Mullvad founder donated 5 million SEK to populist Örebro party
(www.flamman.se)
from zaylon@sopuli.xyz to privacy@lemmy.ml on 27 Jun 13:53
https://sopuli.xyz/post/47902491
from zaylon@sopuli.xyz to privacy@lemmy.ml on 27 Jun 13:53
https://sopuli.xyz/post/47902491
Daniel Berntsson, founder of Mullvad, gave a personal donation of 5 million SEK (roughly 450,000€) in 2025 to Örebropartiet. This enormous donation accounted for 72% of the party’s revenue in 2025.
How does this affect Mullvad’s legitimacy as a company advocating for a free and open internet, while also funding a political party whose agenda seem to contradict these values? The official party website (in Swedish) can be found via the link below.
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Accused of being fascists from the political left and communist from the political right…not exactly a reassuring description IMO.
So nobody can agree if they’re far-left or far-right, but everyone agrees they’re far-authoritarian?
Seems like it yeah
Well, the political right calls anyone to the left of Mussolini a communist, so we can safely assume they’re wrong here.
So, they’re socialists, only national?
so like, national socialists. who do we know who also called themselves that?
Calling nonwhite migrants “parasites” is a pretty clear signal which end of the spectrum they’re actually on.
Accused of being Nationalist from the left and being Socialist from the right. What a novel idea. A nEw PoLiTiCaL tHiRd WaY!
I mean, moderates are invariably SuperHitler, especially in Scandinavia where their social welfare is synonymous with creating apartheid, but I don’t see why that would bother most Lemmy users :0
How did 9+ people even parse this comment?
Twitter did us in you see
So, now everyone’s going to hate Mullvad like they do Proton bc of personal decisions by the CEO??
I think you should all be less trusting of western tech companies that strictly use infrastructure in countries that the CIA would feel comfortable hanging out & torturing people to death in
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/08203209-deac-48f3-af8f-335dbda4aad0.png">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/09e3609a-7997-44b0-bde5-842f225d044f.png">
Is this not itself a geopolitical statement? Do we judge everything by indidual choices, or acknowledge the place of individuals in a wider structure they may not be entirely aware of?
You add up all we know about 5/14 eyes, comprador states, you couldn’t get a better list of CIA-compatible nations than the Mullvad server picker
Let’s just stop for a second. Cyprus? Israel? Ukraine? I know the justification. But cmon
Not weighing in on their politics, but yes and they should. It’s called voting with your wallet. Where do you think the CEO gets the money to fund their politics? They don’t work for free. By continuing to use that service it’s tacitly okaying the CEOs choice.
Money is power.
They donated a little over 500k usd. Mullvad is $5 a month.
A hundred thousand users would have to drop them to equal the donation, and likely several orders of magnitude more would have to drop them in order to equal the amount of the donation when we factor in what percentage of that $5 goes into the ceos pocket.
If you are correct that money is power then the users don’t have any power to effect changes to this situation.
I think you’re also making a misstep blaming the users of the service for that ceos use of their money. Should now every individual shopper be expected to have an understanding of how the individual members of the owning class each shape the world around them and each shopper bring their political will to bear through the dollars and cents they dole out in the produce section?
“Hmm, bananas are on sale and I could stock up on spices with what I save but on the other hand I don’t like the dole corporation…” preposterous!
Even if you thought the above statement wasn’t absurd, putting expression of politics in the marketplace is choosing to fight on a battlefield tilted entirely in the favor of the wealthy. Consider who will have the advantage when money is political speech, will it be the absurdly wealthy who command vast sums, control the materiel of capital, collude to manipulate the very world we live in and rub elbows with each other on the weekends or will it be a bunch of people choosing apples or bananas?
No ethical consumption is invoked for a reason and this is the reason.
Even if you were a dyed in the wool liberal who truly believes history is over, did you expect the privacy store to be run by someone who shares your politics? People who feel they need privacy might be members of a wide range of ideologies that are outside the mainstream.
Okay? So a hundred thousand users can drop the service. “You’re just a small drop in the bucket” is the same bullshit mentality used everywhere that has gotten the world into a lot of the problems it’s in now.
If everybody does their small part, it’s done pretty quick. If everyone sits around going “oh, there’s no ethical consumption” and accepted defeat, literally nothing changes.
Unions are built entirely on speed together strong.
Yes don’t make it the only battlefield but if you strongly disagree with the CEO, giving him more money is a problem. There’s no way around that.
Relevant watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYHvrd7Gwqg
There are only so many good privacy options out there. So being choosy with services isn’t a luxury many can afford.
I wrote that several orders of magnitude more than a hundred thousand users would have to drop the service to equal the amount of the donation under the logic that only a small percentage of the monthly payment of each user goes into the ceos pocket.
With that out of the way, the idea that I’m suggesting throwing your hands up and saying there’s nothing you can do is a wild extrapolation completely manufactured by you.
Successful boycotts are always accompanied by a program of political action that takes place outside the marketplace. Do not fight in the marketplace, you cannot win there. Boycotts are a form of recruitment that takes place in the marketplace because so much of our social interaction has been condensed to economics.
Boycotts in support of unions are always performed alongside a strike, work stoppage or other direct action, never by themselves. The intent is not to nickel and dime the absurdly wealthy company into compliance but to communicate support for the direct action in the marketplace that we all have to interact with to live.
But how does this impact what the op is about?
There is no direct action going on. There is no competing product (mullvad occupies a very unique position amongst VPNs. I’m not aware of any service that offers what they do with the security posture they have and the history of responding to power at the highest level that they have), and if you know of one I’m interested to hear about it. The boycotter would have to simply go without as opposed to turning to an equivalent competitor. To what end? Would that change the ceos political opinions, which are considered middle of the road in their fascist country of residence?
Declaring a battle on ground you cannot succeed upon to achieve nothing of importance only sacrifices the well being and willingness of those who would take action.
“When you vote with your wallet, those with the fattest wallets will be the drivers of effective change.” - Cory Doctrow probably quoting someone else
Not to say that making moral choices is useless, but kidding yourself into believing that by not consuming anything touched by bad people, the world will change into something better. Or in this case, Mullvad’s CEO will change his politics. “Voting with your wallet” is a fairytale told to liberals to give them the illusion of power. Money is power, but only if you have enough of it.
Yes, in an argument against individual action. But he supports collective voting with wallet
If one person in private went “oh I don’t like this I’ll vote with my wallet” they absolutely lose. If everyone gathers together as a community organized world wide (by discussing actions to take, their thoughts on social media and locally, exactly what’s happening here), he argues in favor of it. The problem is the rugged individualism vs collective action.
Yes. If we only vote with our wallet we also lose, but I tend to find those fighting for broader social and political change are also the ones generally discussing how to vote with their wallet these days.
Fair point. But I can’t agree with you on that second part. In my experience, “voting with your wallet” instead of encouraging them to push for change, pacifies people. They see it as a moral off-ramp, the but-I-am-already-doing-something-so-why-should-I-protest. Hell, it has had pacified me for a long time.
EDIT: Also thanks for the link to the quote.
BDS has been a thing for years. It works.
Yes bit ironically I will switch to Proton since its cheaper and now equal to Mullvad anyway
Okay.
Let me know when it affects the service.
A company that you trust with your privacy (one aspect) has been caught in league with mass surveillance loving fascists? Yeah I am sure that those are a perfect mix and it won’t lead to mass surveillance of its users like the dozens of VPNs now under Israeli mass - surveillance - fascist control.
It is just a complete coincidence that the people pushing more and more mass surveillance are buying up (and in this case winning over the controlling part of) the ways for normal people to avoid mass surveillance.
Neat.
Who made the device you’re posting on?
Must be kewl to not care like you
From a privacy perspective, who manufactured a device that (potentially) runs free software is different from who runs a service which you have to trust because you’re using someone else’s computer.
if you don’t care about your privacy, would you mind installing a RAT for me?
Communism is when no iPhone.
Antifascism is when no iPhone.
Tell me more about fighting capitalism, IndustryStandard@lemmy.world.
Tell me more about your passwords, address, and banking details.
Since you don’t mind privacy.
“Voting with your wallet” in this circumstance, to the extent it has any effect at all, will only hurt you and other privacy conscious people.
No ethical consumption under capitalism, etc.
you don’t need a VPN company to use a VPN. and using the “no ethical consumption” line is pretty fucking gross when you’re talking about buying shit from nazis.
A vpn doesn’t need to be an internet proxy either, but users of vpn companies are paying them to privately and securely anonymize people’s traffic and shield their requests from the isp.
It is of course possible to do this using a vps over connections as well documented and simple as ssh but there are many ways to screw that up and paying a company to work out the details is extremely tempting.
If a person ends up using multiple endpoints, the cost of several vps subscriptions would also eclipse the cost of a vpn service.
I don’t need to pay someone to dig a hole for my pilings either but the quality and speed of their entrenching is beyond what I can create.
ok, but if there is two companies, one that donates to fascists and one that does not, are you gonna tell me you’ll just shrug your shoulders and go with the nazis because there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway? like, my dude, what the fuck?
Well out the gate: there isn’t a vpn provider like mullvad elsewhere. I have active subscriptions to several at the moment for different uses and have used at least two dozen different ones over the years as well as maintaining my own tunnels and overlay networks. There are probably lots of people that know more than me but I think they’d agree that mullvad occupies a specific niche that pretty much no one else is in right now.
What politics would a master need to have for you to submit to their will?
What level of need does a person have to be in for it to be acceptable that they buy bread from a Nazi owned store?
oh I see. you’re not a serious person. there are quite a few vpn providers that are better than mullvad. starting with any that allow port forwarding. mullvad does absolutely nothing that a dozen other vpn providers don’t also do. and if you actually had all this experience you appealed to, then you would know that.
you’re justifying renting a vpn from a nazi by comparing it to buying bread so you don’t starve to death. likely, in your head, this seemed like a good argument. idk, maybe you are some kind of digital being, made of energy, who must consume data to survive. I apologize if this is the case, I must seem speciest for thinking your argument was fucking idiotic.
just fucking admit you don’t see anything wrong with doing business with nazis, you weirdo.
Mullvad allowed port forwarding for many years until it was put into a position because of collusion between Interpol and the big cdns where it had to choose between cooperating with an investigation or retaining that feature.
The choice to drop an incredibly popular offering in order to avoid having to cooperate with the police is a testament to the trust component of the service.
When I said that no one is in that niche at the moment, part of that assessment rests on those events.
But also there are vanishingly few independent privacy focused VPN services that accept cash payment, don’t have accounts (and therefore don’t have the need for records that can be subpoenaed), don’t keep logs, are well respected and trusted, have open source clients, support shadowsocks and WireGuard, run an ad blocking dns and have had to resist the police in multiple high profile events.
I’m open to learn of them.
I assume because you made an equivalence between using an internet service and food you would be willing to buy bread from a Nazi? Again, what masters ideology in the necessarily hierarchical market would you accept?
what are you talking about? you made that equivalence. I said it was a stupid fucking equivalence.
So, a third time: under what circumstances and level of need would you accept a person paying a Nazi for goods or services?
at no point and under no circumstances. the very idea is preposterous. why would you need to pay a nazi? kill them and take the goods you need. what a ridiculous question.
you’re not clever, so stop trying to be.
Ah, if you knew that a fascist was a great poet you’d shoot him anyway, huh.
I guess that’s pretty convincing. I had better book a flight to malmo to kill a man and take his uh vpn service.
I’m sure the details will make more sense when I get there.
the only good nazi is a dead nazi. whatever argument you’re trying to make, it’s not working. for one thing, you can’t even seem to remember what you wrote yourself from one comment to the very next. for another, your posts are all over the place, and you can’t seem to form a coherent thought. I don’t know what it is that you believe because you don’t know what it is you believe, other than seeming to have a particular affinity for fascists.
I don’t think there’s anything you have to say that’s worth listening to anymore. you are dismissed.
Almost all my replies to you have been some kind of reference to anarchist thought in order to fish out what specific part of the big tent you consider yourself.
Allow me to be clear: both you and I are living in a fascist world where all of our needs are mediated through the hierarchy of the market or fascist government or some other organization.
To have our needs met outside those frameworks we would have to create the networks of support that fulfill them and forego anything not available within that alternative.
If either one of us were to start foaming at the mouth and deploying our secret Catalonian martial arts to kill every person we meet who gives support to the fascist governments across the world, we would be quickly overwhelmed and taken into custody.
Violence is not something to be flippantly suggested in a public forum. We are both so far within the belly of the beast that unconsidered struggle will prompt the formation of a cystic growth around us, insulating us from further effective action.
You have tried over 24 different VPNs?
There’s a lot out there. Someone made a big chart to show the corporate relationships between them.
E: found it gigazine.net/…/20260103-vpn-industry-relationship…
That is exactly what he has been saying all along. Most of us know that a commercial VPN is not a silver bullet for privacy, much less for security. Lemmy is full of geeks that know how to deploy their own VPN infrastructure. Good. However, in the commercial VPN space, Mullvad has no competition in terms of keeping the user as private as a commercial VPN will allow. You mention going with a service not run by Nazi CEOs and whatnot, and I’m sure most, if not all, of us agree. Now, if you have information on such a service, that may be even comparable to Mullvad’s offering, I’m sure many of us would like to know about it.
Edit:
I don’t use Mullvad VPN, nor have I ever, yet, but my argument is the same. I just find it a bit more expensive than what I’m willing to pay for that service, which doesn’t mean I think it is too expensive for everyone.
known datacenter IPs are increasingly blocked by website operators thanks to scraping
By very few websites, in my experience. I run my VPN on a shared hosted server. I just have to solve more CAPTCHAs.
Thanks for the heads up. Switching to Proton because of this. Mullvad has been bad lately anyways with most of their servers getting blocked every where.
The only thing keeping me on them was their reputation of being a bit less cooky than Proton but this pushed me over the edge
Proton’s CEO praised Trump, just saying. There’s IVPN which is Gibraltese.
Proton CEO praised something Trump did which isn’t a great look but debateable.
That’s wayyy less bad than Mullvad donating $500k to a Nazi party which advocates for remigration.
It’s not just praise though, Proton claimed Trump was standing up for the little guys which is rich considering that the fascist is a billionnaire, supporting the wealthiest to repress the labourers even more. And besides that, it’s also insane.
Hitler was somewhat an environmentalist, but cheering on Hitler for being that is insane, because that is ignoring all the other heinous shit he did.
What’s worse, cheering on something Hitler did or donating to Hitler?
Proton did not claim anything; the CEO of Proton claimed that Republicans (not Trump) would do better on big tech anti-trust.
This view is not that crazy given that the person Trump appointed was doing her job quite well. Too well to the point that Trump removed her from the position later on.
Bullshit, Trump is the most big tech and corrupt claimant to Usonian president since a hefty while.
And Trump IS what the RINOs are nowadays, those that the pro-fascist CEO praised. Republicans are those like Bill Weld and Charlie Baker from Massachusetts.
I keep hearing about that praise, yet never once have I seen proof of it. Maybe I’m just using the wrong search engine. Might need to Google this.
theintercept.com/…/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-rep…
OK, so he said that in January 2025. Just when Trump was taking over, and it did look at the time that the reps were actually at least talking with Proton execs, which is way more than the dems did. Proton reached out to Biden’s team more than once and they never were even given the time of day, Trump’s team got them in to talk. Whatever the environment is today (which I agree is complete shit and everything is ceumbling down because of Trump, Starmer and others), I can’t blame Proton for seeing that when this administration at least talked to them. Having said that, those do not qualify as praises, they qualify as comments on what it looked like at the moment. Praise means: to express a favorable judgment of someone or something. Saying that anyone is ‘more likely’ to do something does not qualify as a praise in my opinion. Much less saying anyone ‘was the evil and now the tables have turned’.
Anyway, thanks for the info, I was not aware of this, and because of what it is, my thoughts on this remain as they are.
We’d already had Trump’s last presidency to know that he wasn’t going to reign in big tech, so the CEO’s positive thoughts and hopefulness for the republican party and Trump’s picks were already insanely out of touch at best, IMO.
I agree that his first term was a shit show, this one is even worse. But regardless, try to put yourself in Yen’s shoes. He pushed to try and get into talks with the Democrats to lobby for privacy, not a hint of interest from them. Tries the same with the Republicans and is received with open doors. What should his comments be?
I guess I’m just glad I’ve been one of the few people that flat out rejected a green card that was almost 8 years in process because of the way the US has been for the last few years. I’m OK not living there and only visiting my brother every now and then.
I would’ve hoped that the CEO of a privacy company would’ve already known that both corporate parties of the US have demonstrated they are anti-privacy.
His comments also don’t really make sense, since Trump’s first term only ever removed regulations on big tech and monopolies, while Biden’s second term appeared to be taking at least some actions towards regulating and reining them in.
If we assume Yen really did believe that the second Trump administration would somehow turn a new leaf, then we must also then assume he is either extremely gullible, extremely misinformed, or both. Not something you want to see in someone running a privacy service someone may rely on.
I can totally see him being gullible. Don’t know the guy, but at the end of the day there are more executives in charge of things that the CEO only requires results for (CTOs, CXOs, and a bunch of other C-letters).
I get where you’re coming from, and I also believe in voting with my wallet, where I think that you and I differ is in how we take what is out there in terms of 'information’and what we decide to do with it.
I no way, shape or form can I speak about you without the ahadow of a doubt, all I can do is infer based on our conversation so far.
In my case, anything coming from social platforms, I qualify as noise if there’s no source attached to it, and if there’s a source, I try (not always do) to figure out if it’s just more left throwing rocks at right, or the other way around, or if there’s any merit to the information. In this case, you are giving me a source, which I can confirm has an accurate content, and that Yen indeed said that, since Proton didn’t even try to deny it.
In my case, I still believe that Yen was under an impression that was, evidently, entirely wrong, and decided to run his mouth on it. The Mullvad case, I don’t use Mullvad VPN, but only because, for my purposes, its too expensive, but I do believe it is currently the beat commercial VPN available, hands down. What their CEO did, it’s fucked up, assuming that the patry is as radicalized against any spectrum as I’m seeing in the sources provided.
the other thing that I consider before saying “fuck 'X’company” is how this will affect anyone trying to get off from under big tech’s thumb and recover some semblance of control over their privacy. I have left all mainstream services, no exceptions, and because of that, I know all too well how hard, long and tedious it is to do so. The last thing I want to do is make it harder for people that are only making peace with the fact that they will lose some (in most cases, a lot) of convenience, and then find themselves in a place where there are no good alternatives, which will result in many just going back and dropping the attempt altogether.
Yes, we need to blow the whistles, because not doing that is just as damaging to the end-goal, but we all have to remember how hard we had to work to get to the place we are at today, and the toll it took on us to get here, so that we can guide the next batch in the best way possible without building a fortress around their potential freedom.
Shit, I’m sorry this ended up being so long 🤣
I’m pretty sure Proton also sponsored far-right influencers, although that sounds less shitty than being the primary funding source for an entire party then doubling down on it
have you validated the statements of the article, or do you just outright believe it?
if not, that’s a weakness with which you can be made to hate all the useful privacy tools.
What is validating according to you, personally traveling to the guy and asking him?
this is just one rando saying something on the internet!
okay, then lets hate everyone, you can trust nobody, because I say everyone is nazi or some other undesirable, there’s no one without ulterior motives, trust me bro. look even linus torvalds is nazi! look he still lives in the USA, and I have insider knowledge about a secret donation he made to trump! no you can’t check it anywhere, just trust me, look my account is 3 years old, super legitimate. instead use my super cleaned out distribution of windows 11, leave your CIA bugged linux behind, and you can sign up to my services because no where else but here you will be safe! pinky promises. if you let the community be divided like that, here you go.
So you’re saying the guy didn’t donate $500.000 to a Nazi party and the article just made it up?
yes. until we have
furtherevidence, we shouldn’t take this at face value.or do you have a reason to believe this is not likely a smear campaign?
I do not find their program on the web. They say they will publish before summer.
Any other official document about their political stances besides that really vague introduction they do on their website?
I use Kaspersky VPN, from Russia, part of BRICS. The Global South lives on its own work, unlike the Global North, who kills and robs the Global South.
So instead of American or European spyware, you instead use Russian spyware :)
Living in America, I’d rather give my data to Russia or China, if I lived in one of those countries, it would be the other way around. The US and Europe have more leverage over my life, so I’d rather give them less about myself.
I’ll give you that, what you’re saying makes sense, but in an ideal world, we don’t have to give our data to any government… only in our dreams though…
Yeah, it’s unhinged across the board, for sure. I’m doing what I can to own my data and control as much of it as possible, but it is a full time chore if I also want to have a life in this time and age.
On the brighter side, that has led to me spending more time with family and friends in person, outside (hoping not to be recorded 🤣).
Why do you day “any government”? Your phrasing exempts corporations.
One downside is that if a western country ends up capturing someone or something important (like France arresting the Telegram CEO), then they might use them as leverage to attain the data on the service. So best case is nobody collects the data.
100% agree. I’m trying to keep everything self-hosted, and j think I’ve made very good progress, but reaching total sovereignty is very hard. I’m guessing it’ll be way easier once I retire and dont6really need to rely on some of the imposed shit anymore.
I remember all the FUD about their anti-virus back in the day, even though it consistently tested the best. I didn’t know they had a VPN. I’ll have to look into it.
Edit: website says “purchase is unavailable for US customers”. I’m sure that’s the US government’s doing and not their own choice, if I had to guess.
Here in Brazil I could buy it, although I could not download it not from the Play Store. I downloaded an APK from the website. It is also available on Galaxy Store, Huawei App Gallery, Xiaomi GetApps, and even the Apple App Store! It seems Google interprets the sanctions more harshly than necessary.
Google doing the CIA’s bidding as per usual. I’m glad it’s an option for people outside the US.
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.
Yeah, the only issue is that any profits from paying for their service will eventually line the person’s pockets. It’s not like the company is directly doing it, or spreading the bullshit.
Makes it a slightly different issue, but it is still an issue
Stop streaming. Put your VPN to work the right way.
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?
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.
You use a vpn to watch netflix, i use vpn to watch porn, we are not the same /s
I think entertainment is a very low priority. Pushed to comment on the topic I would say it’s actually a great waste of time, regardless of political orientation.
It’s isolating and manipulative. It subverts the local culture and brainwashes the viewer into believing that what is seen often on the screen is a reflection of real life norms. It is not, but when the majority of a citizenry consume so much foreign media it does shift real cultural norms. This is the soft-power of cultural products created for export.
Turn America’s netflix off. Turn off whatever pornography you preference. Move your body. Get some sunshrine and play with your comrades.
I genuinely believe television was a mistake. I can not see anything of its legacy to feel warm towards; there is no good here.
I totally agree with you. I cant sit and watch tv and never have been able to. I think we need to go to more person to person interactions. We never needed phones, it just became “essential” because everyone wanted one after someone else got one, it was the “new shiny thing”, but it only served as the catalyst for our own prisons.
You wouldn’t believe it
Yes. I am just tired, comrade. Once can argue about the tone, but the reality is there needs to be a rectification on computer-education on a scale that only a government can enact. I can not do it. I can just rebuke.
Juvenile views do need to be rebuked. If you believe you can regain a portion of control back via payment to an entity, whilst still living in ignorance of the substrate you wish to increase control over you are a moron. You are merely paying for a belief.
I can not understand the user’s insistence on ignorance. All the users here are aware, to differing degrees, of the abuses that are inflicted on them due to this ignorance, yet there is a crowd who adamantly refuse to use their eyes; they wish merely to do the same things they were doing before, with no change in their own behaviors. They will continue to be abused.
I think the reality is they have no interest in the topic.
Wao, you apparently know what ‘substrate’ means. You must be a genius. Such a condescending prick.
A VPN has its place in the security stack that should be everyone’s goal. I would genuinely be impressed if you could tell me how a VPN or any other layer in that stack works.
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.
You’re right, but I doubt any of them are interested in contributing in any capacity. They just want to continue using Windows, Google and Netflix. Only now, in the year 2026, the absolute monstrosity that is the digital surveillance-apparatus, pokes its tentacles–every now and then–prominently into public-life and some get the willies. Never mind it’s been going on since the beginning of the computer-age. They don’t care. They never did. They enable it and they exacerbate it. They still don’t care.
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:
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.
you misspelled yggdrasil
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.
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…
“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.
Sounds like at “best” NazBol, at worst just Nazi.
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.
The main thing to know and understand about them is that they want to ethnically cleanse sweden of people they consider non-swedes.
Seem it’s people calling it full blown ‘Nazi’ (?) - even to people trying to figure this out - and that’s that.
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
Proton since it is cheaper than Mullvad I guess
Bruh Proton never gave money to fascist parties. In fact, if you look at their donations, they’re all left wing.
Proton voiced support for Trump
They may be talking about the CEO being on Trump’s dick, though that’s just a guess.
medium.com/…/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-d…
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.
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 is… okay if you’re doing piracy or trying to watch foreign media. It will keep the eyes of your isp off you but hasn’t been under the extensive scrutiny that mullvad has (which is why it can be used for such a broad set of goals imo).
When I used it I ended up having to switch servers frequently, that was about three years ago though.
Seems like they have far fewer servers than Mullvad does, but at least they state who they’re hosted with and it looks like they do have a multi-hop setup like Mullvad does. They undergo annual audits so I’m not seeing any major security red flags. I frankly would have stuck with Mullvad had they not pulled this shit, but I won’t be made a hypocrite over this.
If you get spooked, don’t worry about being made a hypocrite. Your security is worth more than your moral purity.
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.
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.
Wondering if it’s time that we as an anti-authoritarian left community, establish our own VPN…
So… A honeypot?
If it’s a honeypot for fascists but not one for antifascists, maybe. But I’d prefer no honeypot at all, rather one where governance is from the labourers, to the labourers.
A VPN operated exclusively for a single political group would flag everyone using it as that group.
True, I suppose a VPN operated by those supporting that group, then.
Not a honeypot, but a target. I see.
What do you suggest otherwise? I don’t want my money to go to fascists.
You don’t get that choice. Beans soak up the flavor of the broth, rocks get thrown out in the trash.
I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you literally have no control over what other people do and the whole point of a marketplace is to drill the social relationship down to cash.
A vpn service with a political angle like you suggested would immediately be targeted.
It’s why you can buy a che tee shirt but not actually ship oil to Cuba.
If you need the security of mullvad then i recommend you use it.
Now a communist vpn would be a great piece of political theater! Get one going then get black bagged over it, run a social media campaign to raise awareness, levitate the pentagon, it’d be fantastic!
Soo, TOR but without the multiple nodes and CIA?
RiseUp VPN already exists. I trust that they aren’t feds but I also assume the feds have snuck some sort of spyware on them asap.
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.
There’s the I2P network too. Not a VPN as such, but there are exit nodes and you can run one yourself if you want.
What do you consider to be “anti-authoritarian left?”
.
Nym existe i thing their founders are anarchist. But don’t know if they are trust worthy. The people involve seam decent nym.com/about
Well, fuck your cancel culture, commies!
Apparently they’ve now posted a response:
In context, this seems…tone-deaf. “It’s okay! Immigrants are welcome to work for Mullvad even if the founders “dislike” them.” Yikes.
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.
Unless you were smart enough to pay anonymously, in which case you’re welcome to doxx yourself, I guess.
the comments are a nazi cesspool. guess I wont be renewing
Yeah, I was pretty disgusted as well. If I was on the fence before, that definitely clinched it for me. I only wish I hadn’t renewed recently.
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.
Never had these issues with Njalla (run by Pirate Party affiliated people)
This is a recurring issue with Proton and Mullvad
I’ve been too lazy to renew my Mullvad subscription, and now I have another reason not to
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.
Co-founder. If you want to bring the facts, bring the correct facts!