(original article in Swedish that reported this)
Posting this because I hadn’t heard about it before and I’m probably not the only Mullvad user here, so might as well.
The party claims to stand for a “class-conscious populism” which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology 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 transfers that are a net negative for society such as those who, despite having an ability to work, live off social welfare benefits, as well as those who work “made-up services”[…]
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 “live off transfers”, as specified, as a large economic net-negative and an obstacle for a functional society.
Their ideology is nonsense fake-marxist revisionism to redirect anger at capitalism and turn it against immigrants and people who need social welfare (though they do back some generally left oriented social policies, their main thing appears to be racism)
Even if you’re comfortable with funding this, it still begs the question of just how trustworthy Mullvad actually is.
I guess this still beats any of the dozens of Israeli VPNs that definitely spy on you, but it’s not great 
Being outraged over this goes against the spirit of VPN / privacy. Y’all people are buying literal CP on VPNs and this is supposed to the smoking gun? Show me any other VPN service that has passed audits countless times and can be paid for with cash. Conspiracy hat on, something about this smells like gov “exposing” controversy in order to kill actually private VPN services.
I think being aware of who’s running a critical part of your security and what ulterior motives they might have is actually a good thing, but okay. I’d personally rather use this moment to educate myself about how to host my own VPN securely, instead of trusting a literal fascist with doing it for me and hoping that it works out. It’d be really awkward if my VPN service suddenly becomes part of the fascist governmental apparatus I am trying to avoid
the fuck?
i mean wouldnt hosting your own vpn also out you? fingerprinting is a thing, they would just collate all the tracking onto the new ip, even if that ip is anonymous, it would unmask you. you need some amount of secondary traffic to the server to mask your traffic. i suppose you could host a nym vpn or tor node. nym gives you credits for doing this and it also gives you the choice to swap ips if your server gets banned by a lot of stuff (also some people need swappable ips, i use it for research in foreign languages and it helps a lot). also chelsea manning has a big stake in the company, maybe itll be less shit idk
i suppose you could also host publicly available open source frontends to obfuscate traffic a little. i use redlib 99% of the time and it works pretty good.
Thanks for the ideas! I’ll definitely have to look into it more… once my Mullvad subscription is closer to running out
https://kycnot.me/ has a good list of vps providers with anonymous signups. in general it has a good list of things that dont require id
Yes, exactly, that’s the problem with self-hosted VPN is that all you did was give yourself a new IP address. At least in this case, your ISP (that knows your name & home address) no longer knows what websites you visit.
A possible reading is “yall: people are buying literal cp”
Which could be a reference to the famous time that idiot pedos were sharing csam over cifs (windows file and printer sharing, yes, right click -> share this folder) with only the layer of privacy and anonymity provided by their mullvad use separating the cops cybercrime nerds from being able to be the only good cops that day and mullvad wouldnt cooperate, a warrant raid found that there were no logs, no logging facility and the police action taken after that heavily implies there was no way to install a logging facility.
But it’s not clear because the person you replied to has nobly resisted the hierarchy of maoist standard English’s g.r.a.m.m.a.r.
Edit: It’s been four hours and this comment has received no likes or replies. This may be because this comment is buried in a 20 hour old thread, or it may be because the joke just bombed. Either way I’m editing this comment to put the joke in a spoiler.
Joke about encouraging pedophiles to make themselves easy to catch and to turn themselves in
Dear pedophiles: You are not stupid for using CIFS! By all means, you don’t even really need a so-called “VPN” or “proxy service” or anything like that to share your child
sexual abuse materialpornography amongst yourselves without getting caught. It’s just a waste of money, really! You know what isn’t a waste of money for a pedophile? You know what you really want to have right now? That’s right, a child sex doll, paid for using your own debit card under your legal name, and ordered right to your legal home address for your convenience.[1] You will not be arrested, guaranteed! I swear on my mom’s life! Just do it! Don’t even think twice about it! In fact, I’m so sure you won’t be arrested that you might as well just walk right up to a police officer and say, “I am a pedophile who has partaken in child sexual abuse material for which I could be jailed for many years. The statute of limitations has not expired. It is fully within your authority to arrest me right here and now.” — and the police officer will just think you’re telling a joke, they won’t arrest you! Seriously, don’t listen to people like @whatiswrongwithyou@lemmy.ml, the real idiots are the people who invest in “opsec” instead of just seizing the moment. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. TURN YOURSELF IN. SCUM. — Wow, that was a really weird cough I had there for a minute. What I meant to say was: the world is your oyster, O pedophiles, so make yourselves known! It’s OK!This actually happened in Troms county, Norway, in 2018. ↩︎
Idk if you already know, but the technical details of csam/pedo cases are almost always that level of absurd. The first time i found out about that pattern was the old one where they were unencrypted smtp on port 25 emailing file attachments between each other using isp provided emails (like bobjones@charter.com) and some intern was cleaning out old attachments on the email server and turned them in.
E: oh yeah, and it wasn’t even a case of some pencil neck opening up the attachments as he “deleted” them, the file name itself was an admission of guilt.
Holy shit yes obviously meant “y’all,” oh my god
That kind of defeats all the privacy benefits
Sorry I’m late to reply but oh my god that is not what I meant at all. As another user commented, I was trying to say “y’all, people”, not “y’all people” (as in “you people” I guess?) Oops :((
The thing is that when it comes to VPN service the only way to trust it is to see how it stands against warrants, which Mullvad has shown that it hasn’t been able to hand over any useful data to law enforcement (regarding VPN logs). The VPN owners’ poltical stances have almost nothing to do with the security. I have found all sorts of crazy political outlooks in that extreme “trust nobody” side of tech. On the I2P network you can stumble upon on the most racist, nazi eepsite hellhole ever and then minutes later, a messageboard with the utter opposite of that.
Yeah, I wasn’t able to see that reading at the time, but it made a lot more sense once another user pointed out that it can be read a different way, sorry haha
When I wrote that reply I hadn’t looked into the technical aspects of self-hosting your own VPN yet, so I just went off what someone else said and thought that might be a fairly decent solution. I absolutely agree that if there’s no good alternative then political leanings and minor financial benefit to something that sucks shouldn’t be a dealbreaker
I really hope I didn’t come off as way too mean and dismissive because I misread what you were trying to say, sorry about that