You must log in or register to comment.
Ahh, here’s the largest part of the problem.
They said they felt not much could have happened due to Yen having the majority of Proton’s shares.
Maybe in a few years we’ll get like a Neutron-fork without any dirty Yen-hands…
I sort of get where he is coming from. AI has made shockingly fast rapid advances in being able to code. AI code should definitely be pentested, even if it’s just with more AI.
There are many developers and tech privacy enthusiasts who hate AI coding for whatever reason, and I get his perspective. He just isn’t being very strategic because he’s acting like a normal CEO and not caring that much about emotional impact because he’s in a leadership position, forgetting that a privacy-focused user base will not tolerate typical CEO behavior.
I already have real fears regarding Proton. What sort of privacy company doesn’t accept Monero??? What sort of privacy company uses US-based Zendesk which could be required to cooperate with a police state with a secret dragnet warrant??? Proton has a very active fraud/abuse detection system. Even if it is necessary, how could that be technically possible if messages are encrypted???
But we should also remember that if you are a poor person in a repressed regime, you can get free Proton services to help get you more access to information. They are very nice about that. Who made that choice so that a poor person in a poor country can get these services for free if they are poor? Andy Yen made that decision.
People make mistakes and if Andy Yen realizes he needs to be more emotionally intelligent and aware and tries to change, perhaps people should be willing to forgive him. Proton does a lot of good overall despite recent concerning behavior.
I will also add that it’s concerning that their AI Lumo is integrated into so much potentially and it’s not clear where the processing occurs, if the processing itself is encrypted during the processing, and what models are used. For example, if Lumo is using US-based company data centers in the US and the model has to be given unencrypted data to process, then in theory if there’s a gag-order demand on the data center, all of that information can be extracted. I see very little information about that, which is concerning.
Cancelled my subscription too.
My subscription end in march, and I won’t renew it.
Good part, I have 4 months to find an alternative.
I canceled my sub today.
Zero interest in using a product voluntarily that’s clearly not being tested adequately. I get enough of that having to use MS Teams at work, which has really just become whatever buggy crap MS’ vibe coders feel like vomiting into production in a given day.
Proton has always been very sketchy to me even when I first heard about it, glad I’m stick to that idea and never jump on the bandwagon
Cool.
Not supporting your company anymore though.
It will be impossible to trust this company again until Yen and the rest of the C-suite resign.
I’m slowly trying to degoogle. Mail is a big concern for me. I have a google business account to handle a few domains. I used a small shared host before and it was crap. Every couple months they’d make some change and all my shit broke. I switched to Google because I knew it would be reliable and largely set and forget. It’s been that. I hate Google though. So if not proton, then who?
I think Tuta and mailbox.org are generally recommended, but I use Posteo which has been fine
Tuta uses walled garden closed source apps. Posteo does not support custom domains unless you do something like addy.io. Mailbox.org does encryption at rest but your client needs to support pgp to use it. They all have their drawbacks.
Personally I’ve started to move from proton to mailbox.org with addy.io for custom domains and aliases. Once it’s solid I’m moving addy.io to self hosted
Tuta is not everyones fave right now, look at my history for details…I havent followed up on everything yet but I thought the same as you.
I’m testing out tuta and infomaniak. Since I don’t care all that much about encryption, infomaniak is looking good, in my opinion.
I can recommend mailbox.org
+1 for posteo
I don’t have any fancy use-cases but Posteo has been good for me too.
Just looked into posteo. Great pricing (1 euro/month?) and they’ve got encryption. And organic vegetarian lunches!
Mailo.com. It’s ugly as 2005 websites but it just works. You get IMAP, family accounts. It’s just email. Old and reliable french company.
First time I’ve seen Mailo recommended, thanks for sharing. Does it support custom domains? And have you had any issues making accounts using a Mailo address?
it may not be “beautiful” by what passes as “modern design” but i think it’s great, just the way it is. it’s the modern full page “responsive” scroll til you die shit designed for small screens that suck ass.
Try Fastmail, you will be impressed
I moved over to Tuta personally for email. And Tuta is EU-based if that matters to you. If you use other Proton features there are alternatives there as well.
For Proton Pass and Authenticator, there’s Bitwarden (and self-hosted Vaultwarden). Which supports password storage, 2FA codes, and Passkeys across basically all devices. Also supports SSH agent forwarding if you work with that a lot.
For Proton Drive, Koofr seems to be a good option for cloud storage, also EU-hosted. They also have an additional locally-encrypted Vault for files you want additional security on. Things like 2FA bypass codes you get when you set up your accounts but don’t want want hanging around in the open at all.
Here’s Lemmy’s reply from yesterday triggered by the same concern:
https://lemmy.world/post/53735981
Gmail was actually the easiest one to separate from, if you just count the transferring email addresses. It is a pain in the ass because so many services fight like hell to hold onto your google account you sometimes have to jump through hoops to remove it–a security risk in itself.
The big sticking point for me so far is photos… there are other options, but itś all integrated into my phone in weird ways I don’t want to bother with right now.
mailfence is pretty good so far. very basic but there are nice clients for IMAP these days
i can’t get mail from some places to mailfence. sending is fine. no errors with the connection. no bounces. senders have looked at their logs, they’re fine. mail is sent. it is received. mailfence just loses it somewhere before it makes it to my inbox and they won’t help with anything at all. so i gave up with them.
same. i started migrating to proton. and have my own domains. but use them through prot. now with this horsecrap i gotta get a third thing going… and migrate there. :/
I’ve been pretty happy with Purelymail.
iCloud does the trick and would work on google devices
if you’re already invested in apple devices, icloud for email is definitely worth the look. it’s often overlooked for that; hell, a lot of apple users don’t even realize it can do email.
You are right. He will try again one day in some shape or form. But it‘s still nice to see a backlash with cancellations can make a difference. Teaches us that we should keep trying to change things for the better or stop changes that make things worse for us.
He has to go and the Proton workers have to form a union.
Or we just need to drop Proton. Why is the first reaction to reform a company?
If anything, the workers should band together to form a new, more flat organization (esp., coop)
Edit: just want to add, that “made in Switzerland” does not make a company a fair or good company.
After those discussions with leadership and the board, “We’ve decided to actually cancel the re-interviews,” Yen said. “Why? Well, I think actually in a, let’s say, unintentional way, they have actually already served their purpose.” As in, employees are now talking and learning about AI.
These morons just don’t know when to quit.
Everybody needs to see You Can See Everything, and then needs to remember that all these fuckers are Liz Holmes.
So they admit it was all about scaring the peasants?
It‘s ridiculous. They claim they actually have a shortage of highly skilled developers and that‘s supposedly why they‘re focusing so hard on vibe coding. But this whole re-interviewing thing would just have made their actual problem of a toxic work environment of fear and shaming even worse. Who would want to work there? Not someone who has the privilege to choose. They needed to get rid of that CEO yesterday.
I like to think my plan cancellation last night helped. Now they gotta oust the CEO.
I still have 6 months on my subscription - if I cancel I can keep using it until that time is up while I decide on a replacement?
cancel 'em harder next time.
This was also the final straw for me, cancelled last night
I wish I ever used a product of theirs. so I could cancel it
This guy sounds so fucking emotionally fragile and immature. Wahhh go faster, wahhh make me more money!
When you foment a toxic workplace like this, the good employees leave and you get fucked, especially in a security conscious space like this.
Can you use AI to improve security? Yes. It’s objectively very good at finding holes, which is exactly what you want. But when you call your employees losers and tell them they need to be faster, and whatever the fuck an AI “re-interview is”, well you can get bent.
whatever the fuck an AI “re-interview is”
Its you, claude and andy alone in a room for 20 minutes with a bunch of tokens
andy doesn’t speak, he only types and farts
Their main selling points are privacy and security. Moving fast in all directions at once is the last thing you want to hear a company like that is doing
that would be like debian going from their tried-and-true two year cadence to letting claude do everything and release whenever it spits something out.
“Right now, everything seems consistent with it being damage control,” they said.
Oh dear.
What’s the consensus on a replacement for Proton?
I’ve seen Tuta mentioned the most
I’ve been very happy with Fastmail. A while back out of the blue they released a Flatpak app which is great. They also recently stood up a European region and I switched my data residency there without fuss.
i can recommend mailbox.org and ente.com
When switching over to a paid mail service like this, do you start by forwarding all your your emails from google (or another service) and then slowly start migrating accounts to the new mail address?
Or is there anything I might be missing?
Mailbox looks interesting to me, and have really been wanting to ditch my gmail, it’s the last thing I have left under Google at the moment.
You can definitely do that, but most people that use paid service providers for email usually own their own domain as well, so they will reconfigure their dns records from Google Works info to the new provider
If you don’t have a domain and only want to get rid of gmail forwarding is the way to go
For what exactly? I store my photos on pCloud and for email I use Posteo
Way to get your people happy and productive dipshit. This cancellation is far too late. Now employees are going to keep their heads down, take zero risks and merely check whatever boxes required. He demotivated his entire workforce in one fell swoop. And for people like me who wasn’t using their product or know much about them, now I have a foul taste in my mouth for the brand name.
Glad I hesitated moving over completely from Google to Proton services, time to purge them completely
Proton prevents spying. Google is spying. You’re not doing yourself any favors. I’m moving from proton but Google is worse
Isn’t the fact that I want to get off Google mean I know that already
He didn’t say he’s going back to Google.
Proton has always giving me the ick, but at this point I think 99% of it is Yen.
