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“No Apple tax means we will lower prices” - Proton announces lower prices for users by up to 30% after US ruling against Apple fees

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  • I'd use their VPN even if Hitler owns it. It's private, secure and they stand to their values with respect to that. Why would I care about political views? Politics don't change the service on a technical level. Literally don't give a shit.

    Except politics, actually, can change the service. For example, surrendering data in secret. Or installing backdoors.

    Not that I think Proton is gonna do that (or at least hope so), but thinking "why would I care about politics, they don't affect the app on a technical level" is incredibly naive and potentially incorrect.

    With an over-the-top example, it's kinda like saying "why should I care about the politics of my landlord after they support the "Increase Tenant's Rent" party, it doesn't change the service"

  • Absolutely agreed. I think when you have such role in a company you should avoid making political statements at all, because no matter what you say you will end up upsetting some people. In this case, "try-hard" democrats.

    Well, it's worth leveraging your status to communicate to the politicians (i.e. this tweet). In this case, it cost him more than I think he was expecting.

  • Except politics, actually, can change the service. For example, surrendering data in secret. Or installing backdoors.

    Not that I think Proton is gonna do that (or at least hope so), but thinking "why would I care about politics, they don't affect the app on a technical level" is incredibly naive and potentially incorrect.

    With an over-the-top example, it's kinda like saying "why should I care about the politics of my landlord after they support the "Increase Tenant's Rent" party, it doesn't change the service"

    If your threat model depends of political idiologies then you should reconsider your threat model.

  • I’m not going to willingly put my money towards someone who supports that kind of thing. The first response to my comment was a very level headed response and provided evidence that he does not directly support the administration.

    Still doesn’t provide me a lot of consumer confidence though.

    Maybe you should reconsider your threat model. You seem to be very light on information. If political views is an issue than you're the issue.

  • I am sad because of all the people in this thread who think the CEO is "fascist-sympathetic" because he said Trump did something better than the Democrats one time.

    Yeah, having only just switched from GMail to Proton last week my heart sank when I saw “Proton are MAGA”.

    Then I spent three minutes reading up on it and it’s like, the CEO said one thing about policy on regulation of big tech that was critical of the Democrats for not doing enough, and the internet has decided that means he’s MAGA.

  • Damn. People here sure love purity testing. The guy could pay for their cancer treatment and still slap him every chance because they got it wrong publicly in the past but once you get it wrong publicly once, you're out of the club. Go be a conservative we don't want you. When someone at Tuta has a bad year and ends up in the wrong publicly, find another email service to try and convince people to go too. Probably worse in functionality than Tuta as you go down to smaller and worse funded efforts in this niche field of Internet activism

    But people here do it here too to Mozilla because they don't like their social outreach programs and their attempts to get advertising revenue so screw Mozilla too. So because nothing but perfection is acceptable, push away people that may be adjacent/left leaning right and switch to less developed products. Switch from Firefox and attack Mozilla who do the bulk of Firefox development and use Waterfox who do a custom deployment/build. Pure display of perfection being the enemy of good here.

    You want people to embrace privacy but keep whiplashing people around when the org/anyone in leadership says something wrong. Screw Signal, they're not perfect. Screw Matrix/Element, some developer said something one day so it's all bad. I'm surprised anyone here uses any privacy software or a major open source software like Linux or Krita or Blender at the risk that someone in the background may be wrong in someway which I am 100% certain they exist in important positions. Same with Lemmy

    Go back to the 60s and you all would be shitting on Fred Hampton for accepting the impure and the color coalition for everyone that had ever said something wrong. Al Franken definitely would not make it with y'all. Y'all can't build up leftist communities because y'all are bitter assholes that can't move on and spend so much time purity testing. Y'all are probably mediocre too so can't make a difference in privacy and data ownership activism anyways so should be lining up to support not just Tuta, someone hasn't screwed up publicly yet, and Proton

    Reminds me of Aung San Suu Kyi. She was under the gun of the military ruling class that permitted limited democratic government and because she didn't make speech as if she lived in the US, a bunch of Americans turned on her and celebrated when the military dictatorship came back to rule and put her in prison the moment it seemed like the civilian government would actually assert more power

    It's not a purity test so much as a fear that publicly signaling loyalty to trump devalued their trustworthiness as private and secure. If their CEO legitimately believes that Republicans are better on tech policy than democrats because conservatives want to weaponize the federal government to control speech online, then I don't really trust him not to cooperate with federal authorities when they want to access someone's emails or vpn traffic. Conservatives are simply not trustworthy to me

  • Yeah, having only just switched from GMail to Proton last week my heart sank when I saw “Proton are MAGA”.

    Then I spent three minutes reading up on it and it’s like, the CEO said one thing about policy on regulation of big tech that was critical of the Democrats for not doing enough, and the internet has decided that means he’s MAGA.

    He said Republicans are better on tech policy than democrats. Republicans tech policy is motivated entirely by the fact that their racist and conspiratorial views were getting them banned on social media sites from 2015 - 2024

    Conservatives have absolutely zero principles. If they say they want to break up big tech, it's because they want to control it in some way. They want the platforms to promote speech that's beneficial to them.

    If you believe that Republicans truly are better for tech policy than democrats, then you either whole-heartedly agree that a group of criminals and wannabe dictators should be able to destroy any business that publishes speech against them, or you are extremely gullible. Either way, why would I want to give you my business?

  • Their CEO approved of an appointment Trump made, and criticized Dem on the issue -- doesn't make him a Trump supporter. If we can't tell the Dems off when we think the GOP does better, how can we proceed?

    People aren't criticizing him because he criticized the democrats. Liberals and leftists are pretty unhappy with the DNC right now, too. Anybody can criticize the democrats all day if they want, thats not forbidden.

    They're criticizing him because the things he said are actually fucking braindead retarded.

  • It's not a purity test so much as a fear that publicly signaling loyalty to trump devalued their trustworthiness as private and secure. If their CEO legitimately believes that Republicans are better on tech policy than democrats because conservatives want to weaponize the federal government to control speech online, then I don't really trust him not to cooperate with federal authorities when they want to access someone's emails or vpn traffic. Conservatives are simply not trustworthy to me

    This is literally just insane rambling. You need serious media literacy.

  • If your threat model depends of political idiologies then you should reconsider your threat model.

    If a person signals loyalty to a criminal government which is violating the rights of its people daily, why would I trust them not to cooperate with that government when they ask for a backdoor to be installed? Conservatives are simply not trustworthy. They're lying, backstabbing, and manipulative. They have no principles at all and will say or do anything to acquire more power and money

  • It's not a purity test so much as a fear that publicly signaling loyalty to trump devalued their trustworthiness as private and secure. If their CEO legitimately believes that Republicans are better on tech policy than democrats because conservatives want to weaponize the federal government to control speech online, then I don't really trust him not to cooperate with federal authorities when they want to access someone's emails or vpn traffic. Conservatives are simply not trustworthy to me

    This. It's amazing how naive people here can be just because they fanboyed some random CEO before they were revealed to be problematic.

  • This is literally just insane rambling. You need serious media literacy.

    Tell me why I'm wrong

  • Here comes the Steam defenders.

    I have many issues with the gamer deference to the steam monopoly... But they don't partake in this particular abuse: taking a cut from the dev for all in game purchases. They only take a (sizeable) cut for the initial game purchase.

  • Tell me why I'm wrong

    The premise is already wrong.
    There was no promise or loyalty, not even close.

  • The premise is already wrong.
    There was no promise or loyalty, not even close.

    He endorsed the republican party. He said we should clean house of democrats. Is that not declaring party loyalty? It was also a completely unnecessary comment, in response to nothing. It was shortly after Trump's election when every CEO went out of their way to kowtow to the new regime. Its transparently a loyalty pledge to the new boss

  • Why? Idiots thinking they know more than they do won't be stopped by this. Also if we wanted to round humanities and liberal arts by making it mandatory to pass analysis, linear algebra, organic chemistry and classical physics would just lead to much more people not graduating anything.

    School is for a general education. Academia is for specialization.

    I can only speak for myself... But I had 2+ years at university before declaring a (STEM) major, allowing me to take courses in political science, history, etc.

    So, as someone with a STEM degree, in a field of specialists who have zero understanding of the real world outside of their field, the difference is instantly recognizable.

    The idea that a more well rounded education can ever be a bad thing is just straight up ignorant and it comes off as some sort of insecurity on your part.

  • Andy Yen went out of his way to criticize Democrats on antitrust, which is how you can tell it's actually a pro-Trump position unsupported by the actual facts.

    I like Gail Slater. She's possibly the best choice among people who Trump likes, to head DOJ's Antitrust Division. She has bipartisan bona fides.

    But to say that Democrats, after 4 years of Lina Khan leading the FTC, and a bunch of the reforms that the Biden FTC and DOJ made to merger standards and their willingness to sue/seek big penalties for antitrust violations, aren't more serious than Republicans about reining in big tech consolidation and about stronger enforcement of antitrust principles, completely flips around the history and is a bad faith argument.

    Andy Yen could've praised Gail Slater, and that would be that. Instead, he took a post by Trump that didn't even mention Democrats, and made it about how the Democrats are bad on taking on big tech. That's the problem everyone had with it.

    Andy praised Gail Slater publicly, and they even worked together.

  • He endorsed the republican party. He said we should clean house of democrats. Is that not declaring party loyalty? It was also a completely unnecessary comment, in response to nothing. It was shortly after Trump's election when every CEO went out of their way to kowtow to the new regime. Its transparently a loyalty pledge to the new boss

    He didn't endorse the republican party.

    The fact that you inflate the meaning of that tweet to make it more meaningful than it is, doesn't mean he did anything of the sort.
    The tweet happened after the election but before the government, and it was an endorsement of the antitrust appointee. He also expressed his opinion that republicans were more likely than democrats to fight big tech monopolies in the antitrust space. This is far from an endorsement.

    It was also a completely unnecessary comment, in response to nothing.

    It was in response to Trump's tweet about the antitrust appointee. I would say quite relevant context for a tweet about the antitrust appointee.

    It was unnecessary, true. Like every tweet. He expressed his unnecessary opinion, the same way we are doing now.

  • I can only speak for myself... But I had 2+ years at university before declaring a (STEM) major, allowing me to take courses in political science, history, etc.

    So, as someone with a STEM degree, in a field of specialists who have zero understanding of the real world outside of their field, the difference is instantly recognizable.

    The idea that a more well rounded education can ever be a bad thing is just straight up ignorant and it comes off as some sort of insecurity on your part.

    Nobody is kept from taking additional education if they want to, like you did. But the general education should be from school and school education needs to define the standard of what everyone should know or should at least have known at some point so he or she can refresh upon it.

    If you make it mandatory to make academic education contain every subject like school did, you will end up with programs taking 20 years instead of 5 years to graduate. If you want to discriminate against certain subjects you end up in the same trap of defining certain subjects as relevant and others as irrelevant, like the criticized "STEM-lords"

  • Maybe you should reconsider your threat model. You seem to be very light on information. If political views is an issue than you're the issue.

    Political views are 100% the issue, they drive all other business decisions. If you're fucked enough to support what's going on in the US government, I can't trust you to be a normal human, let alone run a business.

    Fuck off with your apologisim for nazis

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    cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zoneC
    !upliftingnews@lemmy.world
  • Microsoft Bans Employees From Using DeepSeek App

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    (Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism) I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you. People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended). ...what? What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation. People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies. Please allow me to reiterate: ...what? Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps. That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics. I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want. Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how: LOL no. Also, do you remember when I said this? ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?' Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.
  • Indian Government orders censoring of accounts on X

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    Why? Because you can’t sell them?
  • X blocks 8,000 accounts in India under government order

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    gsus4@mander.xyzG
    'member Aug 6 2024: https://www.ft.com/content/31919b4e-4a5a-4eba-ada7-88d3fec455f8 ;D UK faces resistance from X over taking down disinformation during riots Social media site owner Elon Musk has also been posting jibes at UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer Waiting to see those jibes at Modi... And who could forget in April 11, 2024: https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-twitter-moraes-bef06c0dbbb8ed87495b1afbb0edf211 What to know about Elon Musk’s ‘free speech’ feud with a Brazilian judge gotta see that feud with Indian judges, nobody asked him to block 8000 accounts, including western media outlets, whatever is he gonna do?
  • CrowdStrike Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

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    This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/
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    ulrich@feddit.orgU
    If you want a narrative, look at all the full-price $250k Roadster pre-orders they've been holding onto for like 8 years now with zero signs of production and complete silence for the last...5 years?
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    Apparently, it was required to be allowed in that state: Reading a bit more, during the sentencing phase in that state people making victim impact statements can choose their format for expression, and it's entirely allowed to make statements about what other people would say. So the judge didn't actually have grounds to deny it. No jury during that phase, so it's just the judge listening to free form requests in both directions. It's gross, but the rules very much allow the sister to make a statement about what she believes her brother would have wanted to say, in whatever format she wanted. From: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18471175 influence the sentence From what I've seen, to be fair, judges' decisions have varied wildly regardless, sadly, and sentences should be more standardized. I wonder what it would've been otherwise.
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    The new Pebble watches look interesting. Relatively basic, but long battery life (they promise) and open-source operating system.