Was hoping this would cover the latest Twitter blunder of Andy Yen endorsing Trump's political picks and saying "republicans are there for small business now" which had a major blow back.
I think the blunder is firmly with the people who caused the blowback. I don’t think it’s a good idea to all be up in arms whenever someone says something you disagree with.
For context, people were upset about using the official accounts to endorse a party wholesale, in direct violation of their charter.
A subset were also upset with the nature of the endorsement.
And then you could also discuss whether a CEO of a company has to consider what they say, regardless if they're using an official account or not. This is more of a gray area, and has people divided.
I'm personally of the opinion that, as a CEO, you're always representing your company when speaking to the public to some extent.
Andy did not endorse Trump, just the Republican nominee for antitrust. Nevertheless, we have retracted the statement, which was put out by mistake due to an internal miscommunication. Proton is not controlled by any single person but by the nonprofit Proton Foundation, which has neutrality in its governing principles, and that remains the case today.
Andy, or someone else, posted what can be read as an endorsement[1].
> Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
Putting aside that this was a divisive statement, the problem emerged when this was posted by the official company account.
For the duration of time that this was the official response, it's not unreasonable for the public to assume that Andy, or someone else, endorsed a political party using the official company account.
This is the core of what caused the incident to escalate.
It was later retracted, and followed up with a statement[2] on the incident.
The irony is that this was already changing: anti-trust has been massively empowered under Biden and Lina Khan. Trump is certainly attempting to bandwagon this tide, but the appearance of so many Big Tech leaders in VIP seats at his inauguration does not lend a favourable hindsight view to Andy Yen's statement.
Is that really true? What did Lina Khan do to thwart big tech and enforce antitrust laws to a greater extent? I feel like there was mostly blockers for M&A that allowed startups to exit, but little real impact on big tech.
The most vocal supporter of Lina Khan's work over the last few years has been JD Vance... while I can't remember a single democrat voicing even close to the same support.
JD Vance vocally supported her, then the administration he is part of fired her as soon as it was able.
By contrast, Democrats nominated her to be commissioner, officially it was Biden who did so but Elizabeth Warren, another Democrat, is the one who really pushed for it.
Words don't mean shit compared to action.
With your kind of reasoning its pretty obvious why America is currently driving itself off a cliff.
She led the FTC to bring lawsuits against Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. Although two of the cases have been blocked in the courts, this alone was unthinkable in previous administrations. She's also helped enforce policies like right-to-repair and click-to-cancel which threaten big tech's market share. Like it or not she's played a massive part in shifting the narrative on antitrust. Trump's dismissal of her along with Big Tech's front-row seats at his inauguration and general sycophantism are not good signs for antitrust.
Sorry, your CEO tainted any respect I have for your organization. I was planning on move to your service this year. Now I am looking else where.
The statement maybe retracted but the message and statement and ideology remain. I cannot trust your organization based on your CEO.
The irony is the collection of big-tech that showed up for and financially supported Trump. This has a great profound outlook on real antitrust action towards those individuals and their organizations. Actions are more verbose than words but often ignored.
As a long-time user and a volunteer on the translation team, I can't begin to express my disappointment with this.
I've subscribed to Proton for several years, and I now deeply regret my decision. Regardless of any explanations about the removal of the statement or internal miscommunication, the damage is already done.
In my opinion this is clearly a display of a character flaw. I simply don't trust Proton now that it's CEO revealed itself to be of such flawed thought. Isn't that the whole job of a CEO?
Nah normal adults vote with their senses, judgement and their spine. I'm not an American, neither is Proton. Keep your clowns inside of your clown car.
Nothing about anything occurring right now in the United States is “ordinary politics” and saying that anyone who disapproves of someone siding with a fascist regime has a “defective thought process” is doing the work of the fascist regime for them.
I didn’t see what the post you’re replying to said before it got flagged, but if it was objecting to me labeling the government as fascist, I’ll point to “The 14 Characteristics of Fascism” by political scientist Lawrence Britt [0]. The current government clearly checks at least 12 of the 14 boxes here, and I could probably make reasonable arguments for the rest.
So we're pretty quickly heading toward #10 being checked off as well.
Regarding the last item, VP Trump said some weird things about President Musk helping with voting machines (during his speeches at the inauguration, or maybe in the days after -- I can't keep track anymore). To be clear, I don't think that rises to the level of "fraudulent elections." But it is something that I think is worth investigating further, if we as a nation care about free and fair elections anymore.
4. Supremacy of the military. Trump has been big on wanting to be supreme over the military, but I don't think he's been as big on making the military the supreme thing in the country.
5. Rampant sexism. Sure, he's sexist, and he says sexist things. The person responsible for keeping all the people around him pulling in the same direction is a woman, though. So are some of his cabinet nominees. So while he's in this direction, I don't think he's there yet.
6. Controlled mass media. Again, he's trying (the lawsuit against the pollster in Iowa is a really bad sign), but he's not there yet, not by a long shot. He arguably is trying for this one, more than the previous two.
7. Obsession with national security. Do you really think most Americans are living in fear of "them out there"? I don't. Migrants who are here, maybe. Crime, maybe. National security? Not really, no. (Unless you lump immigration with national security, which I suppose is defensible.)
12. Obsession with crime and punishment. The police haven't been given virtually unlimited power... at least not yet.
Look, I won't deny that he's trending in the wrong direction on many of these. It's worrying. (The ones I'm not arguing are even more worrying.) But I don't think he's as close as you're making it sound.
Supremacy of the military: his recently confirmed SecDef has publicly supported carpet bombing and explicitly endorsed the killing of innocent civilians on multiple occasions.
Sexism: Seriously? Not even going to comment on this one. If you don't see it, nothing will make you change your mind.
Controlled mass media: Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram, and TikTok are now all now definitively controlled by party loyalists. This is where most of the non-seniors in the country get their news these days.
Obsession with national security: immigration should absolutely be part of this and it's one of the defining topics of the administration thus far.
Obsession with crime and punishment: Trump has himself repeatedly stated that he is the "LAW AND ORDER" candidate (oftentimes via tweet, in all caps). This would be funny given his conviction on 34 felony counts, but I don't really consider anything about the administration to be funny anymore. Also, "The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism": Republicans do this all the time, especially if it involves white officers and Black victims. "Blue lives matter", etc.
I never stated anything about the party that is not currently in power. I’m sorry that you’re angry but this is whataboutism and doesn’t address any of my points (and you’re wrong about the specifics of your post as well).
Way to twist it to "opinion battles" but Swiss CEO diving head first into American meme politics and following up _on the official account of Proton_ is very clearly a character flaw. Feel free to disagree but keep it to yourself, thanks.
In my opinion, this is clearly a display of a character strength. I strongly trust proton now that its CEO revealed itself to be of such strong character. Isn’t that the whole job of a ceo?
For every one of you, there is one of me to offset you and increase my support of the product. You probably don’t even use them and never intended you, and the rest of the user base is better for it.
> I don’t think it’s a good idea to all be up in arms whenever someone says something you disagree with
Of course not, but there's a difference between disagreeing with which is the best recipe for a cheesecake, the best castle in France, or whether or not it's acceptable to invade your neighbouring countries, if the government should be following the law/constitution, or basic biology, etc.
Some opinions one disagrees with are very worth to be up in arms. I'd even say that people have a civic duty of being up in arms against certain egregious topics. Say if a politician says that they want to allow for 9 year olds to be married to adults; or a rich guy backing multiple politicians all over the world Sieg Heils on national television; or a politician that just got elected is asking for money for favours from companies; or there's talk of "other"ing significant swathes of the population.
So if you think Gail Slater is a good pick for the DOJ’s antitrust division, that’s tantamount to pedophilia and Naziism? What did Gail Slater ever do?
No, I think a guy doing a Nazi salute on TV, twice, at an official ceremony, that's tantamount to Nazism. And the fact that everyone who identifies with his side of the isle tries to deflect and excuse and explain how the Nazi salute he didn't wasn't actually a Nazi salute only helps with that. And frankly, anyone associated with Nazi salute guy and those who defend him... is associated with Nazis, which isn't a good thing.
To the best of my knowledge he endorsed specific behavior about specific policies, not "Trump's political picks".
I wish topics vaguely adjacent to US politics could be discussed in less divisive and polarized ways.
I think that’s the parents point one can endorse specific policies from a person without necessarily endorsing everything else. Btw that’s the beauty of democracy- people made their choices and can still voice their concerns even after the election. Contrast that with Venezuela, China or Russia mentioned in the article.
Even if the VPN provider is doing something naughty-ish, just decoupling netflow info from your IRL id/address/financials/probably TV habits info has value. Even if you can’t control the usage of behavior data by multiple organizations, you can try to “anonymize” it at the boundaries between them. Indirection, to minimize how much becomes associated with your identity.
Really only valid for individual company adversaries though, depends on your threat model I guess.
Legit question: What can an ISP collect when most of the time I'm going to secure "https:" websites? I mean, they can only see the website I'm going to, but not what is going on there, right?
Is just collecting where people are going that lucrative to sell?
The DNS data is super useful for developing a demographic profile.
For example, they could pretty trivially assert with high confidence that a pregnant woman is in your home or that you’re shopping for a car. The tinfoil hat scenarios are interesting as well.
There's what websites/apps you use, but also your behavior patterns. Are you a night owl? How often do you check some website or app. I'm sure there's a lot of other information they do gather based on the "metadata"
Not what they can, what they MUST as required by law. Assuming US, see DTA aka CALEA - at any time little green men with a warrant can ask for tranparrent packet capture of ISP client's traffic.
Also, in many places (Europa) there is collection and retention requirements for ISPs.
That + other data can be used to build a behavorial profile so it's not what your ISP is doing necessarily but what the people they sell the data to are doing with it (or the people they sell to)
DNS records and net flow data. They can also inject JS in http sites, hijack domaijs to do the same, do traffic shaping. But I am biased, I work for a VPN company.
It's more most smaller VPN brands are surprisingly owned by one company Nord.. It's not all vpns it's just if you took 100 brands 90 of them are owned leased from Nord
The fact that it's shown in all Hollywood films as "secure" email, and Navy Seals guys on youtube are recommending it in unison—should tell you all you need to know... Not to mention the DDoS protection racket the Israelis (coordinated with the BND) pulled on Proton for traffic analysis. See their own statement on the matter: https://proton.me/support/protonmail-israel-radware
ask them why they make deals with swiss government and bend to their political whims. Proton can move anywhere else and not be at the mercy of secret orders and backroom deals. but they seem very content on selling a product that is falsely advertised.
In Australia, from my PoV, that's not a "political view", that's very much a policy position.
He's very much in favour of anti-trust legislation which in many ways aligns with his business.
He has side leaked a political preference for the US Democrats, but is prepared to applaud the US Republicans for this one specifc appointment.
It's disapointing the US devolved into a two party Hotelling’s law quagmire and became captured by the first ray of difference, it'd be better to see the end of First Past the Post and a wider range of smaller parties that were forced to interact on policy issues to better represent a wider demographic.
I’m skeptical that multiparty systems actually fix anything. Even when they work, it’s because poorly unaligned parties form coalitions on a largely unpredictable basis, and the only hard and fast rule is that the largest minority party gets to choose the chancellor or PM, just like you would get with FPTP. In the worst cases, like in Israel and Belgium, it becomes impossible to form a stable majority coalition for years on end no matter how many snap elections you call.
Also, the US has had a two party system for a very long time, and not all of that time was characterized by moralistic screeching whenever someone praised the “wrong” party on something like antitrust policy.
You can be skeptical, they're still a viable alternative to the non representative duality the US has spiralled into.
> Also, the US has had a two party system for a very long time,
No doubt, that's one hallmark of that long slow spiral into a non representative deadlock.
You likely recall the US founding founders opinions on political parties .. not a lot of fans as I recall (although admitedly I'm not a US citizen).
The current voting system of the US has a tendancy to iteratively approach bad two party standoffs that better represent small powerful minority groups rather than the nations demographic as a whole.
> just like you would get with FPTP.
That's good to mention again; multiple parties and a change to one of the preferential ranking voting systems.
There are multiple examples about the globe, some don't have deadlock issues .. and a stable majority coalition isn't a requirement to representationally vote on policy, and once passed, if passed, policy falls to the civil service in carry through.
Unless they back track on his statements convincingly, I too am shopping for alternatives. Very sad, this is the one service I didn't expect to be caught up in US politics like this.
FWIW, I will no longer be a customer of any company where I am aware that they financially or politically support the current regime. That especially includes local service providers.
Sure, I'm trying! I don't even care about supporting or not supporting a specific political party or side. I just don't want to support oligarchy. I don't want to do business with companies that are participating in politics.
Also, email is the most critical service most of us use, it is very important to know your email provider isn't supportive of a political regime, specially when that regime is using data collection for retribution, deportations, firings,etc..
He wrote a Twitter post praising Trump's administration and criticizing Democrats[0], then doubled down on the official Proton account[1]. Then he backpedaled, saying the official account statements were an accident[2].
I can understand it in general if you truly think that pick would be better for big tech antitrust (not convinced any party is going to do much about it), it seems said pick was the CEO of the lobbying group founded by big tech (the Internet Association). So not sure how that does actually help with antitrust
There's a new class of statesmen forming in the U.S. as we speak, and it's ripples in the pond. People get psychotic over the little things, imagine what kind of micro-psychosis could do to somebody whose misfortune is to actually interface with the government, and be collateral in the never-ending state-side counter-intelligence activities. The back-pedalling on his part, I think, is the inconsequential part—never admit your mistakes is 101.
And I’m confused why instead of discussing anything in the article, you chose to derail the conversation with an unrelated grievance over antitrust policy.
I appreciate you expressing this concern. Now I realize the connection might not be clear to everyone.
The article is about Proton "is now the resistance tool of choice in authoritarian regimes trying to control the internet". IMO such position requires Proton to be politically neutral so users have more confidence for the service.
I did read the article in depth and I have the same question. Aside from wanting to let people access the complete uncensored internet even when their government would prefer them not to, which seems to be their entire mission in the first place.
damn the HN title got changed. The original title was "VPN is now the resistance tool of choice in authoritarian regimes" I thought its pretty funny that another VPN app is listed as #10.
Some context on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_poli...
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