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.
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.
I originally stopped using IVPN because of slow speeds. Has that improved?
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.
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/...
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.
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.
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.
Proton itself sponsored a fascist influencer in france like just a couple weeks ago... You can pretend that having a MAGA CEO doesn't have anything to do with that, and that they would have stopped the sponsorship and caught their "mistake" without significant public backlash if you like, but the dots are connecting to a lot of us watching.
Also, nice strawman, but are they paying the low level employee enough to donate literally millions of dollars? Probably not. Does that low level employee have direct influence over the company? Probably not.
The idea that you stop using Mullvad because the founder personally made a donation to right-wing extremists, but you are fine with using Proton that sponsors fascists and has a CEO that platforms far-right extremists talking points is bonkers. The claim that you are separating "the entity" from the "people" doesn't even hold water.
Uh no? Show me where proton donated millions of dollars to fascists. Their CEO made an unbelievably stupid statement, and then walked it back, but they have not materially supported actual Nazis.
Really good article, definitely worth reading
the fact that it's been posted by random account that hasn't been active in any way before or ever since makes me suspect that it's just some PR damage control.
The Proton board literally stood behind the CEO tweet and doubled down on it.
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?
and the SimpleX creator is a far righter, too https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/114630877715286899
You'd think with all the trans programmers out there we would have more tech companies built by leftists...
But I suppose the leftists are the ones building the platforms for a pittance while the generationally wealthy right-wingers are the ones paying people to do all that work...
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 🥲
Man, after his death Aaron Swartz has gone from an early employee of Reddit, to a founder of Reddit to now the creator of Reddit. Give it a few years and he'll have provided the VC money for it too.
Aaron Swartz is and always was the guy who coded the core functionality of reddit. He was the man who Tim Burners Lee said would lead the charge for the internet into the 21st century.
Instead, the FBI drove him to death.
Spez and that other dude had the idea to make reddit, but Aaron built it for them. Then Randall from XKCD made the "Best" sorting algorithm.
Then Spez shat all over everything for personal gain.
Then you came here to post.
Yeah, I usually round Robin AirVPN, IVPN, and cryptostorm. Sometimes they leap frog each other in terms of features
Proton doesn't support Trump. Their CEO cherished some judge trump put in, and reddit had a field day with it.
You seem to be downplaying his support for Trump and the current Republican Party. And if I remember correctly, when the backlash happened, he doubled down on his support.
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)
As a Swede - fuck that guy and the fucking Neo Nazis coming out of the goddamn woodwork everywhere. I was all-in on Mullvad, but that's changing today. Anyone got a good recommendation for a DNS over HTTPS alternative that's not owned by a racist/Nazi/Fascist asshole?
I don't want to change my VPN based on one article, so I'm getting mentally ready for resrarching, but I'll ask you first: how very bad is the Örebro Party?
its wild, but not your typical neonazi party read my comment https://feddit.org/comment/13683001
Okay, I suppose nuance is in order here so let's add some. Örebro partiet used to be hardline leftwing extremist and antifascist, but they explicitly moved away from their political roots distancing themselves from their old ideological convictions under the new party leader.
They have since started explicitly supporting populist and nationalist positions on migration and integration that attract the same kind of latent racist voter base that SD (the much more directly neo Nazi party) rode to fame and election victory.
If I had to classify their overall political identity they're reminiscent of the NSDAP leading up to their first election victory. They're in favour of authoritarian rule with both right- and left-wing populist goals such as improved public healthcare and forced remigration or forced assimilation of Muslim immigrants.
Overall your personal mileage may vary, but I'm not okay with my money indirectly supporting a political party that's contributing to the overall decline of civil discourse and feeding into the hated of migrants and the "us vs them" mindset that's poisoning society.
[Edit] @ambitiousslab@feddit.uk gave a great breakdown of their migration stance earlier in the thread. I'm just going to say that I'm not okay with ethnic cleansing and leave it at that.
Thank you. To be honest, I'm still not sure what to think. Here in Czechia, this kind of mixture of nice/good system critique and racist usually means the party is populist and won't be doing the nice stuff once in power. They'll be doing whatever is good for anyone, who investes in them + the racist stuff, which is also populist and kind of easier then doing good. Is that the case in Sweden too?
Sadly Quad9 doesn't have an ad/porn/gambling blocker option.
Wikimedia DNS?
Proton's owner also gives me the ick with his Trump and the Republican Party praising. I'll look into it further and see if there are any other good options.
[Edit] I learned that CIRA (Canadian domain name registrar) has DNS over HTTPS support so I'll be reverting to them. Canadian shield does sound pretty good for a non-profit service without tracking: https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/
That's about outright Trump support, which is not what the comment you replied said he did. They said Trump praising, which is actually kind of what Andy did. I do agree that he is likely just a liberal that didn't fully read the room when posting to social media, however he did praise Trump in that post for that very specific pick.
Personally, I wouldn't @ Trump and compliment him for anything, especially not if I was a leader of a large company. There is no need nor a reason to make trump's ego any bigger than it actually is, not with everything else he's actively doing to the world. For me, it's less about him "supporting Trump" and more about his inability to read the room and not see why that would be taken as supporting Trump.
He also did say that the republican party used to be better, which, while true, it's a low bar and it has been shitty republicans for a long, long time. Reagan was a republican, did the tables turn all the way back then?
See the link by Innerworld below.
A highlight:
And while the tweet praises Trump’s pick for leading antitrust at the DOJ, it is exceedingly clear that he did not directly endorse Trump himself or Republicans in general.
It felt very much like a witch hunt every time Proton was criticised. Almost like other VPNs wanted to tarnish them. But that would be a conspiracy to think I guess.
Now, I don't know any more, but that one tweet seems to be the only bad thing Proton has done as an organisation, which is a non bad track record IMO.
Proton has similar issues with leadership, unfortunately, just not as bad. For DNS, I use locally hosted unbound which retrieves records directly from the root servers. It's not the same as DoH, though, so if that's a hard requirement then you'd want something like Quad9.
Mostly broader support for devices in my network. I know providers can still read my network traffic's SNI but for most common use cases it's better than nothing. And if I really need the anonymity, neither DNScrypt or a VPN will ever beat a layered proxy network like Tor.
4 real isn't it a super socialist party? Lol... I guess I read the wrong articles 😆
Everything I've seen is that it used to be super socialist but under new leadership has been moving more and more right and embracing things like removing all brown migrants.
IT company Mullvad founder Daniel Berntsson is behind a huge donation to the populist Örebro Party, which advocates “comprehensive remigration” from Sweden. “It’s sad that it’s needed,” he tells Flamman.
Five million kronor. That's how much money the populist Örebro Party received in 2025 – from a single person. This is shown in the party's income statement, which Flamman has reviewed.
Behind the giant donation is Daniel Berntsson, founder and co-owner of the internationally successful IT company Mullvad.
"This is a donation from me personally," he writes in an email to Flamman.
The company has made large profits in recent years through the sale of so-called VPN services, which make it possible to surf anonymously. In 2024, the company had a turnover of 314 million kronor.
The five million from Berntsson constitutes the majority – a full 72 percent – of the Örebro Party's income last year. It is also the largest single private donation to a party in 2025. ———————————————
That’s the entirety of the article the toot references. No idea what it means.
The main part is the party's support for so-called "remigration", which is
ethnic cleansing[1] via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry
About the immigration policy of the party:
Markus Allard initiated heavy debate in 2025 by claiming that Sweden is "the land for/belongs to the Swedes" and that the Örebro party favors a large scale remigration policy. He also criticized the Sweden Democrats for, according to him, allowing too many immigrants into the country under their watch as confidence and supply to the Kristersson cabinet.
In 2026 ÖP party leader Markus Allard sparked controversy on several occasions. In a debate hosted by Studio3 with Liberal member of parliament Martin Melin, Allard asked: "why won't the Liberals push for deporting 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?" and in the same debate said that "Sweden belongs to the Swedes. We have to make sure that we take care of our own damn people and we must deport these damn parasites who sit and live at our expense." [45]
In a podcast segment about immigration and deportations Allard stated his opinion and said that "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish." [46]
About the foreign policy of the party:
In a podcast in May 2026 Allard clarifies some positions that his party holds and among other things made clear that leaving the EU and NATO were on the table for ÖP. Regarding NATO Allard claimed that Sweden cannot trust or rely on NATO and that the country should instead seek to massively increase its weapons production and also become a major arms exporter, arguing it would benefit the Swedish economy.[47][48]
Allard stated his opinion and said that “They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish.”
Lol how is being born somewhere not a natural connection???
Also how far do you go back? What’s the magic number? Cos at some point pretty much everyone’s is an immigrant to their country.
Well, according to the Sweden Democrats, the far right party the government collaborates with and their youtube channel (which they have allegedly cut ties with, but that proved to be a lie a while back) that also gave Allard his own show, had a program worrying about "third generation" immigrants, when talking about who is "great replacement" replacing Swedes.
Thats right, in a program where they were talking about how every single one with two foreign born parents and half (because "that seems fair", they said in the program) of those with a single foreign born parent are paricipating in a replacement conspiracy, they at the same time worried about the great gap in the statistics that does not keep track on who is third generation immigrants, so the replacement is even greater than that.
How far? If you've got a you got a grandpa with a sun tan you might be impure to these fucks. But our government thinks they are fine people.
Edit, oh yeah, the native Sami people and Jews are not Swedish to them either. They have doubled down on this many times.
You’re falling for their rhetoric by asking that question. We all know that they don’t give an actual shit about the technicalities of their racism. If your skin isn’t as white as the driven snow, you are seen as inferior to these fucks.
I just had a surreal vision of Trump sending the whole state of Minnesota to Norway and Sweden.
The five million from Berntsson make up the majority – as much as 72 percent – of the Örebro Party's income last year. It is also the largest single private donation to a party in 2025.
The money also seems to have been the triggering factor for the party's decision to stand in the parliamentary elections.
(machine translation)
Fuck them. Not sure who to go with now. Paying monthly and not needing to remember to cancel were the main reason I used them.
Also, it seems safer to assume that all tech companies are rotten until proven otherwise.
Edit: 2 months later and I’ve been with IVPN with no issues.
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
This is fucking disgusting and extremely fucking dangerous. Nazi parties spread like a virus. One day they are completely underground, next time you look they are a major force in the parliament.
Mullvad literally grabbing them from the rock bottom where they belong and bringing them into light is unforgivable.
I'm from Poland and we have a huge problem with these parasite parties. They managed to shift the Overton Window so far into the right that the libertarians are literally on the left and the socdems are the extremely far left.
https://www.vpnscorecard.com/ seems like a good place to check for alternatives although it doesn't go into the politics of the company mostly. Still, their top scorer https://www.ivpn.net/ seems like a good bet.
I do like what I read on their about page. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll dig a bit deeper.
Dang. I've been using ivpn recently because I was having fairly severe þroughput issues on all my Mullvad exit nodes, but I kept my Mullvad account topped up and would use it occasionally just because I liked þe company so much. No more, I guess.
Until someone exposes someþing horrific about ivpn...
"Allard and his party have been described as a nationalist[6], left-wing populist and right-wing populist.[7] He has also been accused of being a communist.[6] Biography
From 2009 to 2013, Allard was chairman of the Young Left's district organisation in Örebro. He worked for the election campaign of Oumar Mariko in Mali during the 2012 Malian coup d'état.[8][9] "
"In a post from 2012 Allard criticized the state of Israel and wrote that "Cuba is going to be placed under an embargo but the fascist apartheid state of Israel is defended until the last Palestinian child has been incinerated. Liberal politics."[17] In 2025 he again referenced the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and wrote that he “does not give a shit” about Israel or Palestine and that he thinks it is wrong to kill children regardless of which side perpetuates it.[18]"
"The Örebro Party with Allard as its leader says it wants to cut the salary for politicians and use that money to make dental care free/subsidized by the money taken from the politicians salaries.[25] On the topic of lowering the work hours Allard, in 2026 in the municipal assembly, voted in favor of a proposal by the Left party to enable a 30 hour work week with retained salary for some welfare occupations such as preschool teachers and employees at care facilities as a trial project that would after two years be evaluated.[26]"
Huh what kind of adhd of an ideology is this lmao.
Def sounds like something would come up from up north. Disconnected and thinks they know what’s best for everyone (but themself first before anyone)
I’m sure they’ll find their great place within the eyes of whoever nutjub is going to be put in to the seat after trump.
Fuck this world man. Seriously. Idk what to say or think anymore.
Instead of a concrete ideology, it seems like a handful of unrelated policies strung together. Like he held no opinion on anything until he decided (via ADHD? Unclear) to. But only on very specific things. No broader ideology.
I'm basing that entirely on this comment thread so I don't really know anything I guess.
A lot of Hungarian far-right parties promoted workplace democracies being the future when they didn't promote getting rid of democracy.
Okay, so no Mullvad, no Proton, no NordVPN... What's left that's not gross or double plus ungood?
AirVPN.
Sure do.
How are the speeds on AirVPN? Does it support wireguard conf?
They do. Unfortunately I'm not a great spokesperson for speeds as my 100/30 connection would hardly stress the VPN connection.
Thanks. Might be worth trying out.
AirVPN, IVPN, and/or cryptostorm
Windscribe?
Windscribe is almost entirely vibe-coded. I wouldn't approach it with a 10 foot pole
(Copied from another response)
Their source code is public and as of the past few months, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, SKILLS.md, and other vibe-coding artifacts exist across nearly all their repos. Maybe it didn't start off vibe-coded but it is at least partly AI code now
Any sources? I genuinely want to see them if you have them.
Windscribe is over a decade old, so they certainly didn’t start out vibe coded, and they have been audited.
I know their image is over the top “hello fellow kids” cringe, which has always been the case, but from what I can tell it’s backed by solid technical expertise.
Their source code is public and as of the past few months, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, SKILLS.md, and other vibe-coding artifacts exist across nearly all their repos. Maybe it didn't start off vibe-coded but it is at least partly AI code now
That's genuinely disappointing. I remember them getting bought out a while ago, but I didn't remember that it was an Israeli company.
Kape Technologies plc (formerly Crossrider Ltd.) is a British-Israeli company owned by businessman Teddy Sagi. Kape owns the VPN service and cybersecurity companies CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, ZenMate, ExpressVPN, and Intego.
Nope.
Israeli owned
What's up with every VPN company being facist right wing fucks?!
Anybody know of a VPN service that
- Allows port forwarding (i.e. you can run a bittorrent client and accept incoming connections)
- Allows connections using the Wireguard protocol
- Doesn't have Israeli ownership
- Isn't owned by fascists
- Has exit nodes around the world, with a decent number of options and good speeds
So far, the ones with major problems are:
- Mullvad is out because of pro-Fascist ownership.
- CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, ZenMate, ExpressVPN, and Intego are owned by Kape Technologies which is Israeli
You know I hear this thing called nord I'm sorry I can't finish without laughing
Bad? Nothing really that I've experienced (because I have no experience) I just like joking about the pervasivenesss of their ads. They're the VPN Shen Yun, so I keep expecting to hear about them being associated with a cult.
Njalla is owned by Peter Sunde and almost fits the bill.
Minus the exit nodes around the world.
njalla censors queer voices and holds their DNS hostage for it. njalla is not to be trusted.
i cannot comment further on the specifics here sadly but I will never give njalla a single fucking penny, personally
IVPN is good. https://www.privacyguides.org/...
Idk how this Airvpn suggestions are popping up. Never even heard them before.
I've heard of them, but I don't know much about them.
As for IVPN:
IVPN previously supported port forwarding, but removed the option in June 2023. Missing this feature could negatively impact certain applications, especially peer-to-peer applications like torrent clients
Try proton vpn I guess
Unless I'm mistaken, also problematic
When you smell something bad when you're next to someone, it's probably them.
When you smell something bad when you're next to anyone, it's probably you.
When you smell some bombs all around you, it's probably Trump and Netanyahu
Completed the rhyme for you 😉
Why can't we have nice things??!!
it's almost like money and greed breed power hungry assholes...
Apparently the longer someone is in power, the more their brain structure changes. I guess the phrase "your head is getting bigger" is physically true after all.
When's the last time you updated the firmware on your duck
Shit, not everyday you see your hometown on Lemmy of all places. I know Allard from my syndicalist youth days, him beeing head of the local leftpartys youth wing. This party is more of a local populist left party. AMAA i guess.
What's your thoughts and the general opinion of this party? It seems to have been called left and right wing.
I did see reports that Allard allegedly called Somalian immigrants parasites and wants mass remigration.
His views on immigration seem bad, but I'm wary of this being media sensationalism to ruin the reputation of mullvad because they don't want people using VPNs.
He must have entered that milieu after my time, even though we're roughly the same age.
What's up with his style of communication? Feels like he's writing while drunk. I find it a bit strange that you can get into town hall even with that kind of posture, but I suppose some people find it edgy.
Besides financing fascist YouTube's including a French fascist and the Brazilian son of a dictator who was one of the leaders of a fascist coup.
Besides those.
https://www.ivpn.net/ maybe?
Looks like it might be okay. Price is pretty good. I have time left on my current Mullvad sub, so I'll have to find a new provider in the next 3-4 weeks.
Proton has done some questionable things as well. The most recent is this.
I feel like I've seen AirVPN recommended in the past. Do they have any dark history or security downsides?
I moved to air vpn when mullvad disallowed port forwarding over the vpn and I have been pretty happy. When i looked into security audits it seemed to be the closest to mullvad in quality, while still letting be get a port though the VPN. I did not look into their founders politics. Until reading this today i had still been reccomending mullvad to all my friends that were not hosting stuff and im pretty pissed that i had been doing that now.
AirVPN, IVPN, and/or cryptostorm
The first thing I found when searching for IVPN is that they're based in Gibraltar.
That means British Law, meaning special information courts with court orders for mass trawling which they can't divulge to the public if they receive one, worse than the US even because in the British version of those courts there are things like the defense lawyer not being able to be present for court hearings and never getting told if the court rules against them, only if the court ruled in their favor.
That's almost as bad as choosing an Israeli-owned VPN.
I did use cryptostorm ages ago, but at least back then their speed was like 1Mb/s. Maybe they're better now.
Somebody else pointed out that AirVPN is based in Italy, which is a member of the 14 eyes. No idea how nasty their surveillance laws are or not, though I doubt they're as nasty as the UK.
dint proton also donated to the far right too.
Ffs I was planning to switch to Mulvad since my Nord subscription is finally expiring next month, then I find this shit. I'm looking into AirVPN. They sound solid enuff.
They look trustable (no email, payment in monero, no tracking) but they're incorporated in Italy which is one of the stupidest countries in the world for this purpose
Have you ever wondered why usually VPN companies are based in countries like Cyprus, Panama, virgin islands or Labuan?
Yeah that's a good point haha tax havens for the W I guess. On another note, I think Proton VPN is also a good alternative since they're based in Swiss, where data protection laws are mega strict.
Proton has given user data to the FBI and French authorities.
Not sure if this was rhetorical but here's an earnest response
Thank you I was genuinely not aware.
That said, and please tell me if I am wrong, it is this VPNs choice to conduct things in such a way that would make them liable to have any kind of problem with the authorities since the norm asks them to report if "the providers become aware" which implies logging and analysis.
I am not sure there is any law asking them to do that, although there may well be.
Could it be that only Italians are protected by Italian privacy laws?
Any Italian who subscribes is doing so against the vpn's terms. If all data is spied upon then any Italian privacy breaches are not the fault of the vendor.
You shouldn't use a VPN provider that doesn't let you use Wireguard. If they require you to use their own client, they're either up to no good or just dumb and shouldn't be in this business to begin with.
AirVPN allows port forwarding and supposedly keeps no logs. I don't remember if they've been audited or not
Edit: No audit. So we can't be sure about the logs claim. They DO have payments over monero though, so that's nice at least.
Ya, I am also moving to AirVPN.
Maybe we can "pressure" them into doing an Audit. Their linux GUI client sucks, but we can use the CLI client just fine. I just wish they had an AUR official version.
Oh cmon! I trusted 'em to not shit in their pants, what next? We discover that Torvalds and Stallman are transphobic?
My original comment was ironic but having a confirm that his political ideas are not bullshit is nice
Speaking as someone who does some work for Stallman, although he is right 99% of the time, that last 1% is a doozy
Thanks guys for posting this and for suggesting alternatives. I'll look into airvpn I guess. Fuck anyone who wants to make society worse by giving into their worst character traits and base instincts.
That's still the majority of the donation for that entire party. All from a single person.
A Swedish article in a Swedish publication about a Swedish guy and his Swedish company paying in Swedish kroner is misleading?
You forgot to say the part where the title is in English but the currency is not mentioned. Is it pounds? Euros? Nope, Swedish crowns. Since when it's acceptable to skip the currency no matter what it is?
I still disagree. It's also why it's important to not judge things only on a title. It's still a lot of money in just about any currency that would be reasonably used in this case. At best it's ambiguous, but I would not call it misleading.
It depends on the audience. From what I see, the most common currencies on of Lemmy users are USD, EUR, GBP, CAD.
Here's a hypothetical: I once received 5 million from a guy. But it's only €280 because it was Zimbabwean Dollar.
Isn't it kroner or is that a different currency?
What the fuck did I just see?? Mullvad after Proton.. So sad.. :(
Mullvad was dead to me when they pussied out and took away port forwarding. That's how I knew they were compromised
Örebropartiet is a conservative left party. Think China, rather than say AfD in germany. Flamman is also a shit show. The owners pretend to be left, but they gladly embezzle money from Malmö city.
That's not the same organisation. Flamman is a newspaper as well, totally separate organisation.
Think the newspaper organisation's name is Tidningsföreningen Norrskensflamman.
So they're orthodox left instead of identity driven rad libs? That's actually kind of based, although I'm completely in the dark about the internal politics of Sweden, but if their focus is on class unity it's based.
There really isn't much of a movement other than Örebropartiet, not that i know. The left in Sweden have leaned pretty hard on the globalistic view that everyone is the same, regardless of origin. That has then lead to them being the main party of Muslim immigrants, mainly due to their stance about Gaza. Örebropartiet is very much a small niche. Much like the anarchists or the piracy party.
The wiki for the Örebro Party actually describes it as not identifiable as left or right and the founder was actually far left. It also advocates for things like free dental care and anti-corruption. So things aren't as simple as purely anti-immigration which is very populist in Sweden.
The initiative to found the Örebro Party was taken in early 2014 by Markus Allard, who is also the first party leader. Allard had previously held positions as substitute member of the Örebro municipal council and district chairman of the Young Left in Örebro; in December 2013 he was expelled from the Left Party and its youth wing Young Left for "liking" the Revolutionary Front, a militant revolutionary socialist and anti-fascist organization, on Facebook and refusing to disavow it when questioned.
The only option now is to oust the founder entirely.
Man and i just renewed my subscription. Why do people always get their shit twisted in politics or whatever, its not like they need the money, donate it instead.
I HOPE this is fake. I find it hard to belive
If it hasnt been 14 days, and you didnt buy with cash, crypto, or gift cards, you can request a refund. I also recently brought a few months, but unfortunately I learned about this just a few days too late.
Edit: Mullvad is honoring refunds past the 14 day window.
I still havent decided what I'm gonna switch to yet, I've been looking into AirVPN, IVPN, and Xeovo. I was really interested in Xeovo, it has all the features I used with Mullvad, except for SOCKS proxies, but I just learned that it even exists today, and I could barely find any endorsements or discussions about it, its probably fine and legit, but it just gave me a bad feeling. AirVPN has all the features I used with Mullvad, except SOCKS proxies again, but it does have port fowarding, it also has a decent sized userbase and a long history. IVPN has every single feature I used with Mullvad, and a decent history, however they only support wireguard connections over IPv4, and they said that they're still working on their IPv6 setup.
I still have months of time on my Mullvad account that I cant refund, I'm gonna continue to use it until it runs out and get what I paid for, if IVPN gets their IPv6 setup working by the time my Mullvadn runs out, I think thats who ill be switching to, otherwise ill probably go with AirVPN, but I have a lot of time left, so I think ill keep Xeovo in mind, just incase there are any developments there.
You know who hasn't given money to far right extremists? Proton and it's founder.
I remember when people went ape shit because the CEO, Andy Yen, approved of one of Trump's pick for the antitrust division.
Then the antitrust pick happened to be good at her job, so Trump fired her and people realized Andy wasn't so wrong after all but still hated him.
Everytime I tried to defend Proton, I got downvoted and insulted over this. Got called a MAGAt and a neo nazi sympethizer. I was told to use Mullvad and that it was so much better and I wouldn't be encouraging some right wing sympathizer even though Andy Yen never took any political stance.
Well who's laughing now?
You're probably downvoted and insulted because you made up a narrative. He straight up said Republicans were the party of privacy, and were shilling them. The backtracking 'Oh I was just supporting the pick' was Proton's PR company coming later, after nuking a significant number of reddit posts from andy yen doubling down, as well as iirc the entire mastodon thread where he was doing the same. It was wild as fuck to watch in real time, we were literally joking in discord that some poor intern was probably trying to physically wrestle the keyboard away from Yen while screaming for someone to call their PR company.
That whole fiasco is literally why Proton no longer uses mastodon, because no one there let them forget the whole thing despite attempts at nuking the posts from existence.
This isn't the first time proton, and andy yen specifically, has shown a troubling tendency towards supporting fascism. Vibe coding their apps is also a big warning flag just from a security point of view as well.
I've still been hesitantly recommending proton VPN to my friends, because a questionable VPN is better than no VPN, and most people aren't willing to shill out money for... well, mullvad used to be what I recommended if they were willing to pay for it, but I guess I'll have to rethink that now. But yeah, it was, to my knowledge, the best free VPN, though that's a low bar.
He straight up said Republicans were the party of privacy,
You got a source for that?
Well, there's his literal original post on X, praising republicans as the party of privacy against big tech: https://x.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660 When people lost their shit, he went on reddit and posted an 'official proton response', doubling down: https://archive.ph/quYyb (archive link because proton PR eventually came in start deleting things and creating a new narrative)
When that was deleted, proton claimed it 'wasn't actually an official response' despite being on the official proton account and literally saying 'proton's official response is', and a shitload of now-deleted doubling down in the thread that I don't currently have time to find, but you can probably see them in the thread by looking for the outraged responses to deleted posts (or finding whatever the current deleted-reddit-mirror is, I don't know the most up-to-date one atm). They then claimed they were 'politically neutral' despite that literally being impossible by dint of being pro-privacy, which isn't politically neutral at all. https://old.reddit.com/...
I don't have time to really dig in and find all the deleted reddit/mastodon posts for you, but they're still around because the internet is eternal, and deleting something only hides it from shmuchks who don't know better, so I'm sure you can find em.
Here, 2 are some now deleted Mastondon responses from Proton.
[…] the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
protonprivacy@mastodon.social
Well who's laughing now?
nobody. because when fascism wins, everyone loses.
Proton has sponsored some French (?) rasist person recently. They have apologised for it and said it was a mistake. However. This is not the first stupid thing they've done.
PS. I'm no way a fanboy of anything. While I have been a Mullvad user for multiple years now, it seems like I have to reconsider that.
It was a sponsorship and Proton's PR team accepted him. It's likely that they made a mistake, and that what's matter. Their product is based on trust, you can't afford to make mistakes like this. Or other mistakes like the previous incident.
Still does not defend Proton actually affiliating with them.
Except for financing a French fascist and a Brazilian fascist who is the son of a dictator who was one of the leaders of a fascist coup... You know, besides them.
They responded to that recently.
edit For those that don't want to click -
"You're right to raise this, and we want to address it directly and provide you important context on how this happened.
Vincent Lapierre's channel should never have been part of our affiliate and sponsorship program, because we intentionally avoid association with channels whose content could distract from our message and divide our community.
Proton operates globally, and while our services are available to everyone regardless of political views and our mission is consistent everywhere, our knowledge of every local media landscape is not. In this case, our team didn't have enough context about the French space to make a well-informed decision, and that's on us.
We also want to be straight about what a placement like this is and isn't. An affiliate or sponsorship arrangement is a transactional placement for awareness, not an endorsement of a creator's views. In the case of Vincent Lapierre, this was a single video sponsorship, not a partnership.
But that distinction doesn't excuse what happened here. The responsibility to vet who we put our name next to is ours, and we didn't meet it this time. We're now reviewing our vetting process and our guidelines for our marketing agencies to ensure this doesn't happen again.
If you see something like this again, tell us. We rely on your feedback and vigilance."
Wtf are they donating to strangers? That's too many ooopsi daisies, wtf?
I am also a candidate that will defend VPNs. And I'm a good person. Trust me bro, and send me the money. /S
Yes, they likely brought on a PR person after their last major fuck up. It directly contradicts what those youtubers said about the sponsorship. Who knows who is telling the truth.
That AI-generated apology is better than doubling down like the last time, but they shouldn't be treated as this "oh they are clean and haven't been caught doing anything".
Though they didn't apologize for the Brazilian fascist support because that didn't go viral like the French one. They might still be paying him.
@ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace @e8d79 If more people were to think for themselves rather than jumping on the rage bandwagon, they would know this was all overblown BS. I’ve watched several interviews with their CEO and there is no way that guy is a friend to fascism or Trump. He’s pro-EU sovereignty, pro-privacy, pro-democracy and decidedly anti-US Big Tech. Whether you like their products is one thing but all of this virtue signaling is really weird.
What in the serious fuck are you talking about, Proton just got caught giving money to far right influencers. "Accidentally" of course. They promise not to do it again, lol.
Also Andy's comment about Trump being anti-trust has aged like fine milk. It is almost like you should just keep your mouth shut when you don't know what the fuck you are talking about
Perhaps you should stop giving corporations your hard earned money.
Is this /s because proton sponsored Far right Youtuber Vincent Lapierre and then had to apologize for it?
They never sponsored him. He filled out some form online and it was an automated process. They also didn't know who the fuck that guy is. I'm French Canadian and even I don't know who he is. I never heard of him.
Everytime I tried to defend Proton, I got downvoted and insulted over this. Got called a MAGAt and a neo nazi sympethizer.
Welcome to Lemmy, either conform or get ousted. It’s almost like Karl Marx is here with us today.
People just don't go read the sources and think for themselves and let the communities dictate how to think.
Anyway, I don't care. Because I know I was right.
Y'all assume privacy is some left-of-center thing?
You ever notice how the right always assumes privacy is only for pedos? That's what they use it for, they can't imagine any other use for it.
I'm confused, what makes you think anyone here thought privacy is some left-of- center thing? Do you mean we should accept that our VPN provider is spending money to far right partys? Because it's normal? Or what is your take?
More that Lemmy is pretty lefty in general, so in our privacy communities lean more towards privacy as a defense against fascism. We're separated from the far-right weirdos that think any limits on their anti-vax screeds and sov-cit best practices FB posts are socialism incarnate by a wide gulf of people in the middle that have no idea about any of this.
Privacy also makes for strange bedfellows. Brave browser is another great example of something tied to far-right funding. We do have to each have our own tolerance level. Personally, I think it's insane for someone at a privacy-focused company to go public about anything political, ever. Do it in private, I don't care. But when you announce something like that to the world, it's beyond the pale.
According to their security page it doesn't seem like that would matter; they wouldn't have any information to share. And it helps that they've been audited by a third party
Apparently FISA courts can order the installation of runtime surveillance software.
Surveillance doesn't work like the part of crime investigation where the investigators can get a search warrant from a Court (which in this case would be to get some logs, which as you pointed out don't actually exist), it works like wiretapping where the court orders are to install said wiretapping equipment and it then just stays there tracking everything that happens.
What that "no-logs" stuff does from the point of view of users, as I explained in another post, is to stop things like rights owners being able to track who was pirating their copyrighted works from an IP address and timestamp as that would require access to logs which don't exist, not stop state surveillance by countries which have surveillance courts that can secretly order companies in their jurisdiction to install surveillance software in their systems.
Mind you, normal courts can also order them to install wiretapping software, but they're not going to do it for non-commercial copyright violations, plus the Laws that apply don't allow dragnet surveillance (it's only the "special" shit that came out after 9/11 like the Patriot act that created such special courts and allow them to secretly order the installation of systems and software for mass surveillance)
So, yeah, if all you care about is pirating without getting letters from lawyers demanding money from you, then any no-logs VPN is probably fine. If you want to avoid state surveillance, then you want to avoid VPNs based in countries with surveillance courts and legislation as well as VPN exit points in such countries, and that means at least the US, UK and Israel.
Thanks for sharing, I didn't know any of this. If you have some sources on this stuff please share, I'd like to get more familiar with this sort of thing. Quick question though: How would installation of runtime surveillance even work for Azire? They don't have local or remote access to do that.
Is there a self hosted VPN option?
You can totally self-host your own VPN, a lot of folks will do that so that they can access their home lab remotely (without having to open ports or set up a reverse proxy).
That said, self-hosting kind of defeats the purpose of using a VPN service if the goal is to anonymise web traffic or bypass regional restrictions/ content blocks.*
* Technically you could use a hosting service and host your own VPN in another region, but it's probably not going to be cheap, and it's kind of a stretch of the self part of self hosting.
Could one use onion routing to self host and bypass the disadvantages?
Also, thanks for a succinct and straightforward answer.
Mmm, there's nuance with a bit of ambiguity here and I'm not deeply familiar with onion routing (security isn't my specialty, I know enough to say that I'm very out of my depth).
Let's back up to what a VPN does: it's effectively a detour for your network traffic. Instead of traffic going from your client (I'm grouping computer/ phone and routers tougher, because you can do VPN routing at either level) and to whatever you were trying to go, the VPN server acts as a middleman. (Assuming secure traffic ssl/ https) A VPN masks your traffic from your ISP (because they just see you connecting to the VPN instead of your destination) and from your destination (because they see the request as coming from the VPN server*).
As I understand it, onion routing conceptually similar to chaining multiple VPN hops together, such that each hop is only aware of where to go next. (I think technically, each packet is sent along a different random path).
So. There're a couple of ways to answer your question, depending on how you interpret it or how you layer technologies.
- Onion routing on its own would theoretically already have the privacy advantages of a VPN- because of the way requests are bounced and split up, the receiving end doesn't know where the call came from. That assumes that whatever the client is trying to talk to accepts onion traffic and can talk back over the same protocol.
- Otherwise, you have to have a client on the other end of the onion route to accept your traffic, make a call to whenever you were trying to go and send it back to you. At that point you've more or less made a VPN.
- You could go through a VPN first and then onion route, effectively this would decouple your machine from the onion network, but it does put you back at 1 or 2 for actually getting the data you want.
All that said, the major downside to onion routing is speed, it's incredibly slow to break your request apart, bounce it around the network a bunch of times, reassemble it on the other end, and then turn around and do it again for the return trip.
* That also means that some sites, like reddit (fuck u/spez), will block traffic from VPN servers because multiple people's traffic all coming from the same place looks a lot like spam.
Claiming immigration policy in general is fascist is just an ignorant perversion of the word that lessens its weight.
Regarding alternatives, I remember for a little while NymVPN was considered a hot item and then suddenly crickets. Did something happen to make folks disinterested in them? I do think they're pretty heavily involved in cryptocurrencies, but I could be misremembering.
I'm white. Irish descent really which to a lot of whites isn't quite white. I don't fear brown folk but these 'pure' inbreds fear it on some level that has nothing to do with reality.
Well shit. I need to change to airVPN now. I'm worried as I've heard people had their IP's leaked to their ISP with AirVPN, BUT that could have also been user error.
From another user's comment earlier
Kape Technologies plc (formerly Crossrider Ltd.) is a British-Israeli company owned by businessman Teddy Sagi. Kape owns the VPN service and cybersecurity companies CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, ZenMate, ExpressVPN, and Intego.
So, owned by Isreal. I didn't know PIA was owned by the same and that's what I've been using. So maybe I'll look into AirVPN? Or IVPN is another one mentioned
AirVPN is based in Gibraltar and hence under British Law, meaning information courts and secret trawling surveillance court orders.
IVPN is Italian and Italy is a 14 eyes member. No idea how bad or not their surveillance legislation is, but it very unlikely they're as bad as the UK (which was even worse than the US according to the Snowden Revelations and none of that shit was walked back, quite the contrary).
Do you use a VPN service, and if so which one? It's seemingly become a bigger and bigger issue... or maybe I'm just not informed enough about privacy/security; is it a trade off between morality and privacy? Because somehow that doesn't feel correct. Should I just choose the most secure and cheapest option, because it's all fucked anyway?
Like at this point, what would be the best option? My personal threat-model isn't that real, but still... what should I be comparing when looking for "the best option"?
Well, I use Mullvad at the moment and one of their founders being an extreme rightwing nutter is alarming.
That's why I started looking around and, lo and behold, it's alarming just how many supposedly privacy-conscientious VPN services are based in or owned by people or companies based in jurisdictions with insane surveillance laws.
I expect most privacy focused VPNs will help a bit with protecting your privacy vs private entities, especially if you rotate exit points. This also applies to things like copyright violation - lawyers just trying to discover who is the person sharing some torrent based on their IP address will find it extremely hard (and thus not worth their time) if that IP just leads to a no-logging VPN server address (as finding out who the person is would require a court order to watch it in real time in a different country, which they won't get for non-commercial piracy) by comparison to that IP just leading to a home user in an ISP as several countries have made laws were the ISPs have to deliver user information matching a provided IP address and time on suspicion of copyright violation to somebody claiming to represent the copyright owner.
If you've avoiding getting your activities tracked by dragnet surveillance states, I would say that in the West one should avoid like the plague any company based or registered in the US, UK or Israel (or any place falling under their laws, such as Gibraltar or Puerto Rico) as they all have special surveillance courts and the kind of surveillance laws that wouldn't be out of place in an Autocracy and which do apply to any company registered or based in those legal jurisdictions.
If you're trying to avoid The Law (as in, the normal Law, not the special surveillance courts and their mass dragnet surveillance orders), I have no idea. I suppose you probably would be better off using VPN inside a VPN crossing at least two jurisdictions without agreements for data sharing in court cases (so, for example, if one is an EU member country, the other should not be one).
It's what I use, but I heard it was bought by a shady company a couple years ago. I'm afraid to check. It is or was one of the most secure and verifi3d provider around and resides outside the 5 and 14 eyes network.
You're a dumbass. In general, if you see ads for it, it's bad.
Check AirVPN, IVPN, and/or cryptostorm
Why do these kinds of products even exist? I've never used one but have thought maybe I should look into it. I sometimes proxy through a cheap or throwaway VPS, figuring small ipv6 allocations below the ISP level aren't tracked very carefully above that level. In some cases the VPS host just gives you a bunch of addresses out of a /64, when theoretically a /64 is the smallest allocatable chunk and it's what a single device is supposed to get.
Because where I go on Internet is not the business of my ISP, and it's not data I want them to store and sell to whoever will pay for it? I am now behind a VPN 100% of the time.
Based on my virtual location, YT doesn't force me to connect to watch videos (in some parts of the world, they seem to do!), and I won't be stopped by age verification crap in my country.
If you're the sole user of your VPS, all the sites you visit can identify you based on your IP only. Behind a VPN, they have to rely on cookies, fingerprinting, etc. (of course assuming you don't just login...).
Some VPN suppliers have a no log policy and have been audited to confirm they had indeed no log.
Mullvad was audited multiple times and the audits confirmed no log and no information leak. They don't even store customers info: you have a customer number, and you'd better not lose it. Sure if you pay by credit card, they can trace you back.
They're transparent about issues they face (2 years ago they reported a weakness allowing websites to identify the same browser switching outgoing servers) and the fix they use.
So yes, they are one of the very very few services I trust.
VPS supplier are just as likely as any other company to sell, leak or disclose on request your information.
For anonymity and privacy from the network provider.
Vps proxying can work for that, but there are a lot of gotchas to keep track of.
The company has gone with big profits in recent years through the sale of so-called VPN services, which make it possible to surf anonymously. In 2024, the company had a turnover of SEK 314 million.
Very incompetent author, includes misinformation.
Is it really that bad? It is a so-called VPN service. I call it that all the time. And they accept anonymous funding through cryptocurrency. I'm not fluent in Swedish Chef, but all this information seems more than accurate enough for me to trust the rest of the article.
Yes, it doesn't take you much research to find out that it is impossible to achieve anonymity only through a normal VPN service. The technology doesn't allow for it.
Everyone who believes otherwise got deceived by cheap marketing lies from providers like NordVPN.
It's kinda an interesting platform. I wouldn't call it purely far right, they dip from many different buckets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party
The party claims to stand for a "class-conscious populism" which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology[32] and unites the "productive" classes of society against the "Transferiat", with the "Transferiat" being a term coined by Allard to describe the classes of society that lives off of transfers that are a net negative for society such as those who, despite having an ability to work, live off of social welfare benefits, as well as those who work "made-up services"[33] that the party deems serve no societal function, such as bureaucrats, consultants, public sector communications specialists, strategists and HR-specialists.[34] The party and its leader Markus Allard strongly criticize the "Transferiat" and argues it needs to be abolished as it "sucks money out of the state".[35] The party differs from modern day left-wing parties by seeing the working class as co-dependent with people working in enterprise and business and instead sees the classes that "lives off of transfers", as specified, as a large economic net-negative and an obstacle for a functional society.
The Örebro party support making plebiscites easier to enact and more potent, increased social housing,[38] subsidies for youth recreation,[22] and free dental care.[39] The party advocates for remigration policies, strong secularism, and assimilationist policies such as immediate closure of the Islamic charter schools.[40][41][42] It opposes continued privatization of health care, elderly care, public housing and municipal education, among other things. During the 2018–2022 term, the party has opposed prestige public projects it considers wasteful, such as the proposed Palace of Culture and bus rapid transit.[43][44]
Markus Allard initiated heavy debate in 2025 by claiming that Sweden is "the land for/belongs to the Swedes" and that the Örebro party favors a large scale remigration policy. He also criticized the Sweden Democrats for, according to him, allowing too many immigrants into the country under their watch as confidence and supply to the Kristersson cabinet.
In 2026 ÖP party leader Markus Allard sparked controversy on several occasions. In a debate hosted by Studio3 with Liberal member of parliament Martin Melin, Allard asked: "why won't the Liberals push for deporting 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?" and in the same debate said that "Sweden belongs to the Swedes. We have to make sure that we take care of our own damn people and we must deport these damn parasites who sit and live at our expense."
In a podcast in May 2026 Allard clarifies some positions that his party holds and among other things made clear that leaving the EU and NATO were on the table for ÖP. Regarding NATO Allard claimed that Sweden cannot trust or rely on NATO and that the country should instead seek to massively increase its weapons production and also become a major arms exporter, arguing it would benefit the Swedish economy.
Not that I agree with it or anything. That's some Nazi-level xenophobia in there.
But I can kinda see how a ultra-private VPN founder could be in it.
The “transferiat” thing sounds like the Nazi idea of “useless eaters”
You gotta put the blame somewhere, or people would realise the problem is the party itself
They’ve been putting up quite provocative ads in London past year. Comparing UK to third-world countries. Like literally putting up names. I mean they’re not wrong but you’re not gonna get any customers if you take a piss on their nationality you know. People don’t get to chose where they born.
Guess that logic won’t apply when you’re from world’s most privileged country.
Ps. Not gonna lie, even from an objective perspective this is an awful ad. Lazy and pretentious. Something would a 20yr angry kid would come up with this tbh.
They have a point, and I doubt they'd drive away their potential customer with this.
Should a company owner's politics affect reception of their product?
Customers choice. Within limits, product is more important than the owners politics.
Remember, a good way to destroy a superior product (that you don't control) is to denigrate something not relevant so that users will change to a compromised product.
GB promoted Enigma in 3rd world countries after WW2 since it's compromise was only commonly known in the 70s.
While the NSA is believed to have improved the security of DES, they are believed to have compromised Clipper.
Microsoft was just caught putting in a back door into their disk encryption.
The USA spreads FUD over Chinese routers, CPU when it is already known to be selling compromised Intel&AMD CPUs and compromised Cisco routers. The more important question is whether leaking your data to the USA or to the PRC has greater personal risk.
You weren't using Mullvad?
Nice, thanks. I can block you now.
@lemmy.world
A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
Rules:
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@lemmy.world
A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
Rules:
- Be civil
- No spam posting
- Keep posts on-topic
- No trolling
go to feed...
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