How is this mildly infuriating? If this Weekend at Bernie’s vibe turns out to be true, that wouldn’t be mildly infuriating. If it’s the story of an evil politician clinging to life like dog shit to your sneakers, it also isn’t just mildly infuriating. And if it is the story of an old man surely not long for this world, this isn’t infuriating at all.

Could it be the books are wrapped to protect against humidity? This may not be the whole reason why they do it but it wouldn’t be the worst one.

I kind of expect this sort of hidden ad shenanigans these days. Which I shouldn’t, of course. But as a result I find it more infuriating to have a link to the “article” next to the already opened very same “article.” Come on, algorithm! That’s just unforgivable.

Yes, I did hear that before.

Eff me, that wasn’t intended!

I am conflicted here. On the one hand, I agree that subtitles would have been nice. On the other hand, I think folks with hearing disabilities get shut out of other content so much that I don’t think this somewhat solitary case makes it good mildly infuriating material. It’s most likely just an oversight. Much less likely a clever scheme to highlight ableism.

This is a problem of their own making having started off so lenient with account usage. In the end, it’s their house and their rules though. Deal with it or set your sails.

I don’t disagree with your opinion that war is newsworthy in general. Off the top of my head I can think of several reasons why you don’t see the stories you expect to see though. Chief among them the fact that search on the fediverse is absolutely unreliable. It ain’t Google when it was still good. Also, other news outlets may have different standards in terms of what they can report. They may need more sources, more eye witnesses. A search for “Iran” may be the wrong search term because there is a certain US politician who loves a headline and the media kind of like him for that. So there is a spam of stories about his unsuccessful deal making that will algorithmically obscure any other Iran content online. Or it might relegate military strikes by other but much smaller nations to a subordinate clause in paragraph #13 of a story with an orange headline. It also stands to reason that local news sources would be better, especially if this is a developing story, and that it’s possible that it simply hasn’t filtered through to English language media.

And more generally, war or senseless loss of life in general and the reporting thereof are not mildly infuriating content.

You are making this up.

I don’t think I am. I was in at least two threads where people just referred to them as Nazis and in a stage of outrage weren’t open to other interpretations. However, my post can be taken as all users who got mad called them Nazis. Some got mad and didn’t call them Nazis. That’s why I said assholes are still assholes.

It is mathematically correct to say that a portion of the energy I may contribute to Mullvad will end up financing fascism.

It’s mathematically correct to say a portion of your fees in the past may have ended up in the coffers of the Örebro Party. It seems likely that continuing payments to the company may filter through Daniel to them as well. Facism is traditionally associated with right-wing extremism. This party is a Frankenstein monster of traditional associations and they lean further to the left than to the right, except on immigration. With “remigration” as the de rigeur pipe dream corner stone. Xenophobia alone doesn’t fascism make. The Soviet Union wasn’t exactly a hit destination for immigrants. So we either enlarge the definition of fascism to include these horseshoe loonies. Or we need a new word. Or we just agree to call them assholes and any continuing payments to Mullvad carry a mathematical risk of further financing assholes, more than one.

Daniel is one of the founders of Mullvad and part owner. He took a big chunk of change from his private wealth and donated it to a horseshoe loonie party. Horseshoe because they try to marry ideas from the extreme left to immigrant hateful ideas from the extreme right. Loonie is self explanatory. His donation made it possible for that party to run a nationwide campaign.

Mullvad users who got mad simplified this to Mullvad fees finance a Nazi party directly. Which isn’t true. How much of this donation truly came from VPN fees is also a matter of debate. They aren’t strictly Nazis, more xenophobic communists. But assholes are still assholes and people choose labels differently. There is a lot of kneejerk reacting going on.

The company seems to want to ride it out. They correctly point to this being a decision by a private citizen who may exercise his free speech by donating to the loonie party. But they either don’t recognize the PR hell of being guilty by association as a company or they know the subscription drain isn’t as bad as the online outrage makes it look like. They publicly say this is all about free speech, which is their DNA, yada yada yada.

If you want something European, I’d throw AirVPN in the mix. I went there and never to Mullvad. And now I’m glad I didn’t and at the same time I’m looking forward to hearing inevitably what corpses my current provider has in the cupboard.

I dislike Proton, which I quit after the CEO praised 47 on his big tech regulation and before they handed the email account of some environmental activist over to the authorities, in France IIRC. They want to be your replacement for Google and keep pushing more services at obscure subscription levels at you. In terms of VPN, they were good though.

They seem to be on the inertia as a strategy train. Most users won’t have heard about this so they’re not in danger of losing them. A few who have won’t abandon ship because it’s a pain. And the rest they seem to tolerate losing. That’s unfortunate, say I who isn’t even their customer. I would have thought they do more but maybe another two weeks of ended subscriptions can lead them to reason and get rid of Daniel.

You may disagree but have a read through the rules. Attempted murder is enough to ruin somebody’s day. This one falls at the first hurdle. It’s also getting more political as you reply here. Find another outlet for your outrage. Outrage > mildly infuriating.

This will not be the final chapter on VPNs. People in government change - the UK is ushering in the 100th PM in the last decade this week. Somebody is going to scream “think of the children” again and all reason dissipates faster than you can say “haven’t we been here before?” It’s like chat control on the continent. These zombies are eternal.

Nothing mild about that. Wrong community.

From my Monday morning armchair, I think it’s a fair assumption that their business was already in a downward trajectory. The automobile industry used to be the plow horse of the German economy and plenty of businesses down the supply line have suffered for their inability to move with the times and ditch internal combustion engines. Automobile gets a mention in passing but thanks to various more or less elected madmen doing their mad things in various crises on this planet I doubt any of the other fields mentioned were putting them in a better position. So either they were dumb about their IT security or the diminished security was due to their economical situation in a confounding clusterfuck.

I find it fascinating to think that you could ruin a competitor now simply by hiring a ransomware as a service outfit. If you know they’re on the ropes, they probably cheap out on IT. Send the bitcoin fueled North Koreans in and soon you can buy it up for cheap. I don’t think that’s overly paranoid to consider today.

Wait a minute… ಠಿ⁠_⁠ಠ

It’s probably worth paying attention to this to see what information they release eventually. However, if there was indeed a hacker attack of some sort, it was probably illegal to do, and it’s also very possible that their infrastructure wasn’t up to par and they were aware of that - these are just two legitimate reasons why they were counseled to be tight lipped about this at this time by the police or their lawyers respectively.

The gained advantage in your theory lies in drivers being unaware that they’re being “scanned.” They are not doing a great job at hiding this then, are they. A motorcycle could evade this all together, a car might also be able. And the solar panel could better be used to power a camera and/or a license plate reader if they wanted to know who is passing.

I’m sure if we put enough lab coats on the task they can come up with a system that can ID a model by the reaction in the coil. But at what cost? A light switch is cheap. A light switch that can tell who is using it surely isn’t. And why go to this length and not just do the cameras? Ockham’s razor.

I don’t disagree with your thought per se. I’m looking at your train reservation example and think that soon you won’t be talking with a real person but two ChatGPTs in a trenchcoat. So corpos aversion to privacy tools drives you to corpo’s desire to cut overhead. And I’m sure there are plenty of examples where the phone in option simply does not exist. Or where it cannot exist because they can’t find people to staff it or a model to fake it effectively.

I see a future where you sadly have to feed one of these agenetic models, when proven much safer to use than today, with the minimum of information necessary to get your train tickets or whatever, and then let it fight with the other side while you do something else.

You are so awesome. Not a single fault in your conviction, your reasoning, or your personality. Who among us mere mortals could ever change your mind? The answer: none. Because we do not hold a candle to you or we simply do not care. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.