Crap, time to drop Proton and find an alternative.
This was enough for me to jump ship, after some research fastmail seems to meet my needs. Sure its not a perfect replacement but im willing to miss out on some features to avoid funding this kind of behaviour. Voted with my wallet
The same CEO who, a while ago, praised the Republicans? How can a company under someone like that ever be “privacy first”? If I remember correctly, there were a lot of people acting as if this wouldn’t affect the products in of itself, but how could it not?
I get downvoted on Lemmy every time I point this out. It’s like clockwork.
My thoughts exactly! I was banned on a Reddit sub for critiquing him. Seems he really has his fanboys.
Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”
In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
This sounds like the most insecure loser statement I’ve ever heard. Andy Yen and the rest of the Proton Execs seem to have fully bought into the man-o-sphere in the same way that every basement incel has.
I hate winner mentality. Competition is an artifact left over from our evolution and society has historically reinforced it because it resulted in better outcomes for the in group to the detriment of the whole. Eventually we’ve reached a point where people can compete against each other on unimportant things for no reason other than competing, which was also celebrated as a spectacle. Now we’re at the point where people are applying the same “competition for competition’s sake” attitude to things that do matter even to the detriment of the in group and themselves. And it is still celebrated because competition and winning has such a strong association with betterment in our culture. We will not improve as a society until we start viewing the desire to win as antisocial behavior.
I was out as soon as this dropped but anyone still in may want to reconsider.
I switched to Mullvad and Tuta yesterday. Still working on moving password managers. I’ve let some things slide in the past but Yen has turned into such a big asshole. Proton deserves a better CEO.
Holy shit, well that slipped through my research. Time to checkout IVPN, maybe?
Isnt the founder of mullvad just as much of an asshole funding far right politics etc ? Not meant as a criticism of you, I’m in the same boat trying to move my stuff and its so fucking frustrating that so many of these companies are either led by psychopaths or being enshittified in other ways. I guess I’m looking more and more at self hosting shit again, but that also scares me a bit for stuff like email and password managers and hardware prices are insane… But either way I’m definitely spreading everything out to different companies this time… Not looking forward to changing my login email on every single website again after just having moved it to proton about 2 years ago…
So far I’ve come up with:
Email: Tuta seems okay
PW-Manager: Found no good service yet, self hosting Vaultwarden seems like an option but I read some concerning things about changing company structures at Bitwarde wich it depends on that implies them possibly moving away from FOSS
VPN: Dont know honestly
Calendar: Im with murena from /e/os seems fine for now
Cloud Storage: Dont really need this, as i have everything on my server but i need a better backup strategy for that server and my god harddisk prices are crazy…
Yeah i completely missed that during my research and am back using Proton until my subscription expires. I had a custom domain which made switching to Tuta easier
I guess I’ll say it here, but I have always had weird feelings about proton. They are always marked as the top of privacy alternatives to Google. I was never sold on it though and figured that the shit would hit the fan eventually
I wish I could just throw out email and calendars as a service and still live in the modern world. I really don’t like my only options for them being having to host it myself with all the pitfalls that can come with or using services controlled by data brokers like Google, shit heads like this guy apparently is, or our way or the highway gatekeepers like Apple.
I just want to give someone money to let me point my domain at it for email services and host my calendar without any drama or BS. Why does that concept have to be so complicated these days?
Holy shit this CEO is fully unhinged, I feel so much for the employees at Proton. What the fuck. I like Proton products T.T
I have never bought into the Proton hate seen on Lemmy, as most if not all of it came from a fundamental misunderstanding of how technology works. And if anything, this report confirms that the employees inside Proton really do seem to care about the product.
But ultimately, if the CEO is this hostile internally, those employees will leave and the product will just enshittify at an exponential rate. This is actually some very damning insight into the future of Proton.
Proton has a couple competitors that are viable to switch to, if not somewhat half baked next to Proton. But it’s important to understand for the people who have been berating Proton for handing over metadata to authorities and similar things, that Tutanota and other competitors will have all the same problems. Tuta is based in Germany which is a member of 14 eyes, and will if anything be more susceptible to the whims of the US government than Proton was.
It’s not a misunderstanding. I hate them because they deal in crypto.
You can help us by spreading this https://molecule.build/
we need collective worker power at proton
You’d be surprised how many companies have CEO’s like this. Mine is the same way. Use AI or get fired is becoming very standard.
Some choice quotes:
“The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” one of the sources told 404 Media.
I think it’s important to use the term “AI psychosis” until it becomes mainstream. There’s power in simplifying, in two words, the mental illness that has spread to nearly every major-company CEO and C-suite MBA hump. And until it becomes a meme, until they know the general public sees them and knows they are blindly confident in something they don’t understand, that we know they are conning themselves and us, they won’t spare a moment of introspection to reconsider.
“Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”
Let’s unpack this. The programmers are concerned about Proton’s push for security, and they push back on objectively unmaintainable AI code - to say nothing of Yen’s bullying to push to live before it’s even tested - and this is Yen’s response. In essence: Security does not matter more than the perception of speed.
This is demonstrably idiotic, because security issues are the “truth” being undermined here, and when someone hacks or compromises key parts of your service, that will be far more damaging some CEO-naval-gazing version of “look how fast we are.”
In all, the many quotes from engineers really do the job convincing that this guy is not just a bad CEO, but a bad person. I’m sure to Board members or billionaires, this type of psychopathy and lack of empathy looks like a feature and not a bug. This probably won’t change that, but every moment spent holding up a mirror helps.
AI psychosis
Oh fucking hell…
I gave him the benefit of the doubt with his trump “support” comments… but this is clear as day, asshole behaviour…
Been a protonmail customer for over 10 years… not sure where to move next
Same, that good will has evaporated though as he’s continued to demonstrate poor decision-making and social skills. Bad traits for a business leader.
I have a lifetime Simplelogin account because I love that service… It’s now part of proton (as they bought it), so I think I’m stuck.
I’m in the same boat. If all my email aliases get stolen though it’s not a huge loss for me. Now their password manager (which I also have a lifetime subscription for) is something I’m going look into a self-hosted solution. Although the only self hosted part would be syncing some file they lives locally on my machine.
I’ve been having a great experience with vaultwarden
What a sorry excuse of a human. Fuck that guy.
I have been inclined to give Proton the benefit of doubt with some of their stuff, but this is pretty rough.
We all knew Proton was bullshit back when they started dealing in crypto.
Fuck em.
Going to be migrating some of my info and deleting my account later today. They’ve been making bad headlines a bit lately but this paints a very clear and bleak picture. This company is completely fucked unless it has a total change in both leadership and company policy.
We’ve all been down this road before with these AI-obsessed dickweed tech CEO’s. We know how this ends.
Does anyome know if there are any drop-in replacements to proton pass paid tier? Specifically
- cloud-based password manager that you don’t sysadmin yourself
- unlimited email aliases
- also stores passkeys, notes, etc
- works on linus and android, as firefox extensions?
I want to switch but they locked me in pretty good with the enshittification and the email aliases.
You’ll need multiple services. I use Bitwarden and Addy and pay for both. Addy can be integrated into Bitwarden, and Bitwarden has notes and passkey support. Both have extensions and apps that work well.
Per your requirements I would not use SimpleLogin because IIRC they limit number of addresses where Addy limits bandwidth and has unlimited addresses.
Maybe check out 1Password. I have never used them but I have heard great things. Not sure about Addy integration though.
And for anyone who wants to respond to me to hate on Bitwarden for their recent private equity sale, I challenge you to come up with a better option that you don’t need to host yourself, excluding 1Pass as I have already mentioned it.
1Password is a great password manager. I used it in its very early days up until they became a 6-figure sponsor of Omarchy recently.
So, I switched to Proton Pass. FML
Thank you for the information!
Just adding on to say that iirc SimpleLogin is part of Proton these days, they were acquired.
