What VPN have you switched to after the Mullvad situation. I have looked at nym and ivpn. But don’t know if they are any good.
What VPN have you switched to after the Mullvad situation. I have looked at nym and ivpn. But don’t know if they are any good.
dear lord…
I give up. I wish you good luck in your quest.
I know you gave up. You said you don’t care where a product/service comes from or who makes it, even if they support genocide and ethnic cleansing.
And then a couple sentences, even with bolded main points, having you read 20-30 words is too scary.
Yes, I know you’ve given up and are slinking away like a coward when confronted with evidence.
I wish you luck on realizing why people would shun you for “moderate” opinions of supporting genocidaires.
Hey, what you are doing is harmful.
A person who needs privacy and anonymity shouldn’t have to justify using the vpn service that has most definitely passed the highest bar when it comes to resisting governments.
The mere presence of a service that advertises feature parity is no comparison to one that has passed the real world test of those offerings.
It’s like believing someone’s claim of steel grade and processing without test marks on the surface. Sure it’ll probably be fine for a big tractor shed, but when you’re relying on the material to hold up an apartment building it’s not worth it to take those claims on faith.
If you were living in a war zone and needed a gun to protect yourself or your family, would you turn down an ar-15 simply because of the rifles history? Of course not.
Mullvad has genuinely resisted government data requests in ways that matter and that’s not nothing. But the premise that it’s uniquely proven in a way alternatives aren’t just isn’t true and is doing a lot of heavy lifting. IVPN and Proton have both faced and resisted comparable legal pressure. The gap between Mullvad’s tested track record and alternatives isn’t as wide as your steel grade analogy implies, and that analogy only holds if you’re treating the alternatives as unverified claims with no real world data behind them.
But if we’re discussing harm, the deeper problem is the framing that ethics are a luxury position for people who aren’t in genuine danger. By that logic you can never apply moral considerations to any purchase of critical infrastructure when the stakes are high enough, which produces conclusions that don’t hold up under pressure. The gun in a war zone analogy assumes the gun manufacturer’s politics don’t affect the people in the war zone. But the people most likely to need a VPN to survive, dissidents, journalists, immigrants, minorities in authoritarian or ethnonationalist environments, are often the exact same people being targeted by the policies the Mullvad founder is bankrolling. A Somali refugee using Mullvad to stay safe is funding, through that subscription, a party that wants to forcibly deport them back to Somalia regardless of whether they were born in Sweden.
So no, I don’t think pointing this out is harmful. I think pretending it’s irrelevant because the product works well is the more harmful position, especially for the people most likely to be using it for the reasons you’re describing.
I am not aware of any other vpn service that has been raided with a warrant for any information present and had the police come away completely empty handed.
That raid I’m thinking of served two functions: one was to get any information available, the other was to investigate mullvads infrastructure in order to evaluate if it was possible to get a warrant to install logging capacity.
While the inability to install wiretaps (logging capacity) has not been explicitly confirmed by law enforcement like the inability to get any data was, we can assume it was impossible because rather than pursue that direction, Interpol advised cdns and hosting providers to block mullvads endpoints instead.
The reason we are able to assume a warrant for wiretapping was impossible is that the action taken, making mullvad unusable to the point that the company dropped port forwarding, has the effect of flushing the target out from the service which is not what you’d want if you were able to install a wiretap.
It’s evidence of a type of trustworthiness borne out by the effects of actions surrounding the service, not just tests, audits or press releases. That is something unique and if it’s not I’d really like to know.
That’s not just rhetoric, I’m truly interested in other VPNs whose impact with law enforcement left only cloud chamber evidence of their trustworthiness.
Your idea that people should apply the strictest ethical scrutiny to their own purchases in the marketplace really seems like it’s based entirely on the liberal assumptions that the marketplace is frictionless and has many goods of equal quality on offer.
It’s also, on another level, patently ridiculous that a person who is choosing a battle tested privacy and anonymity focused vpn should choose something they’re less sure about because they need to somehow avoid any microfraction of blame flowing to them through the market from the specific currency units they used in the transaction.
It’s cool, I know the immigration police are kicking down our door, but at least I didn’t use the gross vpn associated with a person who donated to a fascist party.
At some point you gotta recognize that not only does your reasoning not hold up to theoretical interrogation (how could blame for the effects of transactions flow down to the purchaser if everything solid melts into air, huh? Explain that lieberuls!) but is absurd in the very real life situations you bring up.
It’s like some bizarre inversion of the old “they say the next drone bombs will be dropped by a black trans woman” joke.
Mullvad being raided and authorities coming away with nothing is a great proof of concept. But you also act like there’s absolutely no other option, and you make tge incredibly ironic claim that if you use another product, immigration gestapo will be at your door to deport you…the same thing that the Mullvad founder supports. Make it make sense.
The question of whether Mullvad has the best proven privacy infrastructure and the question of whether ethical considerations are category errors in urgent situations are two different claims. You’ve made a strong case for the first one. The second doesn’t follow.
Nobody argued that a dissident with a warrant being served on their door should stop and evaluate the founder’s politics before connecting. The door kicking scenario is a real extreme edge case and in that case use whatever works, obviously. But that’s not why most subscribers are paying for Mullvad and the existence of genuine emergencies doesn’t resolve the question for everyone else making a less urgent choice.
The microfraction of blame framing also misrepresents what I actually said. I didn’t argue Mullvad users bear personal moral responsibility for ethnic cleansing. I said I personally won’t fund it when alternatives exist, and I laid out who specifically gets hurt by the policy being bankrolled. That’s a statement about my own choices given my own assessment of the technical gap versus the moral one. If you assess that gap differently because the raid evidence is uniquely compelling to you, that’s a legitimate position. It’s just not an argument that the ethical consideration itself is absurd.
You just said I made a strong case that mullvad has the best infrastructure then at the end said you wouldn’t fund it when alternatives exist. My whole point is that alternatives don’t exist.
A person who’s using proton is getting something fundamentally different (and in a lot of ways more featureful!) than mullvad.
I really cant even begin to address the moral/ethical angle you’re working from other than to simply call it absurd.
Oi! You got a loicense for that spending money in the marketplace without bearing the burden of others decisions?
Imagine for a second that you don’t like Donald trump. You have two neighbors, one of them is very wealthy and loves trump. Your wealthy neighbor runs the local supermarket and made a huge donation to the local campaign for trump. Your other neighbor is very poor and apolitical, well, you never heard them talk about politics. They don’t have a car and shop at the local supermarket. Trump wins your district and is elected and you find out your poor neighbor didn’t vote.
Who bears responsibility for the election of trump? Would it have been different if your poor neighbor voted?
Your analogy actually proves my point. The wealthy neighbor who runs the supermarket and donated to Trump is Berntsson. The supermarket is Mullvad. The poor neighbor without a car who has no choice but to shop there is the dissident in the war zone you described earlier. I’m the person with a car who can drive somewhere else and is choosing to do so because of where the profits go.
Nobody in that analogy is blaming the poor neighbor for Trump winning. You’re describing exactly the distinction I’ve been making the whole time. The ethical consideration only applies to people who have genuine alternatives available to them. For people who don’t, use what works.
Your technical case for Mullvad’s uniqueness is the strongest argument you’ve made and I’m not going to pretend the raid evidence isn’t meaningful. However, it is only a matter of time given our increasingly surveilled, authoritarian world. If you’re genuinely in a situation where that specific level of proven infrastructure is the difference between safety and exposure, the calculus is different and I’ve said as much.
But most Mullvad subscribers aren’t in that situation. Most are people making a privacy choice with real but not life-critical stakes. For those people the gap between Mullvad’s proven infrastructure and a service like IVPN or Proton is meaningful but not absolute, and the moral consideration can be part of the calculation. You’re arguing that the technical gap is so large it should override everything else for everyone. I’m arguing it’s relevant for some people and not determinative for others. That’s not the same as saying the ethical concern is absurd. What I find absurd is stating that the only option should be the one that funds the selfsame political parties advocating for the REASON the people you describe would need a VPN.
Hey, i make mistakes sometimes. Because of that i went back and re-read your comments to others and me and my replies. It’s not impossible that im wrong here, you know?
Except im not wrong even in the slightest.
You came in with a comparison to a fascist burger shop, which is facile in ways i find hard to articulate but here goes:
A person doesn’t need to eat burgers. Burgers are largely the same in flavor and nutritional content when compared against other foods. Burgers don’t keep you safe. Restaurants have much greater labor margins as compared to internet services.
I’m just gonna stop there because it’s clear you’re comparing apples and plutonium ingots.
As far as i can tell you were never claiming that it’s okay for some people who need it but a valid ethical consideration for others, you were saying that a person continuing to use it is a serious ethical or moral violation.
My position on your behavior is that it actively harms the people you claim to be concerned about (possible future victims of a fascism) because it frames the choice as being between being responsible for the owners actions and choosing safety.
The same arguments get trotted out when someone wants to buy a gun “oh, do you really need that?”, “more money for the murder industrial complex.”, etc.
The difference between what you’re doing and what you claim to be doing is that people who are actively talking about alternatives are sharing their experiences, you’re moralizing through metaphors aggressively at people.
If you really believe what you just wrote then make replies that help people figure out what kind of vpn they need and evaluate their safety instead of pulling out the dictionary.com to define fascism at them.
What ethical consideration, the party he did donate to does not even remotely support the claims you are making. And also there is the consideration of what type of democracy we want.
Do we want one where people are free to donate and get involved with whatever party and opinion they want without prosecution?
Or do we want a democracy where you are only allowed to have opinions allowed by the state?
I can’t tell if you’re ignorant or just lying.
https://lemmy.zip/comment/27359847
And when did the government get involved in my ability to choose what I purchase? Am I now forced to purchase Mullvad? Its their choice to support whatever they want. It’s my, and others, choice to react accordingly and choose what products we purchase.
Seems like you didn’t check the links in the wikipedia article you sent, that you based your whole “they are def nazi”-monologue.
Giving people the option to move back to their home countries is not extreme, and as I have written before. Already something that is law today.
Here is btw the actual like to the “our politcs”-page: https://www.orebropartiet.se/var-politik/ note how it does not actually have any of the politics there. Yet the wikipedia page seems certain that they have some views, that I cannot see specified anywhere. Even the quote from X is totally out of context.
You can of course do whatever you want, I am just saying that we should be observant to what the party actually wants before we demand the head of a person that gave them money. And clearly you feel comfortable citing sources you haven’t even checked.