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The Mullvad founder gave millions to extremist far right party
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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God bloody dammit. I genuinely LOVE Mullvad and have tried to use their (not so cheap) services. I feel in this economy, privacy comes at a price and I was happy to do this.
Now, I realise my money is going to fund a POS far-right asshole.
Proton supports Trump.
Mullvad suports the far right.
Is there any major privacy respective service provider that isn't a bloody cunt?
I personally use dnsforge.de which is essentially a public Pi Hole with additional configuration choices for strict or porn/gambling blocking. While this one is specifically german, I think there are probably other such services or you could always host your own. (I know you said "major service" but it's about the concept)
also thought mullvad was legit. also want to know if there's any alternative
I’ve semi-seriously been thinking about bootstrapping a VPN service just to have one “not an asshole” service (and that’s setting the bar low - I’m definitely an asshole, just not that kind of asshole). But I’m also a US citizen living in the US, so not the best choice for the job either.
JAVS - just another VPN service, let's fucking go.
If you build it, they will come
I've been using IVPN.
I originally stopped using IVPN because of slow speeds. Has that improved?
Hey,
No.
Proton VPN have had one of their chefs praising donald trump, but that's the worst I have heard about them. Swiss based (they have among the most protective privacy laws out there), email servers are deep down in the mountains (I don't know about the VON ones), no logs (for what I remember, maybe short lived ones?), made by the dudes at CERN.
So compared to others quite flawless IMO.
Only technical problem I have had is the VPN switches port from time to time and you have to rebind the network interface of your favourite torrent if you're running a tight ship. I have found no simple way of detecting when it happens.
If you're using qbt and gluetun https://gitlab.com/jopiermeier/gluetun-qbittorrent-port-manager
Interesting!
So it pings some entity and they send back your external port? I speed read the code (but I'm on mobile) and that's what it looks like. Any information greatly appreciated.
Gluetun itself already knows the forwarded port via NAT-PMP, this program just gets it from gluetun and assigns it in qbt via the qbt api and if it returns a 200 response it considers it confirmed, here's an example log:
waiting for qBittorrent WebUI...
qBittorrent WebUI is ready (authenticated).
port file did not contain an integer: /tmp/gluetun/forwarded_port
port file did not contain an integer: /tmp/gluetun/forwarded_port
gluetun provided forwarded port: 36884
syncing port 36884 to qBittorrent...
successfully updated qBittorrent to port 36884 (confirmed)
port file did not contain an integer: /tmp/gluetun/forwarded_port
port file did not contain an integer: /tmp/gluetun/forwarded_port
gluetun provided forwarded port: 39293
syncing port 39293 to qBittorrent...
successfully updated qBittorrent to port 39293 (confirmed)
Where is the Gluetun server running? I mean if you run it yourself you have to like forward all ports to it?
Thanks for the writeup!
So gluetun is for docker networks and lets you isolate traffic to/from other docker containers into a VPN, you run it and qbt inside docker containers with gluetun configured to your vpn, then qbt configured to route all its traffic through it.
Edit: I didn't have to port forward at all on my network for this to access it locally (I run it on a separate computer), because all the "outside" traffic in qbt is going through the vpn that has a forwarded port seeders/leachers can connect (which is dynamically updated as it changes with the aforementioned qbt port manager)
For example (truncated docker compose just the part related to above): services: qbittorrent-vpn: image: lscr.io/linuxserver/qbittorrent:latest container_name: qbittorrent-vpn depends_on: gluetun: condition: service_started restart: true restart: unless-stopped network_mode: "service:gluetun"
Then gluetun: services: gluetun: image: qmcgaw/gluetun container_name: gluetun restart: unless-stopped networks: - default cap_add: - NET_ADMIN devices: - /dev/net/tun - 8888:8888/tcp # HTTP proxy volumes: - /appdata/gluetun:/gluetun - /appdata/gluetun/tmp:/tmp/gluetun environment: TZ: $TZ VPN_SERVICE_PROVIDER: $GLUETUN_VPN_SERVICE_PROVIDER VPN_TYPE: $GLUETUN_VPN_TYPE # wireguard / openvpn WIREGUARD_PRIVATE_KEY: $GLUETUN_WIREGUARD_PRIVATE_KEY WIREGUARD_ADDRESSES: $GLUETUN_WIREGUARD_ADDRESSES VPN_PORT_FORWARDING: on VPN_PORT_FORWARDING_PROVIDER: protonvpn # or your provider VPN_PORT_FORWARDING_STATUS_FILE: /tmp/gluetun/forwarded_port # OPENVPN_USER: $GLUETUN_OPENVPN_USERNAME # OPENVPN_PASSWORD: $GLUETUN_OPENVPN_PASSWORD healthcheck: test: ["CMD", "/gluetun-entrypoint", "healthcheck"] interval: 5s timeout: 5s retries: 1 start_period: 10s
gluetun-qbittorrent-port-manager: image: jopiermeier/gluetun-qbittorrent-port-manager:latest network_mode: "service:gluetun" container_name: gluetun-port-manager depends_on: gluetun: condition: service_started restart: true qbittorrent-vpn: condition: service_started restart: true environment: - QBITTORRENT_USER= - QBITTORRENT_PASS= - QBITTORRENT_PORT=$QBITTORRENTVPN_PORT volumes: - /appdata/gluetun/tmp:/tmp/gluetun
So, the vpn itself has to be dockerised, right? I still can't figure out the core technique that lets you detect the port used. Is gluetun a core component in a docker system?
Gluetun is a vpn client, you input the info the vpn provider gives you and it connects.
Fuck me, this is gonna ruin mullvad, I hope. Never saw it coming though, wtf?
Can we stop with the "proton" supports trump. This has been echoing since the tweet. I understand the initial recoil, I had it myself, but proton as an entity very clearly does not support trump.
The Proton board literally stood behind the CEO tweet and doubled down on it.
Proton's VPN is sketchy anyway and JS crypto isn't revolutionary... Or even a good idea really. See tuta and torrent freak for alternatives
By that logic, Mullvad is fine too, because the entity doesn't support the far right. You are just sending your money to the company which pays the people that do... so...
I mean I'm okay expanding that logic here as well for consistency. This is all on a spectrum, one of Mullvad's top employees donates millions to far right politician is on the more extreme end of that spectrum than a tweet that failed to read the room.
Taking your counterpoint even further, if you found out some low level employees at any company used a portion of their paycheck to support far right politics would you boycott? Obviously not, which should show you that you don't believe this should be a binary decision.
To be clear, I feel mullvad crossed the line here, my point was that the proton hate doesn't compare and is overblown.
https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
Signal was kickstarted by the CIA, so dissidents in regimes they wanted to topple could communicate securely, but at least that seems genuine.
Matrix was an Israeli spy company's invention.
Telegram is Russian.
Reddit started out as the creation of Aaron Schwartz, but he got demonised and committed suicide. Then it was left to that shit eater spez, who sold his soul to the Epstein crowd making Ghislaine Maxwell a powermod among others, also hosting r/the_donald and bridging Trump's popularity from 4chan into the mainstream. Now he sells everyone's data to Google, while still not paying the manufacturers of that data anything.
TrueCrypt got shut down because it was too cool.
Do you have Signal confused with TOR?