Hi, Mullvad has two owners, founders, and CEOs - Daniel Berntsson, and me, Fredrik Strömberg. All posts I've seen yesterday and today, including the newspaper articles, talk about Mullvad as if Daniel is the single owner, founder and CEO. It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission. If you have any questions, comments or concerns you're welcome t…
The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
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Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
#602[flagged]
Notice how these people almost never go after the management of major multinationals, or even places like car dealerships and real estate firms. It’s almost always companies and projects that are critical to freedom and privacy. That should tell you all you need to know.
So no, it's not just companies that are "critical to freedom and privacy".
Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
#603I understand Mullvad has historically been a leader in privacy among the big VPN options. What are some other equally affordable and user friendly options that you all have been satisfied with? Think for someone who saw Mullvad advertised during the Super Bowl but looking to leave because of this news.
I haven’t used Mullvad, so can’t say how it compares to ProtonVPN but I’m happy with Proton. It is super easy to set up, even on Linux and iOS devices.
Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment ... Karl Popper said, "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them." >> the same way that someone's opinions on animal…
> restricting the free expression of people I don’t support remigration, but calling immigration “the free expression of people” is a stretch. It’s orthogonal. You can argue that remigration isn’t protecting the privacy of those who are surveilled by the government or deported to repressive countries that surveil their population. But Mullvad’s product protects even those people (it must, because it hides the identit…
Far right political parties have a marked tendency to severely restrict freedom of expression once they’re in power. They routinely call for it when they’re the underdogs, but that often changes fairly quickly once they get their way.
In some cases you can see hints of that before they came into power. In France for instance, our main far right party (Rassemblement National) supports drastic budget cuts to state-financed media, and I believe a more direct control of said media from executive power.
One would have to check whether the Swedish Örebro party is similar of course. I personally no absolutely nothing about that party. Still, it is not a stretch for me to strongly suspect that a party that calls for deportation (let’s call it what it is, okay?) is also a party that is, or at the very least will be, against freedom of expression and freedom of information.
If it is, then Mullvad’s co-founder has a serious conflict of interest, and I would have no choice but seriously lower my confidence in their VPN.
I hope their sister company, Tillitis, is mostly free of such. Though even if it too is tainted, their TKey is fully open source (schematics and all if I recall correctly), and simple enough to be independently audited. They even have an unlocked version you can burn yourself so you don’t even have to trust their provisioning process. That’s the difference with a VPN: a VPN is like a Palantir, you kinda have to trust Sauron will do right by you. The TKey is more like Nemik’s astro-navigator: the user can verify themselves they are its sole master, once they did they can trust it even if it was manufactured by the Empire itself.
I mean, I love my TKey. I don’t care if Elon Musk and Peter Thiel themselves oversaw its manufacture, now it’s mine, and there’s no way I’m letting the enemy have exclusivity over it.
Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
#605> The Örebro Party (Swedish: Örebropartiet, ÖP) is a political party in Sweden. The party was initially only a local party in Örebro, Sweden. Markus Allard is the party leader. According to Allard the party cannot be placed anywhere on the traditional left-right spectrum. Some of its key issues include lowered wages for politicians, ending the tax payer funding of various sculptures, monuments and art, large scale re…
Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
#606I try to turn it other way in my head, like if Mullvad got to know somehow political views of some of their customers and say "We don't like what you say, so we decide to end our business with you. We don't want our infra to be used to spread opinions like yours."
You’re not taking it far enough. What if Mullvad has someone you disagree with as a customer, and does nothing about it. Does this mean that Mullvad is supporting them? Does this mean that you have to stop supporting Mullvad? What about Mullvad’s landlord? The company that provides them their electricity? Their internet provider? Their internet provider’s internet provider? Should you boycott the entire internet beca…
Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Doesn't really sound all that far-right to me. To me too, then I got to the leaders quote on TV: "We must deport these damn parasites who sit and live at our expense." Yeah, okay. I know some politicians who speak like that, I feel I get the picture.
I think you'd be surprised at how quickly that sentiment has moved from the far-right to close to the center. People are (rightly, in my opinion) pretty upset at their governments for letting mass migration happen with pretty much only downsides for their actual citizens. People are all about the idea of helping the downtrodden when it's just an ideal, but when they realize it's having negative consequences for them…
Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
#608To be fair, Örebropartiet can also be called an extreme left party. It’s complicated… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party
Does it matter if they are left or right? The point is, they want to round up lawful citizens and turf them out of the country because they have the audacity to be slightly foreign, or worse born to someone foreign. that is the issue, not how much tax/spend big/little government.
The US isn't the only country in the world. Sweden does not have birthright citizenship. Many (most?) of those to be remigrated are not Swedish citizens.
Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
#609Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
#610There have been multiple posts about this and hundreds of comments, so there is clearly appetite to discuss it, although none of the submitted links have been very detailed. I've merged the other threads into this one, so you'll see some anachronistic timestamps below.
The post linked has been removed, so I don't know what more we can speculate upon, 650+ comments in. It's strange to see HN mods allow this much attention to a political, and contentious issue.