This is the quoted article: https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/
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.”
They’ve started collecting red flags like they were the Soviet Union. Welp, this is the last one I’ll watch them pick up, though.
He really doesnt understand the user base that Proton built over the years. He sounds like an asshole that was built by a Tiger mom and Frog dad.
Been using fastmail for the past 5 years. Really happy with the service.
I like how they’re just sticking with email and not trying to build a full ass replacement for the whole Google Suite.
If they are gonna have no qc and insecure code, they should also lower the price, right?
Say and do stupid shit, get stupid prizes.
Proton’s reputation has been getting shaky. First it was the poorly worded communication regarding support for Republicans. Then the privacy in question when they handed user’s data over to authorities. Now this.
How’s that for loser thinking, Andy?
Yen’s support for republicans wasn’t poorly worded. He explicitly said they are for the little man while the democrats are for big business and praised one of trumps cabinet picks.
He’s a piece of shit. Nothing about that was poorly worded.
It was poorly worded because he was meant to target a specific portion of something about antitrust. What he ended up doing is blatantly supporting something a Republican brought up. I guess he couldn’t have found someone within spitting distance that wasn’t Republican and also supported antitrust. Don’t know how, but that’s how short-sighted Andy is.
There was something before that about providing a journalists data to authorities or something too.
Do share how much data they could actually provide
I’ve been putting it off, because it took me more than a year to migrate away from Gmail. But this is hard to ignore. I’m tired, fam.
Yeah, it’s taken me a similar time to migrate away from Gmail and I’m not keen to repeat the process. But if this is what Proton’s code quality control is going to be like going forward - employees forced to push improperly-tested code because of their unhinged CEO - I’m going to have to go through the whole process again. Sigh.
Exact same situation with me. Going to start this weekend on self hosting email and then the transition process. I still have around 6 months left on my proton subscription, so enough time to move everything.
Basically any company that you give money to is going to be lead by arseholes. By definition. The only easy way is self hosting but that has its own difficulties. (And even then it’s still hosted by an arsehole)
Yes go self host email, I’ll wait
Oh, I’ve done it… Won’t do it again, but I have done it.
The biggest dickhead I know runs my server.
I thought he ran my servers
shrugs
GOG is a good company we all pay for.
The GOG that knowingly sent out emails with Nazi symbols in?
On some devices on some fonts
Come on man
Didn’t get one.
Talking about GOG the DRM-free digital PC game store.
Yes they sent an email with the subject containing two runes resembling the SS logo.
“They didn’t notice”, but somehow they didn’t send it to German users
This genuinely looked like a mistake, where was it reported they didnt send it to German users? I only saw that it was a German QA team that noticed it.
Article linked elsewhere seems to indicate it didn’t go to German users because the German QA team found the issue before it was sent, but due to an internal communication breakdown the issue didn’t make it back to the international team before the emails had already been sent. GOG immediately apologized for the mistake and changed their internal processes to catch these types of mistakes sooner.
It very much reads like an honest mistake, and even then it only impacted a subset of GOG users because it’s entirely dependent on the font used to render the email subject. The actual Unicode character used was a curved S (a letter from the Greek character set), but certain fonts render it looking more like the infamous SS symbol.
I’m not German and I didn’t get the twisted cross email.
What?
Thanks for posting this. Fucking Lemmy man. That reads like a genuine mistake to me… not everything is a conspiracy lol. If you just read the thread here, you’d believe that GOG were some underground Nazi apologists or something.
Holy shit do people need to get educated on Occam’s Razor.
Give it a few generations for the selection pressure of the market / the temptations of new leadership to take over.
Not with the AI generated images they use
They no longer use it.
I open it right now and all I see is flashy text with game cover art in the offers/deals pages.
DRM-free is a big plus.
Though, I learned my lesson and bought my own domain. So this pivot should be better.
I would love to chat this through with you. I have some domains but honestly, Iʻve been told so many times to not roll my own…
Do not run your own email server - highly recommend using your own domain though. Use a provider that lets you BYO your domain. Just make sure you get your MX records correct with your DNS provider, most email providers have documentation for this.
The hard thing about email is getting all your contacts to use your he address, it is not migrating your email history. So owing the domain is the most important thing you can do.
You do not have to own your email server, if you have the domain you can go wherever.
You do then have to defend your domain name, which means making sure it will not expire and is locked.
Likewise. I never plan to host my own email server. You can bring your own domain to Proton, at least.
ngl, I feel very burried by the effort to “de-google”. Like, Iʻm close, very close, and email is like the last thing to do (along with cloud backup).
I started with cloud backup, it’s going reasonably. I’m using something called Jottacloud which so far has been solid for me and has a lot of different types of backups. Migrated some-odd 25000 photos, slowly getting through the rest of my stuff on google drive. Soon I’ll be below the 15g and switch to free it’ll be great then I can work on the rest of degoogling
It takes so much work and feels impossible the entire time especially while all the rest of life keeps happening. One step at a time I guess
15g
heh. cute.
I started with considerably more, down to the last 50g now, basically tying up loose ends and organizing all the “will organize later” as I move them to my new service
It’s very simple. Buy your domain for the next ten years for under $200. Then find an email provider where you can bring your own domain. Namecheap has always been good to me. Maybe also Hetzner in Germany?
Hetzner provides email with their cheapest webhosting package at €1.60 a month.
Namecheap is a little more pricey than I expected. You pay $89.28/2 years with a promo code - Renews for $143.76/2 years
Now experience how emails aren’t going through, silently. Leaving you clueless on the delivery status. The only reason I still use Gmail, is that too often emails from my servers will be treated as spam
I canceled my renewal but I’be been putting off finding a replacement because what you said. It’s exhausting.
I use fastmail. Super happy so far.
I mean I believe you, but thoughts on this comment: reddit
Proton monitors employees’ AI code generation"
This is also a distortion. Proton has a tool that labels which code is AI-generated and which is human-written, which is important for many reasons. It can’t be used to evaluate how much AI somebody is using. The design document for the tool states this clearly. This document is available to all employees: r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence The security point
The list goes on and on. Same with the security point. I have access to that chat. Andy never said don’t do pen testing. It’s true, he used shitty language and he personally apologized to the whole company. However in that same security chat he also said something 404 omitted: “The baseline is, we must do this plus be faster at the same time” in reference to security testing. r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence
He agreed with the additional pen testing, and it was even recently implemented at Proton. What he didn’t agree to was it slowing down the pipeline. About hiring engineers
This quote “this is the last year that we hire engineers” is also out of context. At Proton, the engineering and product management roles are merging and we call this new discipline “Product Engineering”. Proton also mostly hires product managers with engineering backgrounds. It means we stop hiring engineers who just code, and hire instead product engineers who also exercise product judgment that AI doesn’t have, not that we don’t hire engineers at all. I know this because I help with hiring for the whole company. One last thing
I want to put a few words out there that aren’t about quotes or screenshots, but about my experience.
To be honest to you, we’re all in a bit of a shock after reading the articles written, and some of the criticism hurts me because it described a company I don’t recognize. Reading the comments on Reddit hurts me because so many of them do not reflect reality. Proton is not rushing into AI without concern for safety, it is actually being done very carefully.
If you’re deciding whether to keep using Proton, I’d just ask that you make that decision after getting the full picture, and not solely on the quotes that have been intentionally taken out of context. Otherwise, you are only hurting the workers that you claim to want to protect.
For some reason your copy paste mangles the text, but the original seems to have some interesting context. I like 404, but it seems like they do as much click bait as anywhere else these days.
I’m waiting to see if I’ll start using it.
Fuck it. Let’s make an easy open source email host and all the corpse can wall us out and we’ll just email each other. Wait this sounds familiar.
What do you mean? That idea is brand new!
If I’d only put off de-googling a bit longer before I saw the news I could have skipped this hop. Oh well…
I’m eyeballing Tuta. Anyone have other recommendations?
I’d recommend an e-mail provider that supports custom domains, so you can easily switch at any time. I personally use Purelymail; I’ve also heard good things about Fastmail and Migadu.
Tuta mail and calendar has been a real easy switch. I imported my emails from proton and just started a fresh calendar because I could and it was a good excuse to clean mine up.
The iOS apps work well and the experimental flatpak on desktop has been totally fine.
I have very little complaints so far tbh. I’m not like blown away or anything but everything just seems to work.
I’ve never quite finished moving all my domains to Proton from google, but I think I’m leaning towards infomaniak.com for now, on the Business plan with my and my brothers family using the service
I spent the day getting things set up to leave.
Pass went to KeePass, which was easier than I expected.
Drive is now replaced with Filen.io
Standard Notes is now Obsidian
Looking at AirVPN, but not ready to pull the trigger on that yet.
Still looking for a calendar. Thunderbird has one but it’s not on mobile for some reason.
The big one is mail. I was the same as you migrating from gmail so I’m learning my lesson now. Set up Thundermail today and have 3 custom domains set up. Spent hours today swapping out account emails. It’s rough, but I did it to myself. I knew going full Proton ecosystem was a bad idea, but at the time I just wanted out of Google. Take your time.
Baikal and any client that supports CalDAV, my friend.
Thanks, I’ll give it a look. Self hosting is a huge learning curve for me, I hate network stuff lol.
傻逼 ! He pays the price for hubris.
I took my payment method off so it can’t auto renew. If there aren’t significant changes, I’m gone. Really sucks because I bought all in on their product stack, just pretty much all of it. Oh well.
And to think…I ALMOST went through and paid for a subscription a couple of days after I started my migration from Google.
I have had really good experiences with SimplyMail. Extremely inexpensive, worth the little bit of money for me. I self host stuff, been meaning to look into Stalwart. Looks pretty cool (willing to hear of anyone thinks otherwise).
What a fucking time to be alive.
“I want to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride!"
It’s terrible.
I’ve been trying Proton stuff out off and on for years. I’m gonna quit trying it out.
And to think…I ALMOST went through and paid for a subscription a couple of days after I started my migration from Google.
I’ve been procrastinating on buying their full subscription too. Now I’m glad.
Don’t these people understand that there is space between “lovingly handcrafting code” and 100% ai with no supervision.
