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.

It’s only $1.

Don’t call me Shirley.

It’s like with planting trees. The best time was to plant some 50 years ago, the second best time is now. But it is too late in many ways.

IIRC for a while many terrorists and criminals had legitimate Belgian passports because some enterprising criminals had stolen the special printing machine and empty passports from an embassy or something like that.

Why “even?” Even after struggling with privacy concerns you don’t think they’re the future of wearables. Shouldn’t that be “because of?” Normally, privacy concerns aren’t a big plus point. I didn’t want to buy this hypothetical device but after learning all the data goes directly to an unencrypted database on an open server in the cloud, I was all in?

TL;Dr because of this dumb premise that is the first sentence:

As someone who is largely (if not always) inseparable from my iPhone’s camera, the desire to test out Meta’s elusive AI glasses was a natural next step.

If that’s your natural next step, your opinion doesn’t matter to me.

Nothing fills my heart with such joy as negative Meta headlines.

Stop fooling around with “he used his private money”, it’s money he earned with this company, by donations, VPN and services, paid by the users.

What you call fooling around I call a factual distinction. It’s also been pointed out that Mullvad money wasn’t possibly a big bulk of the donation. Because they’re not raking in the dough.

I’m not telling you not to be outraged. If I were a customer of theirs I’d be mad too. You draw your own line and that’s just fine with me. Let me draw mine.

I believe facts matter. Facts like Mullvad didn’t directly fund a Nazi party, but one of their owners did. And it wasn’t per se a Nazi party becausre they are more of the horseshoe persuasion where they try to marry ideas from the extreme right with those from the extreme left, which is an unfortunate trend in European politics right now. And I’ve pointed this out before: the real threat is already in the Swedish parliament as the 2nd largest fraction. They are the Sweden Democrats and they are probably more deserving of the Nazi label.

Wrong community. Nothing mild about that.

The Yahoo!tech writers went on a deep dive and watched a YouTube video.

You may be as outraged as you want. I just pointed out that Mullvad didn’t do anything (to their detriment, at this point) like the title of the post suggested. That’s misrepresenting the facts. If you feel like that distinction (a company endorsement vs. a private donation) doesn’t make a difference, that’s fine. I get that. I left Proton when their CEO was praising the regime of 47 for tech regulation. I just believe we should be mad for the right reasons. Facts are good.

It’s been pointed out here in the thread that the majority of the donation to the horseshoe loonie party may in fact have come from other income streams, as Mullvad doesn’t pay an awful lot. I don’t know if that’s true but that would put another spin on the story as well.

There is no shortage of c@>=s in the author community either. Let’s not mention her name again. She’s probably a lot richer and therefore a lot more impactful with her magic money than this mad meatball. In my estimation, a dollar spent in the famous magician universe will have a lot more negative impact on the trans community than a comparable amount of kronor at Mullvad for immigrants to Sweden. The bigger threat there are probably the Sweden Democrats and they’re already in parliament as the second largest fraction.

This isn’t good. It’s also not entirely correct. Mullvad isn’t financing this party directly. One of the owners took his money he made from the company and donated it to the loonies. He could’ve bought crypto with it, spent it in blow maybe, but he didn’t. “Mullvad is financing this party” is not correct. “Your Mullvad fees may have ended up indirectly financing this party” is correct and an ongoing concern. So is their tepid response to the story breaking. I would still advise caution, hammer them with public outrage pressure on the socials, and hope they get rid of the loonie party donor before you bankrupt an otherwise serviceable VPN provider. If that guy is still there in a couple of months, by all means leave.

There is no shortage of c@<%s in the tech sector.

Yahoo!tech digging deep for a story there.

I am in Japan where they have just discovered a cartel of ice cream manufacturers pushing up prices. Supply and demand. This is capitalism, baby!

This is a lawsuit, right? It’ll go through a few judges’ hands on appeals and what not and by the time the companies get their slap on the wrist in 2-5 years they will have made so much money it doesn’t matter.

Regardless of what this dumb party is, it’s first and foremost a donation by a private person. Who happens to run Mullvad. So in the medium term this should have no bearing on the company and how it operates from their point of view. The article hints at disagreement on the board about many things. So if this news story turns into subscribers leaving by the thousands, I would sooner think the “generous” donor might be pushed or bought out.

The tech sector is run by people too. Some of them are mad. Our modern outrage economy demands drastic and public knee jerk reactions to be on the good side. If you’re considering leaving Mullvad, voice your concerns to them first. Put pressure on and wait and see for a bit. If they all turn out to be Nazis in trenchcoats, by all means leave. But they could correct this internally (push out/buyout) and then there is no need to destroy an otherwise okay VPN provider just because one of the founders turned into meatball Melon Usk.

I don’t use Mullvad but I have used Proton VPN and am now using AirVPN. It’s my experience that if you’re using VPN to stream Netflix content or the iPlayer from the UK, you’ll be equally sol on other providers because the streamers have gotten better at spotting and defending against VPNs. So switching in a huff may still leave you disappointed as well.

The most obvious answer is shrinkflation. They may have sold units with more pills in them before but economic pressures put them in a pickle: increase price for all or keep price the same and reduce content. It’s possible they had ordered a gazillion of these pill bottles and have them in storage now. They gotta use them. It would be economically and environmentally mad if they put a million of these bottles in a landfill and ordered smaller replacements.