The IT company Mullvad’s founder Daniel Berntsson is behind a giant donation to the populist Örebro Party, which advocates “comprehensive re-immigration” from Sweden. “It’s sad that it’s needed,” he told Flamman.
~ https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropartiet/
Ffs I was planning to switch to Mulvad since my Nord subscription is finally expiring next month, then I find this shit. I’m looking into AirVPN. They sound solid enuff.
I am in Italy, AirVPN is Italian, and every page of their site states that you cannot access their services if you’re an Italian resident.
Any idea why?
They look trustable (no email, payment in monero, no tracking) but they’re incorporated in Italy which is one of the stupidest countries in the world for this purpose
Have you ever wondered why usually VPN companies are based in countries like Cyprus, Panama, virgin islands or Labuan?
Yeah that’s a good point haha tax havens for the W I guess. On another note, I think Proton VPN is also a good alternative since they’re based in Swiss, where data protection laws are mega strict.
You can totally self-host your own VPN, a lot of folks will do that so that they can access their home lab remotely (without having to open ports or set up a reverse proxy).
That said, self-hosting kind of defeats the purpose of using a VPN service if the goal is to anonymise web traffic or bypass regional restrictions/ content blocks.*
* Technically you could use a hosting service and host your own VPN in another region, but it’s probably not going to be cheap, and it’s kind of a stretch of the self part of self hosting.
Could one use onion routing to self host and bypass the disadvantages?
Also, thanks for a succinct and straightforward answer.
[Örebro Party leader] Allard has described himself as a Communist, and a Marxist
A self-described communist promoting right-wing ideas? Lemmy is quite familiar with that concept.
How can the national socialist party be right wing? They said they’re socialists!
/s fucking obviously I hope.
"Allard and his party have been described as a nationalist[6], left-wing populist and right-wing populist.[7] He has also been accused of being a communist.[6] Biography
From 2009 to 2013, Allard was chairman of the Young Left’s district organisation in Örebro. He worked for the election campaign of Oumar Mariko in Mali during the 2012 Malian coup d’état.[8][9] "
“In a post from 2012 Allard criticized the state of Israel and wrote that “Cuba is going to be placed under an embargo but the fascist apartheid state of Israel is defended until the last Palestinian child has been incinerated. Liberal politics.”[17] In 2025 he again referenced the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and wrote that he “does not give a shit” about Israel or Palestine and that he thinks it is wrong to kill children regardless of which side perpetuates it.[18]”
“The Örebro Party with Allard as its leader says it wants to cut the salary for politicians and use that money to make dental care free/subsidized by the money taken from the politicians salaries.[25] On the topic of lowering the work hours Allard, in 2026 in the municipal assembly, voted in favor of a proposal by the Left party to enable a 30 hour work week with retained salary for some welfare occupations such as preschool teachers and employees at care facilities as a trial project that would after two years be evaluated.[26]”
Anybody know of a VPN service that
So far, the ones with major problems are:
I’m unsure about the whether airvpn is owned by fascists but it seems to fit the rest of your criteria and at least on paper is italian
You know I hear this thing called nord I’m sorry I can’t finish without laughing
Njalla is owned by Peter Sunde and almost fits the bill.
Minus the exit nodes around the world.
it’s almost like money and greed breed power hungry assholes…
Apparently the longer someone is in power, the more their brain structure changes. I guess the phrase “your head is getting bigger” is physically true after all.
Oh cmon! I trusted 'em to not shit in their pants, what next? We discover that Torvalds and Stallman are transphobic?
Speaking as someone who does some work for Stallman, although he is right 99% of the time, that last 1% is a doozy
The five million from Berntsson make up the majority – as much as 72 percent – of the Örebro Party’s income last year. It is also the largest single private donation to a party in 2025.
The money also seems to have been the triggering factor for the party’s decision to stand in the parliamentary elections.
(machine translation)
Fuck them. Not sure who to go with now. Paying monthly and not needing to remember to cancel were the main reason I used them.
Also, it seems safer to assume that all tech companies are rotten until proven otherwise.
https://www.vpnscorecard.com/ seems like a good place to check for alternatives although it doesn’t go into the politics of the company mostly. Still, their top scorer https://www.ivpn.net/ seems like a good bet.
That’s a decent link, thanks. Unfortunately Mullvad get a good score there too. As you say, the shady extracurricular stuff is missing.
I do like what I read on their about page. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll dig a bit deeper.
The title is misleading because it doesn’t mention the millions are in Swedish Krona (I presume).
5 million krona would be €450 800.
That’s still the majority of the donation for that entire party. All from a single person.
A Swedish article in a Swedish publication about a Swedish guy and his Swedish company paying in Swedish kroner is misleading?
You forgot to say the part where the title is in English but the currency is not mentioned. Is it pounds? Euros? Nope, Swedish crowns. Since when it’s acceptable to skip the currency no matter what it is?
I still disagree. It’s also why it’s important to not judge things only on a title. It’s still a lot of money in just about any currency that would be reasonably used in this case. At best it’s ambiguous, but I would not call it misleading.
as soon as i started to see billboards and bus adverts i had a feeling mullvad wasnt what i thought it was. sad, i was hoping i was wrong.
As a Swede - fuck that guy and the fucking Neo Nazis coming out of the goddamn woodwork everywhere. I was all-in on Mullvad, but that’s changing today. Anyone got a good recommendation for a DNS over HTTPS alternative that’s not owned by a racist/Nazi/Fascist asshole?
I don’t want to change my VPN based on one article, so I’m getting mentally ready for resrarching, but I’ll ask you first: how very bad is the Örebro Party?
DNS over HTTPS
Is there a reason you use DoH over DoQ, DNSCrypt, or ODoH/Anonymous DNS?
Proton VPN?
Or maybe you can configure your OS to use a DNS over https provider in the settings. I use Quad9
Proton’s owner also gives me the ick with his Trump and the Republican Party praising. I’ll look into it further and see if there are any other good options.
[Edit] I learned that CIRA (Canadian domain name registrar) has DNS over HTTPS support so I’ll be reverting to them. Canadian shield does sound pretty good for a non-profit service without tracking: https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/
That’s about outright Trump support, which is not what the comment you replied said he did. They said Trump praising, which is actually kind of what Andy did. I do agree that he is likely just a liberal that didn’t fully read the room when posting to social media, however he did praise Trump in that post for that very specific pick.
Personally, I wouldn’t @ Trump and compliment him for anything, especially not if I was a leader of a large company. There is no need nor a reason to make trump’s ego any bigger than it actually is, not with everything else he’s actively doing to the world. For me, it’s less about him “supporting Trump” and more about his inability to read the room and not see why that would be taken as supporting Trump.
He also did say that the republican party used to be better, which, while true, it’s a low bar and it has been shitty republicans for a long, long time. Reagan was a republican, did the tables turn all the way back then?
Proton has similar issues with leadership, unfortunately, just not as bad. For DNS, I use locally hosted unbound which retrieves records directly from the root servers. It’s not the same as DoH, though, so if that’s a hard requirement then you’d want something like Quad9.
God bloody dammit. I genuinely LOVE Mullvad and have tried to use their (not so cheap) services. I feel in this economy, privacy comes at a price and I was happy to do this.
Now, I realise my money is going to fund a POS far-right asshole.
Proton supports Trump.
Mullvad suports the far right.
Is there any major privacy respective service provider that isn’t a bloody cunt?
also thought mullvad was legit. also want to know if there’s any alternative
I’ve semi-seriously been thinking about bootstrapping a VPN service just to have one “not an asshole” service (and that’s setting the bar low - I’m definitely an asshole, just not that kind of asshole). But I’m also a US citizen living in the US, so not the best choice for the job either.
I originally stopped using IVPN because of slow speeds. Has that improved?
Are you able to get through geo-restrictions on streaming services with IVPN? They have fewer servers than Mullvad it seems. Like for Singapore, they have 2, Mullvad has 5. In Japan, they have 1, while Mullvad has 9.
Its been a couple of years but I didn’t have much luck with IVPN and mlb.tv but that was really the only one I tried at the time.
Number of servers is less relevant than users per server.
Mullvad is a much bigger company so I’d expect them to need more servers.
It is, when you want to evade geo-restrictions. More servers spread over different IP blocks means there’s more chances the streaming services aren’t aware of some of those IPs yet, so they aren’t blocking them yet.
Fuck me, this is gonna ruin mullvad, I hope. Never saw it coming though, wtf?
Can we stop with the “proton” supports trump. This has been echoing since the tweet. I understand the initial recoil, I had it myself, but proton as an entity very clearly does not support trump.
By that logic, Mullvad is fine too, because the entity doesn’t support the far right. You are just sending your money to the company which pays the people that do… so…
I mean I’m okay expanding that logic here as well for consistency. This is all on a spectrum, one of Mullvad’s top employees donates millions to far right politician is on the more extreme end of that spectrum than a tweet that failed to read the room.
Taking your counterpoint even further, if you found out some low level employees at any company used a portion of their paycheck to support far right politics would you boycott? Obviously not, which should show you that you don’t believe this should be a binary decision.
To be clear, I feel mullvad crossed the line here, my point was that the proton hate doesn’t compare and is overblown.
Proton itself sponsored a fascist influencer in france like just a couple weeks ago… You can pretend that having a MAGA CEO doesn’t have anything to do with that, and that they would have stopped the sponsorship and caught their “mistake” without significant public backlash if you like, but the dots are connecting to a lot of us watching.
Also, nice strawman, but are they paying the low level employee enough to donate literally millions of dollars? Probably not. Does that low level employee have direct influence over the company? Probably not.
The idea that you stop using Mullvad because the founder personally made a donation to right-wing extremists, but you are fine with using Proton that sponsors fascists and has a CEO that platforms far-right extremists talking points is bonkers. The claim that you are separating “the entity” from the “people” doesn’t even hold water.
That was a sponsorship link anyone was able to use.
They them immediately denounced the fascist and are changing how sponsorship links work.
Vs
Literal founder of company donates millions to literal neo-nazis, doubles down on supporting them
I thought it wasn’t an actual sponsorship, just a referral link system anyone could sign up for and promote.
You’re right. But for some reason, Lemmy has a hate boner for Proton
People just easily believe whatever sounds close enough because everything is awful. I hate these far right fuck heads but honestly the witch hunts for literally everything are just exhausting. I can’t spend my whole life boycotting fucking everything. I just don’t have the fucking energy.
Yeah, I usually round Robin AirVPN, IVPN, and cryptostorm. Sometimes they leap frog each other in terms of features
Signal was kickstarted by the CIA, so dissidents in regimes they wanted to topple could communicate securely, but at least that seems genuine.
Matrix was an Israeli spy company’s invention.
Telegram is Russian.
Reddit started out as the creation of Aaron Schwartz, but he got demonised and committed suicide. Then it was left to that shit eater spez, who sold his soul to the Epstein crowd making Ghislaine Maxwell a powermod among others, also hosting r/the_donald and bridging Trump’s popularity from 4chan into the mainstream. Now he sells everyone’s data to Google, while still not paying the manufacturers of that data anything.
TrueCrypt got shut down because it was too cool.
No lol but I guess they did it twice?
It was in the news a year or few ago that the CIA was ceasing its funding of Signal.
If that was in the news you’d think I would be able to find an article…
Thus was the first hit I got when searching.
https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/signal-facing-collapse-after-cia
Matrix does have fundamental design issues you would expect from cellebrite devs…
Simplex, Monero and Whonix are all as cool as veracrypt!
and the SimpleX creator is a far righter, too https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/114630877715286899
Doesn’t matter as much here. It’s open source and has passed two audits. Look at the code. Use different servers if you want. Reimplement the protocol if you can.
You’d think with all the trans programmers out there we would have more tech companies built by leftists…
But I suppose the leftists are the ones building the platforms for a pittance while the generationally wealthy right-wingers are the ones paying people to do all that work…
Man, after his death Aaron Swartz has gone from an early employee of Reddit, to a founder of Reddit to now the creator of Reddit. Give it a few years and he’ll have provided the VC money for it too.
Man and i just renewed my subscription. Why do people always get their shit twisted in politics or whatever, its not like they need the money, donate it instead.
I HOPE this is fake. I find it hard to belive
If it hasnt been 14 days, and you didnt buy with cash, crypto, or gift cards, you can request a refund. I also recently brought a few months, but unfortunately I learned about this just a few days too late.
Thank you! Just sent a refund, whats next now? Ive seen people mention AirVPN
