cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/30934764

The “privacy-first” company surprised its user base when CEO Andy Yen lauded Trump on social media.

  • @[email protected]
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    1133 months ago

    “We’re not liberal or conservative, we’re a secret third thing!(conservative)”

    • They’re swiss.

      We have more parties in our equivalent of the presidential office than you have parties in total.

      I have huge problems with this notion that you have to be either democrat or conservative. They don’t even cover 50% of the opinions I, a green-liberal (actual liberal, not US-definition), hold.

      You’re absolutely able and allowed to have your own opinion different from what any party official says.

      • JustEnoughDucks
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        3 months ago

        Yes but swiss people can still be absolutely piece of shit human beings. They proved that in WWII by helping fund the Nazis directly. Swiss people also aren’t immune from rampant US party propaganda. You aren’t magical, psychologically different humans than the rest of the world.

        Publicly supporting an openly fascist dictator, whatever “political party” they are on, someone who directly opposes the stated mission and values of the company, means that they are piece of shit humans who cannot be trusted with our data because they will just lie with what they do with it just like how they lied to us about their company values.

      • @[email protected]
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        153 months ago

        When commenting on US politics, they should be aware of US political realities though. When taking position relative to US politics, they should be aware of that. At the very least, they should comment that they’re progressive or something along the lines of “Our political orientation isn’t represented in US politics” to acknowledge that, like you did.

        But when your CEO endorses Republicans, pretending you’re neutral isn’t a good look.

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        Saying someone is swiss isnt the defense you want it to be considering that the swiss helped harbor nazi wealth.

      • @[email protected]
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        13 months ago

        I have a huge problem with parties period. Parties inhibit critical thinking. And I’m an American. And I don’t want this. Eat the rich!

  • Aatube
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    713 months ago

    “Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.”

    I don’t believe that they haven’t heard of Lina Khan.

    • @[email protected]
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      333 months ago

      Yes, big fan of Lina Khan, I worked with her in 2020 on the House report on antitrust (the House was controlled by Democrats back then). I’ve discussed this elsewhere, but certain events in 2022 made it very clear that further progress on antitrust was unlikely under Democratic leadership. You can read more about the backstory here: https://time.com/6243256/schumer-kills-antitrust-big-tech-bills/

      his reddit account is pretry active if you want to read bad takes

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      They did, they even worked together in the past.

      See https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/m7psmzx/

      Quote for those who don’t want to reddit.

      Yes, big fan of Lina Khan, I worked with her in 2020 on the House report on antitrust (the House was controlled by Democrats back then). I’ve discussed this elsewhere, but certain events in 2022 made it very clear that further progress on antitrust was unlikely under Democratic leadership. You can read more about the backstory here: https://time.com/6243256/schumer-kills-antitrust-big-tech-bills/

      Edit: I see someone else already posted it. I will leave it here even if it’s a duplicate for future self-shame.

    • bruhduh
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      -263 months ago

      Problem is, she was lobbying Sony so hard that her corruption was clearly seen by everyone, she fought tooth and nail so Microsoft wouldn’t buy call of duty, and was saying that microsoft gaming department will become a monopoly, and… You see a monopoly out there? Microsoft gaming department is a giant flop even with call of duty, of what monopoly she was telling then?

      • Aatube
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        173 months ago

        Microsoft gaming department is a giant flop even with call of duty, of what monopoly she was telling then?

        Cloud gaming? Duopoly and oligopoly (see healthcare) being also anticompetitive? Look, of course Sony also opposed to merger because it was a competitor. Every antitrust lawsuit is bound to attract some of them. I dunno what you’re going off on here.

        • bruhduh
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          -153 months ago

          Geforce now exist tho, and my point is, Microsoft is a huge slop, they were half dead even then, lisa khan and sony destroyed competition in name of antimonopoly when sony was already dominating even before that and now we have 800$ ps5 pro and everything, my beef is, if she was a antimonopoly representative, then she should prevent monopoly from happening, and sony IS a monopoly in AAA console space thanks to her, i mean, even duopoly is better than complete dominance of one of the players on market, look up amd nvidia duopoly and how it became when nvidia became monopoly, 5090 for 3000$ oh holy fuck, give us at least SOME competition, I don’t even dare to ask about PROPER competition because market came to monopolies already

          • Aatube
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            93 months ago

            Sorry, I meant online services integrating with gaming in general.

            destroyed competition in name of antimonopoly when sony was already dominating even before that

            hell naw. look at xbox live. i think you have a very skewed view of MS’s market position. think about the logistics required to pull MS Flight Simulator (2020) off.

            800$ ps5

            it’s $700, and relatively nobody is buying that thing. plus how is buying activision blizzard gonna help console competition?

            sony IS a monopoly in AAA console space

            compare the sales or just ask the gaming sub

            give us at least SOME competition, I don’t even dare to ask about PROPER competition because market came to monopolies already

            does radeon not exist? you don’t happen to train AI models do you?

            • bruhduh
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              -53 months ago

              I agree with most of your points except, i didn’t even heard of training ai without cuda, i know it’s possible, but it’s far from popular as i see, second, Microsoft is a dead horse and it’s understandable, but it could do some competition, not proper one but some, most of the community including ftc wished Microsoft gaming department too step down, and i would be all in if alternative in AAA gaming was opensource as Linux, but alternative is corporate monopoly, same with AMD GPUs this time, they flopped hard due to 5070, and my main point still stands, i don’t want a complete monopoly even if competition is on life support it should still exist

  • CurlyWurlies4All
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    453 months ago

    This is what a kleptocratic oligarchy looks like folks. Suck up to the big man and he’ll let you fleece the joint.

  • @[email protected]
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    3 months ago

    I’ve been looking in to degoogling and was considering Protonmail before this. Does anybody know of a good alternative? Espeically one that lets you have multiple email addresses?

    • @[email protected]
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      213 months ago

      I bit the bullet this month & bought a domain so I can assign mail handling and change providers without changing my email address. Currently using https://purelymail.com/ because they’re $10/year for as many addresses & domains as you want “within reason.” It’s apparently just one guy with some AWS instances, but it was very straightforward to set up.

      • @[email protected]
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        63 months ago

        I was dumb enough to walk away from that approach about 10 years ago. Ugh. But you’ve convinced me. The annual cost of a domain is lunch money for a week. The freedom it provides in this scenario is well worth it.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months ago

          There’s a lot of domains you can get for the price of a single coffee, if you don’t insist on it being cute, readable, or one of the legacy TLDs. Between purelymail and a .top domain, it’s $15/year.

      • @[email protected]
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        43 months ago

        +1 for purelymail.

        I’ve had my personal domain on gmail and most recently proton. Proton got too pricy when I wanted to add another couple of domains. After some research I landed on purelymail, and it’s been smooth sailing to set up and use.

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        The same applies to what I commented about Mxroute - Purelymail doesn’t cater to users who require end-to-end encryption, advanced privacy features, or those who need built-in security measures beyond standard email protocols, as it’s primarily focused on reliable email delivery and hosting rather than security-first communication.

        Tuta would be a viable alternative to Proton.

        • @[email protected]
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          13 months ago

          Yeah, I considered E2EE. Even set up PGP keys in Thunderbird and installed https///mailvelope.com . For E2EE to really be viable, your correspondents have to comply, and none of the people I email with have any interest. I even email with someone on proton, and they always reply to me in the clear.

      • @[email protected]
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        03 months ago

        What do you mean by “I bought a domain”? Is the domain has been rented or there is someone who sells domain for life and heritage?

    • @[email protected]
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      173 months ago

      If you only care about email (and calendar, I guess) Tuta is a pretty good choice. I’ve been using it for years and had only one problem very early on. Additional aliases are only available with the paid plan (€3 a month) however, same as Proton I believe.

      • @[email protected]
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        63 months ago

        Yup.

        Tuta works well for me for the past year or so, so I recently switched to their annual plan. I used Proton for a couple years (paid plan) and preferred it, but they raised the price so I bailed. The €3 plan from Tuta is more than enough for me.

        • @[email protected]
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          53 months ago

          I’m still on a legacy plan (which still feels like a really good deal despite some small concessions compared to the new plans) but yeah, even with the new prices it’s definitely worth it.

          Also, while not strictly email focused but they have a blog with articles about various privacy related topics and news - it’s a pretty neat source of info, especially for those less knowledgeable about this stuff.

    • @[email protected]
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      103 months ago

      I have tuta, bitwarden, firefox relay, and libreoffice, seems to work decently. I am also considering getting a mullvald vpn, but not sure how well it works with torrenting, since they no longer support port-forward.

      • @[email protected]
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        63 months ago

        Using Mullvad, I stay connected to it 24/7. I’ve no problems with torrenting. It costs 5€/month. Maybe try it out to see if it’ll suit you as well.

          • @[email protected]
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            13 months ago

            I have my qbittorrent container set up the same way, no issues. Only minor inconvenience I have now is having to manually renew my subscription every month because they stopped storing payment information (good!).

    • Cris
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      93 months ago

      I have pretty good experience with Tutanota an bitwarden as the most direct alternatives

      Tutanota apps lack a bit of polish but the UI looks reasonably nice and gets the job done. Bitwarden has treated me pretty well.

    • @[email protected]
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      83 months ago

      It’s not the most practical thing in the universe, but I have a small VPS that I host my email on for myself and a couple others (5 addresses in total). It’s a bit of a pain to set up, but once it’s working, it is really nice to have that kind of control.

      • Revv
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        33 months ago

        There are dozens of us!

        I think email gets a bad rap for difficulty of hosting. So long as you get your DMARC, DKIM, RDNS, SPF, etc right, it’s reasonably forgiving. Need to take server down for maintenance? No worries- any mail that couldn’t be delivered will be resent in a few minutes/hours/days.

        Harder than hosting a simple website? Yes. Rocket surgery? No.

      • @[email protected]
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        33 months ago

        Been using it a few years and I’m happy. Best upgrade coming from google is that the calendar actually works with thunderbird.

    • @[email protected]
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      33 months ago

      After digging around, I’m going to try Tuta for email/calendar and Mullvad for VPN. Tuta’s €3 plan lets you have 15 additional addresses and 3 custom domains.

      Anyone using a good proton drive alternative?

    • Josie
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      3 months ago

      im using a nextcloud host called murena. you could probably use an equally good one or self host, but i found the free next cloud host sign up tool too buggy to use.

      main draw of next cloud for me is you can use features like third party clients and calendar sharing without having to manually prepare for account downgrade if you want a lower tier, and in fact the only difference between tiers is storage

      note that im not clear how good their encryption is, it seems not to be fully end to end encrypted

    • themadcodger
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      93 months ago

      Yeah, my two year contact just renewed with them before this happened. fml

      • sunzu2
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        33 months ago

        Plan Your escape… It takes a hit minute to switch emails anyway

        • themadcodger
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          43 months ago

          Yeah, I’m just salty about the timing. I’ve already started the process, but if I had a crystal ball I would have downgraded to a year max, or maybe monthly.

          Edit

      • Dekkia
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        3 months ago

        You can get a refund within 30 of an auto-renewal. That’s what I did too.

      • @[email protected]
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        23 months ago

        You can still cancel your subscription so that it won’t auto-renew in 2 years and it let’s you leave a comment when doing so if you want to voice any concerns.

    • @[email protected]
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      133 months ago

      MXroute doesn’t cater to users who require end-to-end encryption, advanced privacy features, or those who need built-in security measures beyond standard email protocols, as it’s primarily focused on reliable email delivery and hosting rather than security-first communication.

      Tuta would be a viable alternative to Proton.

      • @[email protected]
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        33 months ago

        No they don’t, but I never switched to proton for that. I switched to proton to get away from iCloud. I also never loved the idea of them keeping my gpg key in the cloud, I can just as easily do e2e with mxroute in a more secure way

      • @[email protected]
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        03 months ago

        security measures beyond standard email protocols

        Doesn’t exist. The only security you can have is if you use OpenPGP. Everything else is marketing and lies.

        • @[email protected]
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          13 months ago

          Came here to follow up with this.

          I don’t care what magic beans my email provider wants to sell, at the end of the day they’re only able to do encryption within their own server which is pointless.

          Anyone who thinks email is not immediately plain-text when they hit the send button (because, frankly, it is) is suffering from some weird marketing-induced delusion, or just plain doesn’t understand that proton encrypting something, or SSL in transit is not going to do a single damn thing to improve security.

          Sure my copy of an email is all nice and secure, but the other copy of it almost certainly not, unless you use something like GPG to force the contents to be transmitted encrypted, and fucking nobody uses GPG outside of very limited situations.

        • @[email protected]
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          13 months ago

          Agreed. I also notice proton stores your gpg keys in the cloud, unlocked by your account password.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 months ago

      +1 to mxroute for anyone thinking about it.

      Been using it for a while (and worked with the guy who runs it) and it’s been pretty much perfect.

  • katy ✨
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    13 months ago

    The fact that a privacy company based in a non five eyes country is even praising a government - especially one like the US - is a red flag.

    Nevermind the fact that they claim Republicans are anti big tech while being surrounded by tech CEOs…

  • sunzu2
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    -63 months ago

    Check my comment history…

    I said this before:

    fucking stop putting all your eggs in one basket, folks

    Mix and match ftw…

    This is not a deal breaker for me but if they keep this up, I will stop using them. And it just one service, so I can easily do it, assholes.

      • @[email protected]
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        163 months ago

        I mean company backs pro-company party isn’t exactly surprising. You want to not shop at every company that supports Republicans? You’re going to have a hard time finding anywhere to shop in most of the US. Gotta stick to smaller companies, and if you get small enough you’ll get to mom and pop locations where personal votes are the comparison and they’ve voted Republican their entire lives.

        • @[email protected]
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          3 months ago

          there’s an entire continuum of political support, and you can choose to draw a line anywhere on it. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to draw that line at outright public endorsement, particularly now with Trump in office.

        • sunzu2
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          -53 months ago

          People are reactionaries by nature, they don’t think shit through until they get fucked enough to learn or they die, which ever comes first.

      • @[email protected]
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        53 months ago

        the CEO of a company I use for emails expressed a questionable opinion on antitrust issue

        it’s not deal breaker for me

        absolutely disgusting

        If this is absolutely disgusting for you, I guess you have really, really, really high standards, that probably nobody can meet.

      • sunzu2
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        -33 months ago

        Can’t fight them all…

        But I don’t disagree, good sir

  • ZeroOne
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    3 months ago

    So… we are going to police people’s thoughts/actions/speeches now ?

    Be a bit practical here people, Imagine the right-wingers saying “Oh no, he donated to left wingers, reeeeeeeee

    • @[email protected]
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      103 months ago

      Official company announcement, not only personal one.

      Proton has position itself as a service for those who want to avoid big tech spying on them and unfair government prosecution. It is then very charring that they officially support a party that is trying to go out of their way to reduce women/lgbtq rights and invited the whole cabal of big tech as guests of honor to the innaguration.

      If their mission and their messages do not align, it’s normal that customers are concerned.

      I would be concerned of they officially supported any other party, but this case is specially outrageous.

      Be a bit practical here people, Imagine the right-wingers saying “Oh no, he donated to left wingers, reeeeeeeee”

      This might be sarcasm right? They went full reeee with Nike, Gillette, Budweiser, Costco…

      • ZeroOne
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        03 months ago

        They did now, didn’t they, I’m simply gonna wait until Trump in his magnificent stupidity tries sanctioning Proton

        Let’s see Andy come out of that

    • Engywook
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      -13 months ago

      Nah… Much better to take the pitchforks out for every little shit one reads in the internet and pretend to be a good guy to accumulate fake internet points.

        • Engywook
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          3 months ago

          Really, the stupidity of some netizens on these daily “scandals” is astounding. It’s like they’re always looking for something/someone to be upset about. People, nobody cares which service/browser/whatever you use, so no need to announce everywhere that you’re leaving. Just leave.

          For instance: https://lemm.ee/post/53975606

          LOL, jusk ask for alternative, man. No need to put a story behind that.