Summary
Proton Mail, known for its privacy-first email services, faced backlash after CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party and its antitrust stance.
The company initially posted and deleted a statement supporting Yen’s comments, later claiming an “internal miscommunication” and reiterating its political neutrality.
Critics question Proton’s impartiality, particularly as it cooperates with Swiss authorities on legal data requests.
Privacy advocates warn that political alignments could undermine trust, especially for Proton’s users—journalists and activists wary of government surveillance under administrations like Trump’s.
Okay, can someone help me, a tech illiterate, choose a new vpn, email provider, and password manager? I’d really prefer open source.
Vpn: Mullvad
Email: Tuta / tutanota
Password manager: Bitwarden or 1password
DEFINITELY do not go 1password. They took a massive VC investment and it is only a matter of time before they find a way to monetize it. Ignoring the fact they absolutely destroyed the app.
Bitwarden (you can host yourself with vaultwarden) or KeepassXC.
Just moved to Proxmox. Vaultwarden as an LXC from helper-scripts is so easy.
Keepass is superior in my experience for passwords
They asked as a “tech illiterate” so I answered what I’d answer a tech illiterate person.
Keepass is good, but it’s not tech illiterate friendly.
Oh I must have missed that sorry. Then yes it’s a bit more difficult for the tech illiterate until they’ve been using it for a while
Thank you for respecting my literacy level! Lol
From a UX perspective I disagree. 1password wins at UX hands down but Bitwarden is a very close second and IMO has better privacy guarantees.
Security is useless if it’s too difficult. Despite liking Bitwarden I am a 1Password subscriber and happy with my choice.
Really? I really dislike the UI of one password. I have to use it for work and it’s a pain.
Never tried bit Warden could be good who knows not me that’s for sure.
I don’t think keepass is to difficult as to make it useless. I think it really depends on the platform there are some amazing Android apps that will autofill directly from your keyboard no real work necessary it recognizes everything. Now if you’re on Windows… Yeah things start to fall off the wagon
VPN: Mullvad
Password manager: Bitwarden
(or if you are advanced user, KeePassXC + Syncthing for full control of your DB)
Email: I use Tuta, but I am honestly not that confident in it to recommend it, unlike the above.
Airvpn has port forward i believe.
I guess if you really really need port forwarding, you need to look at dodgy choices like that.
But unless you absolutely need port forwarding, stick to Mullvad. If it is only about torrents, consider getting a seedbox instead of or in addition to VPN.
I’ve had a good experience with AirVPN. I mean, I only use it for torrenting, but… Is there a good reason not to go with them for torrents?
I don’t think there is particular problem with torrents. The problem is, when your VPN is active, you probably send all your other data through it. That is why dodgy seedbox is much less of an issue compared to dodgy VPN. A seedbox only has access to your torrents, a VPN probably has access to all of your communications.
While AirVPN claims no logging, with prices that cheap and already having to skirt the law to be able to provide port forwarding, it’s not very credible. There is a good chance your data is being sold to someone and/or getting stolen since good security costs money.
Now there is no guarantee AirVPN has these issues or that Mullvad doesn’t, but Mullvad goes to great lengths to build their trustworthines, e.g. 3d-party audits, not even having disks in their servers to ensure logs can’t be stored, etc.
Oh, okay, I understand what you’re saying now.
Yeah, I don’t trust any of the VPN providers. There’s just no evidence that they’re trustworthy. I reach for Tor (or i2p sometimes).
I typically run all the torrenting stuff in a container, I’ve never actually used that VPN to browse. I just spin the container up and down when I want my bandwidth back.
Nice. Good to see you know what you are doing. I see no issue with this setup.
That said, most people will use VPNs for their whole system. So when you nominate AirVPN without additional context, that is what most people would use it for. Please take care in making clear what you recommend it for going forward :)
You might want to have a look at this site to study-up on available/recommended tools: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/ I use Mullvad VPN myself and am happy w/it. Ditto Bitwarden which works well and is cheap. I have a Tuta account but detest the UI and the fact that they don’t support IMAP/SMTP clients, or PGP, so I do my own PGP encryption/decryption using Thunderbird Mail on desktop which has built-in support for it. Also I use Fastmail as a (paid) provider (no built in PGP but tons of other bells & whistles) though mailbox.org looks interesting and is well-priced. Finally I use addy.io for anonymous aliases/forwarding and they have good PGP support.
Bitwarden is a good password manager. Can’t help with the rest.
Keepass with
rsync/unisonor a local git server works pretty well too.