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Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

mullvad.net

171–180 of 252 posts

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#171

What does everybody here think about Daniel Berntsson, founder and co-owner of Mullvad, personally donating 5 million Swedish krona to the populist Örebro party, criticized for its stances on race & immigration? I'm not trying to start an unhealthy discussion about this topic, genuinely curious about your opinion on the matter.

He is in his full right to support whatever party he wants?

Those parties exists for a reason, a response to certain pressures. Nothing happens in isolation. If you zoom out a bit and if you can for a second try to empathize with both sides, you will often find that both sides of an issue is correct, reasonable & rational from their own perspectives. It is often more an emotional response than one of pure survival.

The more you force things on people or suppress them, the more they will resist & push back. The rise of the far-right is not random or just pure evil manifesting out of thin air. It is like a acute inflammatory/immune system response. Obviously it can be exploited by bad actors to further inflame/divide & accelerate certain agendas. Often times extremism takes hold when certain justices are denied (which is in fact evil).

Life is best if you assume the guy on the other side (90% of a group) is just a bro trying to survive & have no real bad intent towards you, they don't know you or have been in your shoes, and the other way around too. Thus it is very important to become non-reactive, become observant who is trying to stoke the flames, who benefits from the chaos and so on.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#172

What does everybody here think about Daniel Berntsson, founder and co-owner of Mullvad, personally donating 5 million Swedish krona to the populist Örebro party, criticized for its stances on race & immigration? I'm not trying to start an unhealthy discussion about this topic, genuinely curious about your opinion on the matter.

Irrespective of political affiliations, I felt that Mullvad addressed the outrage in a mature and non culture war manner. Because of how they handled the situation, I have a lot more respect for the company.

It's great that they didn't try to cancel the guy or get seduced into driving a wedge into their team. It is great they chose their principle over pleasing the crowd in such a transparent way.

I have been a customer for many years. I once even used the cash payment option out of curiosity.

Here is their statement:

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/donation-controversy

They even linked his (Swedish language) private blog on which he wrote on the issue:

https://dberntsson.info/

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#173
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An authoritarian state that exercises oppressive power through legalistic institutions in league with a corporate oligarchy.

Germany has its problems, but it's consistently in the top 15 most democratic nations in the world. Calling a solidly democratic nation "fascist" is a rhetorical reversal straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

Germany does not look "solidly democratic" from the outside.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The German courts entirely disregarded our use of geo-IP lookups on queries, and asserted that since tests via a VPN were able to resolve the domain, we were in breach of court orders Seriously, what the fuck? So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up? I really don't like where this is going.

What's even worse: the court fined us because they claimed this use case was in some way in contempt of their ruling. Then, when we won the overall case, that money was never returned because it wasn't specifically referenced by the final court. The response from the lower court was effectively: "Well, you will need to sue the court to get that money back." Edit: I'm with Quad9 (CTO)

>wasn't specifically referenced by the final court.

Maybe your lawyer fucked up? Did you immediately appeal the fine or request a stay pending the main action?

Appeal court ruled on the substantive case. My understanding is that in Germany it has no procedural jurisdiction to order the state treasury to refund an enforcement fine. You need restitution claim that makes the thing yet another hoop.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The German courts entirely disregarded our use of geo-IP lookups on queries, and asserted that since tests via a VPN were able to resolve the domain, we were in breach of court orders Seriously, what the fuck? So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up? I really don't like where this is going.

The entire point is that it can't be reasonably enforced with any granularity. Rights-holders want it to be like that so a copyright win in a single country means something has to be taken down globally.

The decision was reversed in the appeals court.

The appellate court ruled that independent recursive DNS resolvers are too far removed from the actual infringement to be held liable.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point is that it can't be reasonably enforced with any granularity. Rights-holders want it to be like that so a copyright win in a single country means something has to be taken down globally.

Sounds more like we should end copyright worldwide.

As language models are tolerated that is only fair in my opinion. If they are allowed to be trained with GPL licensed, copyrighted and so on data then copyright should vanish also for everyone else. The existence of LLMs with the current laws is just unfair.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright is serving exactly nobody today Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living. This includes a majority of people here on HN.

Most hackers here are not relying on copyright to make their living. Either you work on open source but make your living off services on top of the code, or your code is a trade secret protected via contracts. Not to mention that everyone using coding agents probably aren't even protected by copyright in the first place, at least in the US, since the courts are taking a pretty hard line on human authorship being requ…

Free Software as a concept could not exist without copyright. Copyright is what allows the license to declare the terms under which a copy is permitted, including the provision that the source code ship with the binary form. (This is discussed in the commentary to the GPL.)

Despite the SaaS model under which many of us build, there is still a tremendous amount of packaged and distributed software that people use every day: your phone and its OS and apps, most computer OSes, databases, medical records, transportation, communications—the list goes on—that many of us work on to put food on the table.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"your code is a trade secret protected via contracts" isn't enough to replace copyright because the contracts are only enforceable to the signing parties. Let's say you write some software for your employer and they sell the product to several customers with a contract not to distribute it. However, the product appears on some pirate website anyway, and you can't identify who allowed the product to be leaked. Once it…

Yeah, I'm assuming most people here aren't selling proprietary code to customers directly. I assume most professionals here work somewhere that sells SaaS or uses the software they develop internally only.

That is a false assumption.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright was not designed to maximize productivity. It was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness (or, as stated in the US Constitution, the progress of science and the useful arts).

> t was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness If you look at outcomes it has completely failed while making big corps very rich in the process

Nonsense. Thousands of new TV shows, songs, and apps that come out every year and put food on the table for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that help produce them.

Yes, some people and companies benefit disproportionately, but those tend to be the ones who finance the process and bear the risk of loss due to failures and flops.

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