Andy Yen’s values are incompatible with Proton’s mission. He advocates for poor security practices, supports fascists, and he verbally abuses his subordinates. As such, I can no longer in good conscience continue to financially support a company with such terrible leadership.
Unfortunately for me, my subscription just renewed last month on a multi year plan, but it does give me time to browse for and experiment with alternatives.
If you’re able, I encourage you to do the same and cite Andy Yen as the driving factor for your decision. We can’t let these tech bro fascists destroy what little semblance of privacy we have left.
I already did that lol
I switched from Proton to Tuta a while ago, then realized they both suck for the same reason—walled garden.
Airvpn is a reliable option for torrenting in my experience.
Mailbox.org is a great option for mail, based in Germany. They have some things included other than mail, including a drive.
Name me a VPN that is comparable to Proton and I’ll move to that and Tutamail in a heartbeat.
IVPN, Windscribe VPN, Obscura VPN, Air VPN
If you’re leaving proton because of their AI use, Windscribe is a bad alternative. You can’t even directly reach their customer support anymore, you have to go through their AI and it decides if it’s worth getting a human involved. Yes, even for paying customers.
If you raise the issue on their subreddit, the CEO encourages you to resign.
Good to know about Windscribe, one less company to research, solely for the poor support. I’m leaning more towards IVPN anyways because they have some add-on features that I’m interested in.
I’m not a purist, I don’t expect everything to be AI free, that’s just unrealistic unfortunately. It’s a shame though because it’s built off of the theft of open source work. My issue is Andy being a fascist, being verbally abusive to his employees, sacrificing security for speed, all for the sake of saving a few dollars.
They don’t have as many access points.
Thank you. Checking these out.
I become more and more weary about the absolutist moralizing. Yeah this CEO is nutty, but what I want from him is to protect the privacy of his customers. That is a precious good to us.
I especially mistrust the fuckai fanatics who want to burn down everything and everyone that has remotely to with AI no matter if it’s reasonable or unreasonable. Their tactics are despicable and their strategy leads to unproductive outcomes for all.
Soon there will be no big VPN and privacy companies left and it will be easy to mop up what is left without resistance.
He’s pushing slop code, ignoring complaints from Proton’s own security team.
Proton customer’s privacy is fucked. It may take some time, but they’re fucked.
I use them for email and I’m not moving anytime soon. Thankfully, 98% of my email, probably more like 99.9% if I’m being honest, is just worthless junk. I don’t care if they see it. I was self-hosting my email server for like eight years until Debian decided to just eviscerate itself one day on a system update for some reason. I gave up, moved to them, and I don’t have the time or the energy to move again.
I don’t use any of their other services. I have my own seafile for file storage. I have my own Wireguard on a VPS for VPN usage. Etc etc
I honestly thought the CEO is a fascist is old news? I’ve been wondering for awhile why Lemmy seems to have forgotten this, despite the fact that it was Lemmy that raised the issue about Andy.
On Lemmy first? Where would that be?
It was a long time ago when he posted supporting Trump on a social media post.
I just switched to Migadu. Super good plans and very good if you have multiple domains.
When I canceled Proton, I put the reason, “Your CEO is a lunatic.”
I had already made my mind when he called trump’s administration something like “the people’s party”. I’ve been a client since forever, renewing every 2 years during sales, but not this time.
And now reading more about what kind of person he is, ultra capitalist boss talking about “loser” mentality… What a cunt. Reminds me of musk
company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
Tuta is a good alternative
I keep seeing folks mention that at least it is a good and secure service why should I leave? this should be why: via: https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/
Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”
I think they’re thinking of how to be securer dumbass. Which is probably smart considering everyone and their uncle is using AI to find vulnerabilities everywhere they can these days.
lmao -1000 score
r🤢ddit link to a Yen comment
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1xilgwk/comment/19ru2qt4r4r5u/
What is the problem with that approach?
What? The approach to saying no context and then not giving any context?
I mean the approach he outlined in his post
Proton today does way more security reviewing than we have done at any time in the past. With the proliferation of AI tools, our code is also under more third party scrutiny than ever before. We see this across the industry, with critical software bugs (like the recent PHP bug) being found on an almost daily basis. However, several extra days of human review is not the correct way to confront this challenge. We still have human review, but now augmented by AI, has become exceptionally good at finding vulnerabilities in code. For some time now, Proton has also been using unaligned models with custom skills to do a thorough review of our code. This approach is better, and also faster.
I.e. AI augmented code review (if I understand that correctly).
If you read the manifesto they’re accelerating towards “zero human written code”. I.e. no augment; the LLM performs it’s own code review. Humans don’t even look at the code anymore. Programmers all get fired; only employees left are project managers
Yes, really
Oh dear!
I did my part. My sub renewed in Sept hoping this shit for brains issues a sincere apology but given the state of the world I am doubtful. But either way time to find something that doesn’t put all my peas in the same pot.
His values have been incompatible with Proton’s mission for some years now. Proton hasn’t deviated from their mission however so I’m fine using their products until they do.
I incidentally agree with the guy that handwritten code is practically obsolete in this age of llms. Typewriters and hard copy markups are also practically obsolete in the age of word processors yet some of the best and most prolific writers use them exclusively.
Give people options and let them choose what works for them. So many CEOs have a hard time with this concept.
You definitely don’t code if you think hand written code obsolete.
Yeah, LLMs can code something (in particular something that has existed), but ot does it in an extremely inefficient whackadoodle way. Hell it can’t even do a simple web page (not even a whole site) without going insane on the amount of div containers it makes. I remember once it made 5 div containers for what was easily possible to do by just changing width=400px instead of 700px instead.
And that’s just HTML and CSS! With a high end model!
And you think is a good idea to let it touch something that requires security and slimness???
Using it is like fixing a car engine by strappimg on another car engine to the hood of the car and connecting from there. Yeah the car runs now but…
Hi 👋 I am a professional programmer with 35 years of experience and I believe coding by hand has been obsolete for ~6mo, now, maaaaaybe up to a year. You want someone with experience driving the car, but I haven’t hand-written more than maybe 100 lines of code professionally in several months. If anything, I waited too long.
But at what cost?
Yeah, and I knew a carpenter with 40 years of experience too. He was a shit carpenter, but he always got work because he’d been a carpenter for so long.
I may only have 10 years of experience coding but I can still see how shitty the output is, and even listed an example. No one should be driving a car with the engine strapped to the hood, even if they’re good at driving.
If it’s some basic program like a simple video game mod that changes a value or two, sure, let the janky ass code do it.
Cryptographic high security stuff though? There’s no way in hell that thing isn’t going to introduce a security risk.
That said, it is at least useful for finding bugs and security flaws. But that’s because an LLM is a statistics machine, and it’s therefore better at reading data than it is at creating it.
I always like to say to people with a lot of experience that are still bad: you don’t have 40 years of experience, you have 40 times 1 year experience.
I may only have 10 years of experience coding but I can still see how shitty the output is, and even listed an example.
Then you should be putting more time into your tools. Nobody uses a blank of wood to hammer something, and then decides 'wow, hammers aren’t good tools," you’re just using a shit hammer.
And, to be clear, I work in a full-stack environment and regularly generate HTML and CSS without the issue you mentioned… you can’t just pull a frontier model without any skills/rules/mcps and expect it to just do the work. You need design docs and thorough rules for your environment. An LLM is a tool, not a developer.
Cryptographic high security stuff though? There’s no way in hell that thing isn’t going to introduce a security risk.
That’s totally fair. They can only get ~75% of the way there on crypto stuff rn. Amazing at the other side, though (pen testing)
The example I cited was a frontier model set up with specific rules etc.
That’s exactly why I realized how shit LLMs are. This was Cursor set up with its VS Code fork and designed specifically for HTML and CSS. It still goes crazy on the amount of div classes it makes compared to what a human would do. The website it coded is inefficient compared to what a human would do.
An LLM is a tool but it’s no hammer - its a lump of iron pretending to be a hammer. And you’ll get just as messy results.
I did this the first time he praised Trump’s cabinet picks.
That’s when I bounced as well. Luckily that came out while I was still testing it out and before I spent any money.
What Email provider do you use now if I may ask? Do you use password managers and/or VPNs? If so where did you switch to? Because when I look at alternatives it’s damn bleak out there.
I use Fastmail now. I know it doesn’t have the encryption that Protonmail has (what does, aside from Tuta anyway?), but the alias feature is great and integrates directly with 1Password (my PW manager). I chose 1P due to a blog post by Troy whatshisname a few years back and have been happy with it since. I have 15 days left on my Mullvad VPN sub, and I honestly don’t know what I’ll switch to once that’s over (since apparently that CEO is a fascist too).
It certainly is bleak out there. I self-host quite a few services, and I used to roll my own VPN, so I might just do that again.
Heyyy, sorry to bring more bad news. But 1Password is also a fascist company. They donated money to DHH through Omarchy, and the CEO is already known for not being cool.
It’s a shame, because I liked the keyboard navigation on their password manager.
Fuuuuck. This is exhausting. I was already salty about having to move my VPN but changing password managers means migrating my family too. So annoying. Any recs for ethical and good VPN and PW management?
Sadly I’m still looking for alternatives on the VPN front.
As a password manager I use KeePassXC and keep the password file synced between computers using rsync. But the KeePassXC dev is also vibe coding parts of it now, and I’ve heard the same about the rsync dev. I’d still rather stay on vibe coded software instead of vibe coded and fascist supporting software, but I’m looking for alternatives.
My recommendation is that you stop doing that.
The tools you’re using to stay private and secure online need to be chosen for functionality first and foremost. Do not be driven away from effective tools by controversy.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
JFC. That one will take longer to switch away from.
Get something offline-by-default like KeePass, and then if you want to you can backup/sync the database file with whatever cloud storage provider of your choosing
I had just swapped over to proton at the time so I didn’t want to go through that again but if both ethics and security aren’t priorities then I’m out I’ll probably just self host half the replacement services on my VPS anyway.
I had missed that and that’s a failure on my part.
I also cited him back then. Interesting to pay attention to reddit comments but not to your own cancelling subscribers.
Yeah I told them exactly why I was leaving in my cancelation, and I never heard anything back from anyone there.
I canceled my renewal at that time but had just reupped for two years. I was hoping the foundation board would do its job and reprimand him if not oust. Their inaction and silence has been the most disappointing part of this and the real reason I’m following through on ending my 10+ year account with them.
Exact same. Mine had also just renewed for two years. I cancelled the renewal but hoped sometime in the last two years things would have improved. I’ll be losing that in January along with the more than half a tb of drive space I had racked up for being a long time customer.
They’ve got 28 days to oust Yen and make a really good PR statement or I’m gone for good. This damage control by Yen isn’t cutting it.
A lot of the past criticisms of proton I believe are very overstated but it’s clear that things are not healthy inside proton.
Edit. Considering how big of a target proton is, if this is how unhealthy the culture is, I’m surprised they haven’t had any big incidents already.
