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What a fucking jerk
I guess the implementation of Lumo, their AI assistent, should have been recognised as a warning light.
I dont think the AI is the issue most people have. The toxic attitude and “release fast” way to implement AI from C-Level is the issue. At least thats what I have a problem with. AI is used in every tech company and it will be used more in every tech company, there is no getting around it. It just depends on how it gets implemented and that internal leaked info is not how it should it be done.
And to think I was informed I was “over reacting” when, as a happy paying Proton user, bailed within a week upon Andy Yens GOP/trump comments some time back…
When they show you who they are, believe them… The age old adage that never fails. Ever.
What do you use now?
Posteo primary, and Tuta secondary
Have you done any research on the companies themselves? Good, bad, ideological stances?
Yes. Both are fantastic from an ethics & values perspective imo. Look at tuta on their reddit or blog over time and you can get a good view of the real human team and what they stand for. I would put them on top for their tireless work on behalf of fighting for privacy causes. They work hard at it.
Posteo is harder to find any poltical stances (which is fine by me) but their sustainable values are top notch, check their site and search some details.
Whether either these fit your needs ymmv but like them both
Proton is being run by a idiot. You should never in your life say this kind of shit when your brand is supposed to be privacy and security focused. Yes every single fucking line of code should be meticulously tested and reviewed and written. Faster deployment will not mean higher profit when youre supposed to be selling stability and security. What the fuck.
Guess I have to swap to tuta or something cause fuck this noise.
I’m gonna take a slightly controversial stance and say that the LLM use isn’t even the main issue here, it’s the culture. If your teams don’t feel safe to discuss bugs, flaws, or problems with how work is getting done, you will inevitably ship worse code no matter if it’s human written or not. I haven’t generally cared much that they’re using LLMs for dev work, but this scares me for their product. There’s a reason IR and post mortems need to be truly blameless.
True. If people dont feel free to say shit when things go wrong then you won’t see issues till its too bad to be swept under the rug. Like a massive leak or critical failure. Its just not a good look for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster
NASA managers also disregarded engineers’ warnings about the dangers of launching in low temperatures, and they did not report these warnings to their superiors.
This is… Not exactly correct.
Morton Thiokol engineers told NASA. NASA managers challenged the data, and Morton Thiokol executives told the VP of engineering to override the engineers.
I don’t think that kind of information was supposed to be public. Working for companies, I always sign a contract with an agreement that I won’t spoil the company’s reputation online. We have mandatory training on this and how not to publish stuff online about the company.
But, I’m glad they did though. I hope they tell Andy to piss off and replace him quick.
But does that make things any better? Would you rather read an empty hull of a statement that is marketing slop or even nothing at all? Ignorance is bliss, I suppose…
No of course not. I’m just pointing out, this is the reality in the corporate world.
I myself am tired of how corporations operate. I’m tired of the lack of ethics. I’m tired of the dishonesty.
But under late stage capitalism, psychopathic and sociopathic behaviors are rewarded. And that is how we end up with these people running the show and making these rules and acting like this.
Now this is clearly not an easily dismissed dumb comment.
The Proton board needs to step in here and do something about Andy.
What I liked most about Proton is that while they move more slowly launching features than most people may like, when they do put out new stuff it’s always solid and clearly well made. If he wants to lean even a little in the “move fast and break things” direction, he needs to be replaced.
Oh man, I’ve tried not to judge this guy based on those badly worded tweets, but this behaviour to his own staff is fucking damning. I hope the company can cut him off like a diseased limb before their rep is completely destroyed.
FFS Proton, you were supposed to be the chosen one!
Damn… My subscription is up for renewal and I wasn’t going to hesitate to renew, but now? I’m going to spend the next few weeks checking out my options.
Tuta for email. Filen for drive. Aegis for 2FA. No idea what to use for VPN, I am not giving nazi Mullvad one cent. Aliasvault or Bramble for password managing seem like great options, since I’m also disappointed on Bitwarden. Sometimes I feel tempted to just self-host everything and be done with the whole service-hunting tbh
If you threat model doesn’t actually require having your emails encrypted (since that only exists until you send it) I switched from Proton to Fastmail and I have really enjoyed the service. It’s been night and day getting it to work with third party options.
Mailbox.org and tuta are being floated for email, ivpn or windscribe for VPN, bitwarden or keepass for passwords.
Beat of luck!
I dropped bitwarden and moved everything to Proton, wouldn’t recommend going back. They have been in a bad trajectory as well.
If I drop proton it will be to self host it all but the VPN, 2FA and a small off site cloud storage. Everything else is just a matter of convenience.
However, I’m giving them a year to figure it out. Thanks for the article, I will be watching him more closely now.
Those tweets were a pretty big red flag to me, especially his fawning over JD Vance/etc.
With this leak, it seems pretty clear that hes fully silicon valley brain rotted. I found this excerpt from a different article also very telling, especially how he wants Proton to be a Chinese style “996” company:
Here’s an example of the absolute pearls of wisdom Andy is dropping over on Reddit
Holy shit Andy shut up already
Need the Biden “would you shut up man” meme
All of that is reasonable, until the faster part.
AI tools have been surprisingly good at finding code vulnerabilities. But that should only be an add-on to all the human review. It shouldn’t save any time. If anything it should make things take longer, with the AI finding things people didn’t, so there’s more patching that needs to be done.
Sometimes it’s patches, but sometimes with enough bugs you’re looking at a redesign (which takes even longer than patching)
I generally agree with you here, particularly regarding the benefits of finding stuff that a manual review may miss.
The approach I take issue with is the haphazard rush to add AI as part of the development process, almost purely for the sake of it, not on a case by case basis where it is needed (and can be fully tested)
Subscription is up for renewal in March. I use most of Proton’s services every single day. VPN, authenticator, mail, docs, drive, all of it.
If Andy is still CEO come February, I’m not resubbing. Simple as that.
Beyond the AI shit, I don’t want a cent of my money going into the pocket of that asshole. Who the fuck talks to the people who generate all of their value like that. Fuck Andy and the high horse he’s on.
Mines in January. Already considering alternatives
Weird how the IRL mail system is guaranteed by the government, and has a bunch of rules around it, but digital mail is just corporate cowboys doing whatever they want.
Great, so what I’m I switching to? Tuta? Running out of options tbh
Proton is still the best product. No reason to move today
Article was full of reasons to move.
It’s just one person.
The boards response may be a reason to move, or stay.It is in fact not just one person. If you’d read the article, you might know that. But, you are right about the board. They may shake up the leadership, which I sincerely hope they do.
I got as far as the pay wall let me (surprisingly far).
It was just everyone complaining about Andy. Who else were they complaining about?The manifesto, which is the first word in the article title, was written and sent out by the CTO, Butler. So he is clearly a big part of the leadership problem as well. And if the board continues to abide this, then they are also part of the problem, arguably already are.
Well I can’t cos I’m on subscription. Sick of hearing about this absolute melt tho.
mailbox is a nice option, too.
If you don’t require your email to be encrypted (since that ends once you send something) I switched to Fastmail last year for email, calendar, and contacts and it’s been night and day with how well it works with third party options.
I’ve been pretty content with Fastmail. I use DAV5x to sync calendar, contacts, and tasks to the system data store and is available just if it was coming from the Google services. I can even setup the DAV5x source as an account in the Google Contacts and Calendar apps. I wish Fastmail would have separate apps instead of the single integrated one, though. And the calendar could stand to gain Maps integration. And I’ve replaced Google Tasks with Tasks.org.
Same with using Dav5x and tasks.org through Fastmail. And configuring the MX records was dead simple. In general it’s been really convenient
Why can’t anything be good?
Dogs are good
Capitalism is a big reason right now, but it hasn’t been around forever. I think the only common denominator throughout the history of things not being good is just… People
Believe me, without the mentality of maximizing revenue and minimizing costs, 99% of these asshole CEOs wouldn’t exist
Respectfully I disagree. I’m not defending capitalism here, I’m just observing history. There’s always been assholes at the top, be they CEOs, or kings, or emperors, or whatever have you.
Yes that’s obvious. But I am referring to this type of asshole CEO, which is very much aligned with the capitalist mentality of these times.
Rather CapitAIlism
Here’s a uservoice thing to vote on against this: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/945460-general-ideas/suggestions/51867423-andy-yen-steps-aside
Thanks for this!
Is encouraging to see all those comments. I took my payment details off my account so it cannot auto renew. If Andy isn’t gone by renewal, someone else will be getting my money instead.
I’d happily switch to another password manager if it was also swiss.
Sadly, Infomaniak, which I use for storage doesn’t have a password manager.
I found this but I don’t know what to think about it: Pass-Securium
I’m trying to use more and more european sofware also, so I’m not going back to Dashlane.
Just use KeePass. It’s entirely local, open source, and exceptionally good.
I might try it if it’s easy to set up with kDrive, my phone and my wife.
What application would you use for Keepass on an iPhone (not my choice)?
And on Linux?
Ahh. Apple makes things tricky. For iPhone (my work phone), I use Keepassium and Synctrain (Syncthing). For Linux, I use KeePass XC and regular Syncthing.
Thanks a lot for your answers!
I have 2 months to try them before my ProtonPass subscription expires, so I think I’ll have a good idea of their efficiency by then👍
it says self hosting but you can also use their cloud for free.
Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.
Not a great quote from Andy…
“This will be the last year that we hire engineers, and starting next year we hire what we used to call product managers, to build things with AI.”
Vibe coding by non-developers without security and code reviews is straight up crazy talk, especially for a company touting security and privacy.
