They have a FOSS firewall product, “Portmaster”, and you can subscribe to their VPN analog, “Safing Privacy Network (SPN)”. They will rename SPN to “Portmaster Unlimited” (or maybe already have done so).
Portmaster is supposedly working in alpha; though, the new release will be beta or V1. Anyway, is it working well, or is it too soon to tell?
This is a project/product that we’re definitely aware of and have our eyes on.
I personally believe that it is still way too early to tell seeing that there is still a lot of work to be done for what I consider basic features (such as cross-platform support, which is planned, but not there yet. It currently only works on Windows and Linux).
When the project has matured a bit more, I think we can properly evaluate it and decide whether it is something that we would want to recommend, and which use cases/threat models it would address.
Thanks for replying.
It occurs to me that Portmaster and SPN on a computer will run independent of whatever firewall and VPN products you use on a mobile device. The only interaction is that a subscription covers several devices, and you can’t currently run Safing products on mobile devices. Still, if you can afford two separate VPN/SPN solutions, SPN has nice features for Windows and Linux.
Portmaster is working very well, no issues so far. I have paid for one month of SPN and will start testing it in the next few days.
I started to use SPN yesterday with triple-hop and it works amazingly well. Despite only having around 20 SPN nodes it’s very fast.
Community nodes and compatibility issues across apps and OSes, I guess?
IMO, decentralized VPN or SPN(partial decentralized) is a better alternative to centralized network, as the risk/trust is not put into one basket. However, there are some valid concerns too. For example, there’s no telling whether the exit node is logging the traffic. And from my experience with Mysterium Dark, the connection is not very stable too. I don’t think this kind of tech is going to replace our trust-based centralized VPN services soon.
Is it time to re-analyze Portmaster for suggestion on the site? SPN has been working flawlessly for me for a few weeks now. It can be run parallel to a VPN for P2P applications. They are still missing a Mac app, but are looking to add support when they can. You can also self host SPN nodes to expand the network.
I think that this would be a good recommendation to open up local DNS control on Windows.