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Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party (www.theregister.com)
submitted 6 days ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49722402

Swedish VPN vendor Mullvad is facing a backlash from some customers after co-founder Daniel Berntsson personally donated SEK 5 million (£385,000, $519,000) to the controversial populist Örebropartiet, which is running in Sweden's national elections for the first time.

Berntsson has this week published a blog post explaining the donation, alongside posts titled "Immigration," "Political individualism," and "Moral individualism." Before that, he had not posted since 2019.

The flurry of posts follows weeks of customer criticism over the donation – for example, Finnish blog Moonwriting's post "I'm done with Mullvad." Another blog, Unutterable, is more direct: "Mullvad funding the far-right and the problem with tech company ownership." The Hacker News discussion thread about the donations has reached a remarkable 1,784 comments so far.

Mullvad was co-founded and is still jointly owned and run by two CEOs, Berntsson and Fredrik Strömberg. Its name, as reflected in the company's logo, is Swedish for "mole." It also offers the Mullvad Browser, a privacy-enhanced fork of Firefox ESR co-developed with the Tor Project. Swedish socialist newspaper Flamman ("The Flame") revealed the donation in its story "High-profile techie gives millions to the Örebro Party."

In a post on X, the company said it was devoted to freedom of speech and tolerance, saying: "It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission, in the same way that someone's opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn't."

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[–] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Proton vpn is pretty good, except on Linux where the client is horrendous. The Killswitch is very unreliable there. When it fails, it sends your machine right back to the internet instead of blocking the connection completely like it’s supposed to.

I have a paid proton email level, which gives me (I think?) one active VPN tunnel to use.

I tried it out and it works fine with the standard openvpn client on linux. I always set up my own killswitch, which is easy with ufw. You block all traffic except allow the VPN interface and IP. Bulletproof.

But what I really want is wireguard! I didn't know I wanted it, til I tried it. It's a lot nicer IMO than openvpn.

[–] dreamkeeper@literature.cafe 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Hmm, maybe I can try the ufw approach then. Wish I knew about that before I installed gnome. Thanks for the tip.

[–] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago

YW!

Here's what mine looks like, but I'm redacting the tunnel IPs and port numbers. You might have to add an allow for DNS in there depending on your VPN,

xx.xx.xx.xx xxxxx    ALLOW OUT   Anywhere   <-- the VPN endpoint IP and port
Anywhere             ALLOW OUT   Anywhere on XXXXXXX <-- the interface name
Anywhere             DENY OUT    Anywhere   <-- block all but the VPN tunnel