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The Mullvad founder gave millions to extremist far right party (mastodon.social)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.world
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The IT company Mullvad’s founder Daniel Berntsson is behind a giant donation to the populist Örebro Party, which advocates “comprehensive re-immigration” from Sweden. “It’s sad that it’s needed,” he told Flamman.

~ https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropartiet/

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[+] 248 points 3 months ago (72 children)
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  • [–] 96 points 3 months ago (22 children)

    also thought mullvad was legit. also want to know if there's any alternative

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  • [–] 49 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    I've been using IVPN.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

    Are you able to get through geo-restrictions on streaming services with IVPN? They have fewer servers than Mullvad it seems. Like for Singapore, they have 2, Mullvad has 5. In Japan, they have 1, while Mullvad has 9.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Number of servers is less relevant than users per server.

    Mullvad is a much bigger company so I'd expect them to need more servers.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    It is, when you want to evade geo-restrictions. More servers spread over different IP blocks means there’s more chances the streaming services aren’t aware of some of those IPs yet, so they aren’t blocking them yet.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

    I'll preface this by saying I used to work in the industry.

    The restriction evading isn't really related to the number of servers. VPN companies for streaming block evasions buy IP addresses that aren't data centre specific. Those ranges are well known and easily blocked. So for example when you browse you'll generally use a "standard" IP but while connected to the same endpoint if you fire up a netflix session it'll route that traffic out the "streaming" IP. This is also partly to try to prevent steaming companies from getting easy access to a list of those IPs

    It's quite expensive to get IPs that aren't blocked by steaming services so that is a cheaper cost per user for larger companies. Where I was that cost was way more than the cost of any individual server per month (and some of those servers were hefty). That is one way that Mullvad would have an edge but it's minor.

    For what it's worth I did have a call with the iVPN lads (twice I think) and found them lovely. Never interacted with Mullvad but I will never give them money after reading this. Weirdly I'm in the market for a new subscription and they would have been my go to. Their fiver a month thing is really very smart.

    Edit: for geo blocks on standard browsing it would generally present to us as a support ticket. We'd raise it with engineering and they'd assign a new outgoing IP with whoever our provider was. We used M247 a lot and they were very responsive when that happened. Usually a few hours and it was sorted.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Thanks for the info, I learned something new. So if for example I run my tv through my VPN and I’m watching youtube. When I switch to the netflix app, the VPN service determines that I’m trying to hit a netflix IP, so it routes it out to an outgoing IP specifically for netflix geo-blocking evasion that is separate from what youtube was using?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Yeah that's exactly it. That's how we did it anyway. I guess other providers may have their own secret sauce but I have to assume it's some variation of that. We paid for a pool of, I think, 1000 non-contiguous residential / business IPs and if any of them got blocked we just immediately rotated.

    Honestly we never had much trouble with it after the initial engineering work was done. I don't think the providers really give a shit beyond best initial effort to make the rights holders happy.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (6 children)
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  • [–] 24 points 3 months ago (15 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 57 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    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...

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  • [–] 49 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (20 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Matrix does have fundamental design issues you would expect from cellebrite devs...

    Simplex, Monero and Whonix are all as cool as veracrypt!

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  • [–] 25 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    and the SimpleX creator is a far righter, too https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/114630877715286899

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    Doesn't matter as much here. It's open source and has passed two audits. Look at the code. Use different servers if you want. Reimplement the protocol if you can.

    No really, please somone do it in go or rust. I don't want to learn kotlin 🥲

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    AirVPN?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Proton doesn't support Trump. Their CEO cherished some judge trump put in, and reddit had a field day with it.

    It's made by CERN scientists, so I guess their PR is suboptimal.

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