Well I'm not going to stop using it until i've seen another VPN get raided and verified to not hand out my data.
Shit sucks but I'm not aware of any other VPN that doesn't have accounts, and let's you pay without a credit card.
Private Alpes is a bulletproof hosting provider in Switzerland, where Mullvad has also rented its Swiss infrastructure.
Apparently they've now posted a response:
We also live these values by being tolerant in our daily work. Everyone is welcome to collaborate with Mullvad if they share these narrow core values. As employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, lobbyists, campaign partners or whatever it might be. No matter what their other opinions are and no matter whether the founders or anyone else in Mullvad dislike them. The founders themselves fundamentally disagree on several important issues.
In context, this seems...tone-deaf. "It's okay! Immigrants are welcome to work for Mullvad even if the founders 'dislike' them." Yikes.
It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission, in the same way that someone's opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn't.
I would argue that those three things aren't even all on the same level, and that's without even addressing the fucking fascism of 're-migration' policies.
That said, if you no longer want to be a Mullvad customer for philosophical reasons, we think it's important to honor that, and will gladly refund you.
Unless you were smart enough to pay anonymously, in which case you're welcome to doxx yourself, I guess.
disgusting? yes
surprising? no
libertarians and borderline-criminals have always shared the privacy space with anti-capitalist lefties, since before the Bolsheviks bulk-ordered their red shirts.
Wondering if it's time that we as an anti-authoritarian left community, establish our own VPN...
Anything shared here would inevitably be (or become) a honeypot. If you want a community-driven VPN, it would need to be something like Tor. Individual nodes being hosted by the community, and a zero-trust system to ensure no single node sees enough traffic to ID users.
But the issue with this is that a malicious actor (like the government) could simply spin up enough nodes to be able to capture the system. A zero-trust system like Tor is only secure because it is large. It’s not economical for a single actor to run enough nodes to reliably capture all three connections in the chain. But if it’s a small group (like Lemmy) starting up their own system, then it would be trivial for a larger organization to simply outnumber the two or three dozen safe nodes.
Nym existe i thing their founders are anarchist. But don't know if they are trust worthy. The people involve seam decent https://nym.com/about
I've been too lazy to renew my Mullvad subscription, and now I have another reason not to
Im sorry, but people here in the comments seem to be complaining to complain. If both Mullvad and Proton are known to fund/support fascist parties, then what do you suggest we leftists use? And dont just blindly recommend eastern spyware VPNs either. Maybe we just go back to distributing newspapers and using radio, just like our comrades back then did
And dont just blindly recommend eastern spyware VPNs either
Do these even exist? Who gives a shit if the PRC spies on me? I'd happily use a North Korean VPN if they had IPs that weren't geoblocked.
Anyone have experience with iVPN? I've generally heard it's good, but I'm not sure how it compares. Looks like it's the same price as Mullvad at least, and also accepts cash and monero as payment options. I'm just wondering about how many servers they have comparable and how often they got blocked by major websites. I'm thinking that'll probably be what I switch to, unless it has some major problems I'm not aware of.
I use AirVPN, personally. They put money where the mouth is and haven't donated to any Nazis either.
They look good from an ethics standpoint, but it looks like the only anonymous payment method they take is monero. I'm considering them, but I'm not super familiar with crypto and how to obtain monero. Looks like I'll need to do some research.
isn't monero the only decent way to pay anonymously over the internet?
Emphasis on "over the internet". Mullvad and others also accept cash via mail, though obviously that can take weeks depending on where you're mailing it from.
Bruh Proton never gave money to fascist parties. In fact, if you look at their donations, they're all left wing.
They may be talking about the CEO being on Trump’s dick, though that’s just a guess.
Yeah Andy Yen was specifically talking about Gail Slater's antitrust support while the democrats had ties to corporate lobbies and voted on the wrong side of things. He apologized for appearing to be republican.
If you look at proton's finances they all donate towards left organizations, promoting freedom and privacy, even donating to a liberal news organization.
I'm sick and tired of all these people bashing on proton because of one tweet that was taken out of context.
Bash on Proton for not being open source enough but don't bash on them for this same tweet over and over again.
Never had these issues with Njalla (run by Pirate Party affiliated people)
This is a recurring issue with Proton and Mullvad
Dang, Mullvad instantly loses its credibility of the go to lemmy shill VPN overnight.
If people were shilling for Mullvad, then they wouldn't give a shit about this would they?
So I'm definitely not familiar with swedish politics, but does this site actually represent the entire party? The party site is just a very vague description of some group of people that sound like they're anti left and anti right at the same time. The Wikipedia article on the party doesn't really help make sense to what they expect to accomplish, but again that could just be my ignorance to it.
Would love to know more about all this, with more reliable sources if possible (vs a website that just says something without really providing sources). Mullvad is about trying to protect privacy with fighting big brother, and I'm really not seeing anything about the party that indicates it wants the opposite.
They're practicing the rhetoric strategy known as Bonapartism, which is when you claim to be neither left nor right, but a third way, which is nonsensical as realistically you gotta stand for something. As for this party's actual views, they're social fascists (socialdemocracy for me, fascism for thee). They're wildly racist.
The main thing to know and understand about them is that they want to ethnically cleanse sweden of people they consider non-swedes.
Be careful with being explained politics from other countries, even sourced. If you asked a big part of the french population what are LFI's politics they'd tell you all sort of horrors that the media baselessly accuses them of simply because they are dangerous to the capitalistic system we live in. The formerly mainstream french "left" hates them too and always has.
Unfortunately more and more media all around the world is owned by more or less hidden oligarch wannabes.
I don't know swedish politics either, but I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet to tell me what they are.
note that this is a local party, and as such their policies are focused on their local area only. apparently they plan to be on the national ballot this year but i've not seen any policy changes to reflect that. reading from an interview the founder did in 2022, he had to start his own branch of the left party youth wing because there wasn't one where he lived, and as soon as they became official he found out that they didn't like his opinions so he was forced out. as for what those opinions are...
– Vi började fråga oss vad som var relevant i människors vardag. Är radikalfeminismen relevant? Nej. Är frågan om hur många kön som finns relevant? Nej. Är gamla mossiga resonemang om huruvida Sovjet var en arbetarstat relevant? Nej.
Han upprördes av skatteslöseri och kommunala skrytprojekt som genomfördes samtidigt som utanförskapet växte.
– Jag tog frågan till nutid. Vilken klass tjänar egentligen på den förda migrationspolitik som lett till utanförskap och kriminalitet?
"we started asking ourselves what was relevant in the daily lives of people. Is radical feminism relevant? No. Is the question of how many genders there are relevant? No. Are tired old arguments on whether the Soviet Union was a worker-led state relevant? No."
He was upset by wasted tax money and bragadocious projects the local government spearheaded while social exclusion kept growing.
"I brought the question to present day. What class makes money from the immigration policies that have led to exclusion and criminality?"
He's coined a term for the class of people he says are the main tax money wasters; "transferiat", as in the macroeconomic concept of transfer payments. these people, he says, just profit from the system without adding value. as examples, he lists "genusvetare, mångfaldsstrateger, HBTQI-certifikatörer [,] i viss mån även journalister (inom public service). Det finns även ett lägre skikt av transferiatet – de bidragsberoende, framför allt den stora massan av arbetslösa invandrare som kommit att hamna i utanförskapsområden": gender studies graduates, diversity strategists, LGBTQ-certifiers, journalists in publicly funded media, and unemployed immigrants.
...honestly i was with him for a while there. i thought he was gonna go on a tirade against "bullshit jobs", but instead he went off the deep end. later on he cites "public art" and "community centers in areas where more limmigrants live" as a waste of taxpayer money.
Av vänstern anklagas vi för att vara fascister och av högern anklagas vi för kommunism
Accused of being fascists from the political left and communist from the political right...not exactly a reassuring description IMO.
Calling nonwhite migrants "parasites" is a pretty clear signal which end of the spectrum they're actually on.
So nobody can agree if they're far-left or far-right, but everyone agrees they're far-authoritarian?
Accused of being Nationalist from the left and being Socialist from the right. What a novel idea. A nEw PoLiTiCaL tHiRd WaY!
A VPN does not protect the user from the type of sophisticated mass-surveillance that exists now and will only become increasingly more sophisticated without political critique. Users who are confused about the criticism of a capitalist-company when its benefactors are known to further entrench a beneficial political-ideology are simpletons who do not grasp the relationship between the Western-democracies and its political mass-surveillance organs that go on to spawn the private-surveillance companies that do get public critique (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Palantir, et al.).
No, a VPN is not better than nothing. Do more. Do better. Adopt real solutions like GNUnet. Liberate your computers with free software.
inb4 simpletons just want to use a VPN to watch mah netflix. Ok boomer.
Points for mentioning a solution, but being condisending and talking down to people isn't a great way to get them excited about becoming involved. It's better to let people in on the joke rather than make them the joke.
So, anyone that doesn't have the technical expertise to start moving to a more private online experience is a simpleton. Thanks for clearing that up for all of us simpletons. GNUnet is nowhere near ready to even begin to be a part of anyone's digital life, ansd the developers say so themselves:
Please be aware that this project is still in an early alpha stage when it comes to running software – its not an easy task to rewrite the whole Internet!
While it's great to put the word out hoping that more people gets involved, vexing others has the opposite outcome.
All this to say, fuck you, get off of your high horse.
Regardless of what this dumb party is, it's first and foremost a donation by a private person. Who happens to run Mullvad. So in the medium term this should have no bearing on the company and how it operates from their point of view. The article hints at disagreement on the board about many things. So if this news story turns into subscribers leaving by the thousands, I would sooner think the "generous" donor might be pushed or bought out.
The tech sector is run by people too. Some of them are mad. Our modern outrage economy demands drastic and public knee jerk reactions to be on the good side. If you're considering leaving Mullvad, voice your concerns to them first. Put pressure on and wait and see for a bit. If they all turn out to be Nazis in trenchcoats, by all means leave. But they could correct this internally (push out/buyout) and then there is no need to destroy an otherwise okay VPN provider just because one of the founders turned into meatball Melon Usk.
I don't use Mullvad but I have used Proton VPN and am now using AirVPN. It's my experience that if you're using VPN to stream Netflix content or the iPlayer from the UK, you'll be equally sol on other providers because the streamers have gotten better at spotting and defending against VPNs. So switching in a huff may still leave you disappointed as well.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)