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Comment by craftinator | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't PIA bought by an offshoot from a shady malware producing company called Kape? Isn't PIA's new CTO Mark Karpeles, one of the ringleaders of the Mt. Gox debacle, who stole millions of dollars and was convicted for it in Japan? Nothing says safety like malware and fellons in your VPN provider.

Reddit thread with a decent timeline of events: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/e9fo...

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As a r/buttcoin regular I couldn't help but chuckle loudly in the office here reading this. Had to double check and laughed even more. The utter absurdity of it all.

He actually seems like a decent guy who got in well over his head and did prison time for it in Japan, but as the saying goes "all publicity is good publicity", you literally can't do wrong in the corporate world.

Patiently waiting for Elizabeth Holmes next endeavour.

I may have been laying it on a little thick, but honestly, letting him become CTO of a major VPN provider... A whole sea of capable, professional tech leaders out there, and they choose a blockchain enthusiast with a criminal record and a history of incapability. I get the feeling that Kape wants someone in charge who won't say no to shady practices.

I get where you’re coming from. If I’m going to choose one VPN company to use, it won’t be one with him as CTO.

Exactly. It's almost like they are trying to filter out anyone with sense.

This does seem conveniently timed, right after the controversy of a few weeks ago has died down.

Hopefully wireguard will be accepted into the mainline kernel soon and it will become much easier for people to run their own VPNs.

I will not be using PIA for the remainder of my subscription, and won't be renewing it.

Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682

I wonder more than coincidence if users started haemorrhaging.

I turned of auto-renewal the day I saw that announcement and will be looking for a new VPN in ~4 months or so.

Given most people with VPN's are likely privacy conscious, seems amazing a good percentage wont be doing the same given the groups reputation that took over.

This looks like a PR move after their really bad recent press.

Open Sourcing is just seen as easy guaranteed good PR even if it is just something less important (client).

Same, moved to Windscribe but was torn between them and Mulvad. PIA lost me and they won't bring me back short of a full refund of my existing sub with them and with Windscribe.

But I'd just take the money and move on anyway.

Hah, I hadn't realized Karpeles was involved. That's a pretty wild CTO choice.

After all that's happened, going open source is pretty much their only option.

I can see how they can open source their client side applications, and I guess they can open source their server code, but I can't wrap my head around how we can verify what exactly they are running on their servers. Like, can we ssh into them with root access and poke around running processes? I just don't get it. Anyone have a clue how else that kind of verification can happen?

it's not possible

and even if it was they could just configure their switches to mirror ports to send the traffic somewhere else for logging

this entire thing is snake oil designed to fool people that don't know any better

trust is earnt... and PIA hired Mark Karpeles, put him in charge of technology then later sold out to a malware firm

if you insist on having a VPN: there's plenty of other firms that don't have these "attributes"

What alternatives do you suggest? I just cancelled my PIA subscription and am in the market.

I use Mullvad with the standard wireguard clients. Works much better than anything OpenVPN based. They are based in Sweden which seems like a reasonable jurisdiction.

FoxyProxy offers a branded VPN service and the proceeds support its development: https://getfoxyproxy.org/order .

I can't vouch for it personally and all I know is that it supports an open-source extension I've relied on for more than a decade, but at least it beats contributing to Karpeles' paycheck, right?

I've heard good things about Mullvad and IPredator, both from Sweden. Generally you want to be looking for VPN providers that don't spend half their revenue on marketing.

Mullvad or (depending on if it has launched yet) the Firefox branding-over-top-Mullvad for the same price.

Yeah I think you're right

The biggest problem I have with this is that Mark Karpeles is, provably, a bad programmer...

Yeah, it's not just the fraud thing; Karpeles shit the bed on Mtgox multiple times. I actually kind of believe the narrative that it was incompetence more than malice, at least to start with.

My name is Chris M and I am the CMO for Private Internet Access.

PIA management has prepared the following statement regarding Mark Karpeles’s role at LTMH and we hope it addresses your doubts or concerns:

In 2018, Mark Karpeles was appointed CTO of LTMH, which was the parent company of Private Internet Access prior to KAPE. However, Mark never had an operational role in PIA and subsequently never had access to any part of the PIA infrastructure nor any role in the planning or execution of the day-to-day operations of PIA.

The role of CTO at PIA has been run collectively by Tommie P. (SvP Software, joined January 2017) handling the software development side and Gaurav G. (CIO, joined January 2015) handling the operational and infrastructure side of the business.

Mark’s role at LTMH has predominantly been to manage development teams working on FutureFC, general R&D, and providing a broader perspective of the industry as a whole rather than PIA specific issues. His work is best summarized as a valued external consultant for specific discussions related to the advancement of our privacy and security efforts.

As part of the merger with KAPE to become Private Internet, Mark currently has no operational role in the merged entity and is pursuing other endeavors.

I'm sure his role is perfectly defensible and his experience a valuable asset for PIA in this space, but I think the issue is the optics of such a hire and what it says about other decisions that have happened or have yet to happen regarding the sale/direction of PIA. It's just especially odd considering what seems to me like obvious overlap between "People interested in having VPN service", "People interested in Bitcoin", and "People who are distrustful of Mark Karpeles".

I can understand how you would feel that way if Mark was hired as the CTO of PIA, but as we stated before, he never had any operational role or access to anything at PIA.

Yep, I agree. That's why I said it was perfectly defensible. Getting burned by Mark in the past causes me a bad _feeling_, though, and the world of feeling and the world of logic often don't intersect, even within the same person. Basically I acknowledge that my feelings aren't logical, but that doesn't make them not exist.

How can we verify that he doesn't contribute to the codebase? Are there some git logs or something we can look through?

Is this statement a joke? Who makes a statement from a company by saying they are making a statement by the management? What's the point? To look official? Next, this "statement" says nothing. Of course that's the point, but at least be creative. You should be, because I can imagine how challenging it is to defend something universally indefensible.

How dumb do you have to be to make this guy an officer. He could've been the chef in the basement washing just as much money.

Associations with Mark Karpeles are like wearing blackface: it's never okay. Never. It doesn't matter what the reason is.

Chris M, I appreciate you responding to this. I was a PIA customer for years, until recently, and it's nice hearing something from your company other than "Don't trust, verify!". Direct information like this goes a long way towards reestablishing PIA's credibility. Unsubstantiated (and likely impossible) marketing ploys do the opposite. Most of what I've read and deduced about the recent changes in your company's structure has been extremely negative, and full of red flags. In my opinion the first half of PIA's new marketing slogan is an ironic reality: "Don't trust."

As a marketer, whoever wrote this statement should not work in marketing... at best it is simply unclear. At worst it sounds inconsistent in the truth which doesn't help the 'trust us' goal of the statement.

Are all your execs now spreading misinformation in random HN threads? Was your CEO not enough?

Making it sound like Mark Karpeles had no real association with PIA is disingenuous.

> However, Mark never had an operational role in PIA and subsequently never had access to any part of the PIA infrastructure nor any role in the planning or execution of the day-to-day operations of PIA.

You say this yet PIA says diferent in your official statement

> Specifically, as many have wondered, he is working as the global CTO across LTM, reviewing technical architecture from an efficiency and security perspective and providing advice and guidance. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/04/why-i-hir...

Sure, maybe it's the parent company but based on how they were structured it seems likely that the CTO of LTM had a lot of influence. Moreover, he was hired as a CTO somewhere by the same people making the big decision at PIA..

Also we can look through your CEO's comments from 2 weeks about Mark. E.g.

>You don’t know a person until you see them in the toughest of situations. Mark is a good man and a great developer who fought on the front lines and I’ve known for a long time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684155

Seems like he trusts him.

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