Yeah, I canceled my sub. I have no idea if the CEO of my new email provider is any better, but I know that Yen is abusive to his employees, and that matters to me. I know he’s deep in the throes of AI psychosis, and that makes me not trust him at all. I’m gone.
What did you end up switching to?
Ah okay. I considered that one but Tuta had double the storage for the same price, so I went with them.
The services I use could be run by child-raping centaurs for all I know. But they keep their mouths shut and stay in the shadows. Ignorance is bliss.
Certainly hoping the child-raping centaurs aren’t running my email server… but I think there’s a little more here than blissful ignorance. I think it matters that, even if my new mail CEO is as bad as Yen, he hopefully sees that he’ll be punished if he acts like Yen. Because I’m not the only one that has left Proton: I think Yen is really going to feel the heat. Hopefully that deflates the egos of other techbro overlords…
Say and do stupid shit, get stupid prizes.
Proton’s reputation has been getting shaky. First it was the poorly worded communication regarding support for Republicans. Then the privacy in question when they handed user’s data over to authorities. Now this.
How’s that for loser thinking, Andy?
There was something before that about providing a journalists data to authorities or something too.
After a Swiss court order, and they only could provide an IP adressen where the account was first made. Don’t spread partial information that doesn’t reflect wat happened.
This is exactly the sort of thing why im baffled that people are leaving for companies in countries with either little or literally no data privacy laws.
Sure andy is a dipshit. But at least he doesn’t get a god damn say over how some things are done. Because the law sits out side his control.
You make a great point.
But have you never met a CEO who used their access to break the law?
Trust is tricky, and an individual choice.
Ok, the first 2 instances are wildly out of context, don’t know how much it is the case in the newest case.
The congratulations to Trump were for the appointment of Gail Slater, which he very much agreed to because of Slater’s reputation as being “not good for big tech”. (Slater did not last long, as expected)
And the “data transfer” to authorities was a legal requirement imposed by the courts of the country they are in (based on “terrorism” charges by the french authorities - for essentially squatting), with no actually doable legal recourse left (as it often is in “terrrorism” cases). No preexisting data was available. They had to wait for the activist to log in, to catch the IP address of the client connecting to the surveilled account in the live system.
Refusing to comply with lawful orders of the country you are seated in can absolutely wreck your shit, and you might even lose control over your infrastructure people depend on.
And had the activist used an VPN to connect to his mailbox, the story would have probably ended there, especially if the VPN had been Proton itself - the injunction was only for the Mailbox, and VPNs are pretty much untouchable regarding surveillance in Switzerland.
Yen’s support for republicans wasn’t poorly worded. He explicitly said they are for the little man while the democrats are for big business and praised one of trumps cabinet picks.
He’s a piece of shit. Nothing about that was poorly worded.
It was poorly worded because he was meant to target a specific portion of something about antitrust. What he ended up doing is blatantly supporting something a Republican brought up. I guess he couldn’t have found someone within spitting distance that wasn’t Republican and also supported antitrust. Don’t know how, but that’s how short-sighted Andy is.
So… he meant to lick some boots while maintaining optics, but he ended up fucking himself with a red hat?
On a side note, he’s smart for letting a lot of people back out of Proton services. The VPN speeds are better now.😆
IVPN all the way?
Posteo mail, excellwnt provider, good ethics https://posteo.de/en
More expensive per GB than Tuta, for those wondering.
Yet another case of “you either die the hero, or you live long enough to become the villain”
Except the lifespan for the former seems to be about 6 months :)
Aparently it should have been, either you die a hero or live long enough for people to find out you were always the villian :)
I’m so glad I delayed switching over to proton.
Also fuck that guy. What an ass.
What did you end up switcheroo-ing to?
I went with Tuta because of the value/GB. Also they feel fully committed to the users’ rights and privacy.
God dammit… this totally validates my procrastination in signing up.
I’ve been putting it off, because it took me more than a year to migrate away from Gmail. But this is hard to ignore. I’m tired, fam.
I mean I believe you, but thoughts on this comment: reddit
Proton monitors employees’ AI code generation"
This is also a distortion. Proton has a tool that labels which code is AI-generated and which is human-written, which is important for many reasons. It can’t be used to evaluate how much AI somebody is using. The design document for the tool states this clearly. This document is available to all employees: r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence The security point
The list goes on and on. Same with the security point. I have access to that chat. Andy never said don’t do pen testing. It’s true, he used shitty language and he personally apologized to the whole company. However in that same security chat he also said something 404 omitted: “The baseline is, we must do this plus be faster at the same time” in reference to security testing. r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence
He agreed with the additional pen testing, and it was even recently implemented at Proton. What he didn’t agree to was it slowing down the pipeline. About hiring engineers
This quote “this is the last year that we hire engineers” is also out of context. At Proton, the engineering and product management roles are merging and we call this new discipline “Product Engineering”. Proton also mostly hires product managers with engineering backgrounds. It means we stop hiring engineers who just code, and hire instead product engineers who also exercise product judgment that AI doesn’t have, not that we don’t hire engineers at all. I know this because I help with hiring for the whole company. One last thing
I want to put a few words out there that aren’t about quotes or screenshots, but about my experience.
To be honest to you, we’re all in a bit of a shock after reading the articles written, and some of the criticism hurts me because it described a company I don’t recognize. Reading the comments on Reddit hurts me because so many of them do not reflect reality. Proton is not rushing into AI without concern for safety, it is actually being done very carefully.
If you’re deciding whether to keep using Proton, I’d just ask that you make that decision after getting the full picture, and not solely on the quotes that have been intentionally taken out of context. Otherwise, you are only hurting the workers that you claim to want to protect.
The thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50317991 raises some valid concerns about the Reddit post in question. It explicitly even says its been approved by the company, so idunno. 404 Media has done a lot of legit exposés in the last few years. I’m inclined to trust journalists over the guy posting on Reddit with permission from Proton. The screenshots apparently included show Yen telling an employee to do damage control with their personal account on reddit, which really makes things look even worse, doesn’t it?
I spent the day getting things set up to leave.
Pass went to KeePass, which was easier than I expected.
Drive is now replaced with Filen.io
Standard Notes is now Obsidian
Looking at AirVPN, but not ready to pull the trigger on that yet.
Still looking for a calendar. Thunderbird has one but it’s not on mobile for some reason.
The big one is mail. I was the same as you migrating from gmail so I’m learning my lesson now. Set up Thundermail today and have 3 custom domains set up. Spent hours today swapping out account emails. It’s rough, but I did it to myself. I knew going full Proton ecosystem was a bad idea, but at the time I just wanted out of Google. Take your time.
If I’d only put off de-googling a bit longer before I saw the news I could have skipped this hop. Oh well…
I’m eyeballing Tuta. Anyone have other recommendations?
I’d recommend an e-mail provider that supports custom domains, so you can easily switch at any time. I personally use Purelymail; I’ve also heard good things about Fastmail and Migadu.
Fuck it. Let’s make an easy open source email host and all the corpse can wall us out and we’ll just email each other. Wait this sounds familiar.
Basically any company that you give money to is going to be lead by arseholes. By definition. The only easy way is self hosting but that has its own difficulties. (And even then it’s still hosted by an arsehole)
GOG is a good company we all pay for.
Not with the AI generated images they use
They no longer use it.
I open it right now and all I see is flashy text with game cover art in the offers/deals pages.
DRM-free is a big plus.
They no longer use it.
Is there a source or proof on that? Or is it just that you didn’t find it right now on their website?
The big drama was during their “2026 sale”, where they used GenAI promotional art for the event. They also seem to have refused to confirm using GenAI, and at the time made no promise/commitment to stop.
The GOG that knowingly sent out emails with Nazi symbols in?
What?
Holy shit do people need to get educated on Occam’s Razor.
In this case Hanlon’s Razor might be more relevant ;D
Thanks for posting this. Fucking Lemmy man. That reads like a genuine mistake to me… not everything is a conspiracy lol. If you just read the thread here, you’d believe that GOG were some underground Nazi apologists or something.
No, it was a fucking dog whistle for one simple reason: why use the last symbol double? If all of them were doubled or single? Sure, I could believe the mistake angle. But only that one symbol doubled where it doesn’t make any sense to double the “intended” symbol? I don’t believe it. That are too many coincidences necessary for me to believe it.
Yeah my thoughts exactly.
On some devices on some fonts
Come on man
I’m sure they gave a level-headed, reasonable, rational response
Yeah and their defense was: we knew before that it looked bad, so we didn’t send it out to German speaking newsletter subscribers… Which recognised that they knew it looked the way it did, before they send it out. And even then the biggest question they never answered: Why send only that one symbol double? you know, the one symbol that “on some devices on some fonts” makes it an SS symbol, where the “intended” symbol doesn’t have any meaning or reason being doubled?
I want to like GOG, but that whole affair did not portray them from their best side.
You got a link because I can’t find that? It was their German team that reported it too
I would like to give you the primary source link to that other place, but since reddit is going choo-choo on the enshittification train and only allows logins now, here is a PCGamer article for that whole mess: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/
Or you would need to specify what specific thing your asking for a link.
The German QA did notice it, but the feedback didn’t get send back correctly is their standpoint. Taken alone, sure, that happens. But with all the rest? no, I don’t believe it.
Didn’t get one.
Talking about GOG the DRM-free digital PC game store.
Yes they sent an email with the subject containing two runes resembling the SS logo.
“They didn’t notice”, but somehow they didn’t send it to German users
This genuinely looked like a mistake, where was it reported they didnt send it to German users? I only saw that it was a German QA team that noticed it.
Article linked elsewhere seems to indicate it didn’t go to German users because the German QA team found the issue before it was sent, but due to an internal communication breakdown the issue didn’t make it back to the international team before the emails had already been sent. GOG immediately apologized for the mistake and changed their internal processes to catch these types of mistakes sooner.
It very much reads like an honest mistake, and even then it only impacted a subset of GOG users because it’s entirely dependent on the font used to render the email subject. The actual Unicode character used was a curved S (a letter from the Greek character set), but certain fonts render it looking more like the infamous SS symbol.
GOG published a letter with neo Nazi imagery, knowingly said it wouldn’t be okay in Germany, and sent the email to everywhere else. After a huge outrage they gave a meaningless apology without any real comitment to investigating how it happened or how they would ensure it never happened again.
The biggest dickhead I know runs my server.
Could be worse, your servers could be ran by the same dipshit that runs mine! I swear nothing ever gets fixed on time!
Yes go self host email, I’ll wait
Try stalwart, fresh 1.0 release from last week. Modern jmap and easy to setup selfgenerated dns-zonefile.
Oh, I’ve done it… Won’t do it again, but I have done it.
Legitly the only way i would ever dare to even attempt self hosting email again is in 20 years when ai can do it entirely for me using the power of a single AA battery. No sane person self hosts email!
I self host email. Actually, I run a publicly available email service from my office, so…
Though, I learned my lesson and bought my own domain. So this pivot should be better.
I would love to chat this through with you. I have some domains but honestly, Iʻve been told so many times to not roll my own…
Likewise. I never plan to host my own email server. You can bring your own domain to Proton, at least.
ngl, I feel very burried by the effort to “de-google”. Like, Iʻm close, very close, and email is like the last thing to do (along with cloud backup).
Do not run your own email server - highly recommend using your own domain though. Use a provider that lets you BYO your domain. Just make sure you get your MX records correct with your DNS provider, most email providers have documentation for this.
The hard thing about email is getting all your contacts to use your he address, it is not migrating your email history. So owing the domain is the most important thing you can do.
You do not have to own your email server, if you have the domain you can go wherever.
You do then have to defend your domain name, which means making sure it will not expire and is locked.
I did my own email server for a while using Mail in a Box. It’s not hard, but it’s a hassle.
Now I just pay like $36 a year I think for Purelymail. Works great.
Sorry, but you saying you’re tired after one switch is pretty funny. Many people here have gone through this several times for many different services etc. You have no idea what being tired actually means in this case.
The only reasonably future proof solution is to get your own domain, and redirect emails sent to @yourdomain.com to your email provider.
Then you can freely change providers in the future but your email addresses stay the same. Doing that costs very little and doesn’t require any self hosting, just buying a domain. Looks professional too.
yes but doesnt that just get flagged as spam?
also many services require a google or apple address to be viable
yes but doesnt that just get flagged as spam?
If you’re willing to run “mail-in-a-box”, with full control of the DNS for your domain name, it sets up all of the security DNS records to not get flagged as spam.
If you’re unwilling or unable to let mail-in-a-box control the full DNS for your domain, mail-in-a-box still has a page that will list every DNS record that needs add to your un-self-hosted DNS. It is many many DNS records, for best spam protection.
My other concern was receiving spam.
But the default spam filter in mail-in-a-box felt immediately noticeably (but just anecdotally) better than the one built into Proton. Which surprised me. I had assumed that I would give up some spam filter quality by self-hosting.
No, your emails are still sent from your providers servers and are signed by Proton/Tuta/Gmail/whatever you choose to use. Your domain is the from: field but it was sent by the actual email provider with all the trust behind it.
I never ran into something requiring a Google/Apple address. Some may require a Google account, but you can create a Google account with any email address. You don’t actually need to use Gmail on your Google account.
Canceled mine. Only did it for a month when Mulvad had their shit exposed. Lord. I feel for those who have to fully migrate.
As much as I think this Andy fellow is a douche, I appreciate Proton is encrypting all my stuff, which is still way better than gmail. For that, I will continue paying for the service. It’s just so much work to switch over email - I don’t want to have to do it again.
I mean it only matters if the person you communicate with is also on Proton. All correspondence you have with anyone using Outlook/Gmail will still allow Microsoft/Google to read your emails
I am, once again, offering to take over as CEO of Proton.
My work focuses on nonprofit-stakeholder-government relations. Specifically how organizations mediate between state agencies and stakeholders. No agenda beyond aligning mission, vision, and values, and keeping it that way.
Reach out if you prefer that to help guide Proton somewhere other than the trash bin of distrust.
Ok it is yours good luck
Your confidence in my abilities is both recognized and appreciated.
I’ve heard enough. If I was on the board, you’d have my vote. ✅
You habe my vote!
Huzzah! I’m getting more votes than I ever did for school government!
All you have to do as a CEO is shut the fuck up and let your product do the talking. The less I hear about your shit views the more likely I am to stay with your product.
The issue is to become a successful CEO you tend to have to believe your own lies and very quickly surround yourself with sycophants. Whats more if you buck this trend you tend to limit your skillset as societally we reward bullshit more than results.
South Park really got it right this season lol
it’s really funny how different this story reads by the developers than by 404 Media. The PR on the story got traction before they could do anything about it. It seems like no one knows where the quote came from and we now have a flock of whistleblowers saying they don’t recognize any of this. No sources, just a hivemind collectively referencing the same sourceless allegations. Someone successfully brought down Proton.
I don’t pay for Proton services, so I don’t really have any say, I just want to know what’s true here.
the developers also admitted to the “loser thinking” quote in reddit but just glanced over it saying Andy will work on better communication.
The same Andy who also some years ago said
"Great pick by @realDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.”
There were many antitrust actions filed before Trump and during Biden (against Microsoft, IBM, standard oil etc). Calling Trump a friend of the little guys just because he added some more is either missing the mark completely at best, manipulative at worst. Tariffs, Trump coins, Melanie coins all were designed to funnel money from the little guys to the big guys. How do you trust the decisions of a person that makes such a comment so confidently. This is your typical run of the mill billionaire or wanna-be a billionaire thinking they have brilliant ideas on everything because they were successful in one venture.
AI/tech bro hate bandwagon. All aboard.
It’s a hot topic. If CEO/CTO didn’t want to alienate users, they should’ve kept their mouths shut lmao.
The problem with CEOs and tech bros is they think I give a shit what they’ve got to say. All of them. Elon is the worst on this, has to have an opinion on everything, just STFU.
I mean, I do give a shit what they say.
Andy Yen said “I’m going to fuck up a service you rely on.”
I took them at their word and canceled.
He’s literally why I never signed up with Proton. Bullett dodged.
