Mullvad co-founder donated money to a Swedish political party that wants to limit African immigration to Sweden

Tor itself was invented by the US Naval Research Lab and still today is funded >50% by the US Department of Defense.

if you don't, some will say "you are not treating this seriously, it's not a joke, humans life's are at stake and you can't even bother writing a professional response"

If anyone recommends VPN, it is usually the one. Others have greater chance to be scam or selling your data.

Because they have a very strong track record of good performance, reliability, and defense of privacy. VPN businesses largely sell trust and Mullvad has earned a lot of it

Are they? I can only imagine MordVpn makes a lot of money

Free speech absolutists can still have opinions, criticize others, and choose who to associate with. They're not advocating for censorship or legal penalties for speech.

It's a false equivalence. If I design a censorship-resistant network, it doesn't imply that I endorse everything flowing through that network. And just because I'm in favor of free speech doesn't mean I can't criticize the speech of others as a private citizen or organization.

If we look at the origins and funding of the Tor network, it's pretty clear that CSAM is not the priority, although it is a priority. But mostly it's about preventing terror groups like ISIS from freely organizing massacres in France, Germany and maybe even the United States.

Not sure what this is supposed to say; free speech != equal speech.

If all speech were truly equal, calling for the death of all black people is speech that is equal to calling Israel’s action in Gaza a genocide.

Listen, I've been enough time on this Earth to know what is behind immigrant demonization, and it's not a particularly dark instinct. It's a well orchestrated distraction maneuver to have the lower classes find somebody to blame that is not the brutal increase in accomodation prices, that leads, de facto, to wage-slavery for big chunks of the population.

So no misunderstanding, millionaires gotta have the poor white Swedes blame the poor brown Swedes. True intelligence requires analysis of the power relations. The Mullvad boss can do without my money, and possibly I can spare my empathy for the next immigrant that will be beaten, burned or sent back to a war-torn country or a climate-change disaster zone.

Despite your implication how is Oreboro Party far-right, wikipedia actually states they are:

characterized as left-wing, right-wing, populist, nationalist, and conservative

and:

Ideology: Populism, Swedish nationalism, Left-conservatism, Anti-corruption, Anti-establishment, Anti-immigration

Political position: Syncretic

So basically everyone can (dis)like it for some reason...

Wikipedia is heavily biased far-left on this topic. Their logic: taking in migrants is not far-left, but sending them back is far-right. That's called political bias. Of course they don't mention their huge crime rate.

It's ok, everything Wikipedia doesn't like it calls a "far-right conspiracy theory"

Like the issue of the grooming gangs in the UK

Örebro Party is also pro-surveillance.

Every single country on earth participates in remigration, it is not ethnic cleansing by any stretch, given the amount of white people being deported from the US, Europe and other places all the time.

Europe has this absurdist political compass that calls any anti-immigration party "far-right", even when their official party platform is center-left or far-left in every single other respect (like Örebro's current platform of substantial expansions of social welfare program funding). Same is true in France, where you have a party with far-left socialist economics and anti-immigration sentiment that is bucketed as "far-right".

>Daniel Berntsson the co-owner of Mullvad, donated approximately US$500,000 to the far-right Örebro Party in Sweden

Thank you for naming the party donated to.

It's a shame that refusing to consort with fascists is conflated with "being political".

One of the reasons I left so called "civil" society is that for lack of a better phrasing I often found the tent to be too big.

Yep, you don't hear about them because what would they announce? Day 10000 of being not-an-asshole?

yeah truly awful CEO. he should advocate for the unregulated flood of foreigners used to replace locals and be exploited as cheap labor like our benevolent and progressive silicon valley idols!

Our system rewards people who, in a natural state of affairs, we'd beat to death.

From what I recall, talking to one of the Tor founders about this, Tor was created with overseas US military personnel in mind. E.g. A soldier’s location could be compromised through foreign ISPs if they accessed sites like .mil domains directly. Tor was a way of preventing this problem. There were other use cases but this one stood out for me and it was one of the initial ones considered.

Meh, and yet anyone can run a relay or onion service in a few clicks.

It's the best tool regular people have for privacy without a doubt.

>The regular person using it doesn't get as much of the privacy benefits, but the charade is making it seem like they do.

Just false.

If your model is simply to avoid corporate surveillance and tracking its a fantastic defense.

If your trying to go up against nation states, it never claimed to protect you from that.

> I thought the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users.

Both things can be true... the original need for the network necessitated the mission of the foundation itself... you can't have a global network that only spies use, or you're not blending in, so you have to make it about a public good that many civilians will also use.

Other systems like I2P, SimpleX, Tribler, Datura etc. take additional steps to mitigate such kinds of Sybil attacks that people talk about against Tor, and new methods are being worked on all the time.

Splitting up your traffic across multiple nodes/circuits/etc. as well as persistent dummy/decoy traffic are some methods I've seen discussed recently.

> if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time

IMO This is a colossal "if" and not something we can realistically determine besides saying "we know it happens sometimes, but certainly not all or even most of the time."

Everyone's threat model is different, and hiding from state-level actors is generally 1. much too complicated to succeed at, and 2. you're probably not that special in the first place that you'd actually be targeted. The privacy community is bursting at the seams with all manner of tinfoil-hat wearers and wild conspiracy theorists that think some dark boogeyman is out to get them.

I'd also like to see a source that proves "most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra."