service to use DNS over the VPN or just the system resolver if you don't care) and you don't have to tunnel everything over the same VPN. You can have multiple interfaces going to different applications if you wanted. You have the flexibility to configure your client in whatever way you want without having to deal with proprietary endpoints to request a temporary forwarded port for the connection like what PIA makes you use.
I used to use PIA before the owner hired con artist Mark Karpeles as the CTO and jumped ship when that happened. Even though I only picked Mullvad because it was recommended on HN and wasn't PIA, I much prefer it from a technical standpoint. If I knew how much better it was originally I never would have went for the cheaper more popular option of PIA. People shilling Mullvad are probably doing so because it has many technical advantages over traditional VPNs used by more casual customers. Mullvad also supports bridge servers for shadowsocks. I've never had an opportunity to test it but I'd expect Mullvad to be more reliable in China than PIA.
PIA is cheap, and they don't seem to keep traffic logs. That's basically all they have going for them.
Anecdotally PIA performance seemed to drop around then, port forwarding was frequently broken and Wireguard wasn't making much progress (looks like maybe they've finally rolled it out now)
Maybe things were already bad before Kape but it was around the same time
