Had I had even the most remote idea this would happen, I never would have migrated all my addresses years ago.
Fuck this. I can’t believe I’m to waste my time changing all my fucking addresses again.
My fault for not buying a domain for my email to at least make this slightly less painful.
So much for muh Secure and private mail. Don’t even know where to migrate next. Fuck this.
PS: Andy has partially responded to article in the ProtonMail subreddit. He has alleged that 404 took his comment about security out of context and offered absolutely zero context or explanation about that “Calling his employees losers” bit.
Here’s his full comment:
Happy to answer actually, since the quote above was taken out of context. Proton today does way more security reviewing than we have done at any time in the past. With the proliferation of AI tools, our code is also under more third party scrutiny than ever before. We see this across the industry, with critical software bugs (like the recent PHP bug) being found on an almost daily basis. However, several extra days of human review is not the correct way to confront this challenge. We still have human review, but now augmented by AI, has become exceptionally good at finding vulnerabilities in code. For some time now, Proton has also been using unaligned models with custom skills to do a thorough review of our code. This approach is better, and also faster.
so much for this ‘protection’
The fortunes of mail and VPN provider Proton will be managed by a foundation in the future. In this way, the founders around Andy Yen want to ensure the independence and direction of their company for the future and remove it from the influence of profit-oriented shareholders.
(emphasis mine) from heise.de
and like half the shit in this blog post written by lord proton himself, andy yen, ceo, announcing that foundation.
if this (op link) is any indication of how he treats those who work for proton, this guy needs to go… founder or not… ceo or not.
he was already skating on the proverbial thin ice with his magat/trump support.
A maga piece of shit sucking off the AI bubble with both hands AND being a worthless abusive boss? I am shocked… Well, not that shocked.
This is not the same guy that ran for president right?
proton is the absolute bottom of the barrel of privaxy washing
You can’t build a service for whistle blowers, petty criminals, and weirdos then say fuck security. Anyone got any recommendations for a VPN that isn’t likely to have security holes as big as the ai bubble and won’t give my comings and goings away to the first government or corpo interested in it?
My go-to VPN is just wireguard to my home LAN since I only use it to protect the first hop on public Wi-Fi. If you care about your ISP knowing anything that obviously won’t work
Do they think this is gonna play well with their security minded base?
Cancelling isn’t that hard.
Wow this is super shitty. I hope they can unionize. Dude seems to be cras h ing the ship on purpose.
they need to get rid of that ceo and the cto in fucking mediately
Can we fucking have nice things anymore? This is crystal clear, that CEOs of all kinds, ruin everything. Fuck you, Andy Yen.
I’ve never seen a CEO do more good than harm. Ever. Some or mostly neutral, but most are actively demential to a business and the world. The only real use they even have is to resign/get fired when the company fucks up enough to need the appearance of accountability.
The optimum CEO (symbolic image):
He’s just idly hanging around until it’s time to suck up some punches.
Can they force Yen out in anyway and save the brand?
It’s already ruined
I was considering buying their subscription but that’s going to be a tough sell after reading this. Anyone have any good alternatives?
Tuta is probably the closest direct replacement.
I left Proton though for Fastmail. Ultimately I just needed a Gmail replacement and it ticked all of my boxes. If I need to encrypt email I’ll just do it myself with OpenPGP.
How does that work to use openPGP, If someone else is also not on the same platform? Or is that an issue with proton as well?
No
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.
Holy fuckin shit, what a jackass
I was out as soon as this dropped but anyone still in may want to reconsider.
He was actually correct on that one, and Gail was ousted shortly after for not complying with the tyrant.
His statements in response were much less accurate
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’m not at all surprised by a lot of men in tech coming out as insufferable insecure weird little guys, but what I continue to be amazed by is how many of them seem to not understand how technology works at all. It seems every tech company is another Apple, run by some freak who got lucky and found a talented tech guy whose work they could exploit.
To be fair, Classic Jobs & Woz™ were OG, and Jobs knew he wasn’t a tech guy like Woz and more to the point (afahwc) that was how technology should work - for people to not know or care how it worked under the hood.
But since the explosion of social media, yeah, way too many “companies” run by nerd hitlers getting traction for garbage “products”. There are good products out there but they don’t have the reach because they aren’t in the pedo cabal. *cough* metaphorically speaking *cough*
Yeah, Jobs didn’t kid himself to think he had the skills, he only fooled his cult. And he was great salesman, so it’s not a perfect comparison.
well, actually, that talented tech guy (Jobs). founded the company and was later forced out. he got back in when they came back and groveled as he was developing NeXTStep OS and hardware.
but point understood.
I was thinking of Woz.
It’s impossible to argue that Jobs didn’t have a sharp eye for marketing, but most of the brilliance Apple got famous for was other people’s work paired with Jobs’ marketing. And Jobs was a complete fucking weirdo, from abusing his employees to dying because he refused to accept other forms of cancer treatment than eating fucking fruit.
Time for them to jettison this asshole.
I wonder why revenue is flat. Could it be the CEO making dumb statements which alienate their user base?
I bet it’s that. I bet management of the niche company doesn’t understand their market and why they got popular in the first place.
Now I’ve got to figure out replacements for their services.
VPN -> Mozilla VPN? Mail Relay -> Firefox Relay? Mail -> Tuta? (Need ~5 custom domains and lots of email addresses) Calendar -> Tuta? Drive -> ??? Docs -> ??? Notes -> ???
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
Proton products have been great for me, I use them all every day. Not renewing when my sub is up and I’ll quote Andy Yen as why.
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.
I don’t really care if they hand metadata to authorities. I want to replace “we give you free services, in return we spy on you, then we ALSO want you to pay us later and we’ll still spy on you” with “pay us for our services, we literally can’t spy on you bc of encryption”.
Whoever has that will get my money, (well, except Proton because fuck that CEO).
You’d be surprised at how many people on Lemmy have decided Proton is lying to people and secretly sharing all your data with US authorities because of the handful of times they have been ordered to by law hand over metadata that does not include the content of their data.
These people then say to ditch Proton and use Tutanota instead as if they they somehow won’t be compelled to do the exact same thing.
I haven’t seen this view. I mostly see people defending Andy Yen when anyone brings up the first red flags he dropped
Lemmy is odd. Its more tech aware then reddit yet some how just had ignorant and stupid as reddit on tech related matters.
I think it’s just anyone who actually understands or has a reasonable take don’t bother engaging with the stupid.
While the idiots open their mouths.
Proton ain’t perfect and yen is an idiot. But some one the claims I’ve seen about proton baffle me.
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.
Be careful though, just like “Trump Derangement Syndrome” got swapped from meaning people crazed for Trump to meaning crazed against Trump… AI psychosis could be twisted by the media (tech bro owned) into “people who dislike AI are crazy.”
i apologize, not to throw shade at you because I fully agree with the comment, but
let's unpack thisis a bit of a trigger phrase along the lines ofsit with that a minuteornot just x, but yLoad bearing comment.
You’re right to push back on this.
Yup, totally. AI outputs also killed my confidence using hyphens mid-sentence (but I still do it because it’s just how I think). But thanks, I’ll actually make a note to stop using that AI-hijacked phrasing…
