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- cross-posted to:
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Cancelled my subscription too.
Proton has always been very sketchy to me even when I first heard about it, glad I’m stick to that idea and never jump on the bandwagon
I canceled my sub today.
Zero interest in using a product voluntarily that’s clearly not being tested adequately. I get enough of that having to use MS Teams at work, which has really just become whatever buggy crap MS’ vibe coders feel like vomiting into production in a given day.
In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton 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.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
Yikes, this Yen guy seems really charming
His words are aggressively out of touch, but I will say that I agree somewhat. I tried going back to handcrafting code for a bit and it really does feel slow. Like, “absolutely no way to compete in the current market” slow.
Speed is not a good quantifier for industry success. Speed to market might get you some initial customers, but speed alone won’t keep them. If your product is junky, slow, and insecure you are going to lose those customers you had, and potentially open yourself up to lawsuits in the process.
The things that matter more to long term success and sustainability are all the things AI is not.
I never said speed was all that mattered. But from my experience, and my other friends in the industry, it is possible to achieve speed while maintaining quality. security, and maintainability. Because these are all things that the AI can look for too. Just look at how many vulnerabilities AI is finding nowadays. Just like any other product manager, you can bring up concerns, ask the AI to look into them, and validate the AI’s claims. Just like you would manage a team of engineers. Which is of course still faster than writing everything yourself.
If all you ask the AI to do is produce lines of code, that’s all it will do. But AI workflows can be far more complex than that.
The quote is talking about how the CEO is scoffing at an engineer asking for a few days for pentesting. None of that has to do with using or not using AI for coding. Doesn’t matter who wrote the code, the management of a privacy first company looking to cut corners on testing for buggy code is a no no for their customers.
Slow has nothing to do with pen testing or not. Pen testing is how you validate that the code is secure, AI or no. This is showing a shocking lack of care about security for a company pretending to offer a secure product.
Without the entire slack exchange, it’s not clear whether Andy Yen was responding exclusively to the call for pentesting, or towards broader comments about AI code.
Look I’ll be honest, a CEO telling his workers their (valid) opinions are bullshit and looser thinking is absolutely unacceptable, even putting the context of security (or lack thereof) aside. If you refuse to listen to your engineers as a leadership, you have failed miserably.
It only feels slow when everyone is forced to use AI, none of these companies have proven to operate at a profit yet
Huh? The frontier model companies aren’t operating at a profit but all the major enterprise tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, etc) are using huge amounts of AI in the SDLC and beyond and certainly are operating at a profit…
They’re operating at a profit because of their large legacy products, not because of their new stuff.
Example A: Google
Did you even see their earnings miss and what they attributed it to?
I’m not sure what you are trying to say, what difference does it make if the users of a product are profitable when the creator of said product isn’t, the users of AI make their money on a diversified portfolio of products, the AI companies are making no profits right now as the subscription prices they are charging are at a loss to gain market share, if they don’t find a sustainable profit margin over time they will have to shut down or increase the cost of the subscription so only a limited number of companies and individuals will be able to afford it. Either way the gushing AI inference taps will stop leaking so freely at some point.
sounds like a “you” problem
“skill issue” comments are rarely productive. I have many friends that also work in the industry that feel the same, even if they are against AI. I trust their opinions (and my own of course) over yours.
Cool.
Not supporting your company anymore though.
Near the start of the meeting, Yen said, “I want to acknowledge myself, personally, that there was a communication failure on my part and there are many things that probably could and should have been communicated differently, and this is something that I’ll have to reflect on and improve over time. So I will do that.”
“So what does that mean going forward? Going forward, I’m still going to push,” he added.
Uh. This news makes everything about 0% better.
“Claude, write an apology for me that blames miscommunication but still acknowledges that I will not meaningfully change my behavior at the heart of the issue.”
Brain dead CEO?! Tune in next week for more obvious news! 💀
Something about upper management just pushes people into being dicks. Maybe cause all they do is work? Even my grand-manager is quite blunt and out of touch. Guess that happens when all you do is micromanage others all day
of course, he will push. reflection and improve over time is part of his idea of slow-mode.
It will be impossible to trust this company again until Yen and the rest of the C-suite resign.
You are right. He will try again one day in some shape or form. But it‘s still nice to see a backlash with cancellations can make a difference. Teaches us that we should keep trying to change things for the better or stop changes that make things worse for us.
I’m slowly trying to degoogle. Mail is a big concern for me. I have a google business account to handle a few domains. I used a small shared host before and it was crap. Every couple months they’d make some change and all my shit broke. I switched to Google because I knew it would be reliable and largely set and forget. It’s been that. I hate Google though. So if not proton, then who?
I think Tuta and mailbox.org are generally recommended, but I use Posteo which has been fine
Tuta uses walled garden closed source apps. Posteo does not support custom domains unless you do something like addy.io. Mailbox.org does encryption at rest but your client needs to support pgp to use it. They all have their drawbacks.
Personally I’ve started to move from proton to mailbox.org with addy.io for custom domains and aliases. Once it’s solid I’m moving addy.io to self hosted
I can recommend mailbox.org
Tuta is not everyones fave right now, look at my history for details…I havent followed up on everything yet but I thought the same as you.
https://lemmy.ml/post/53619601/28192074
This seems like a pretty good breakdown.
I’m testing out tuta and infomaniak. Since I don’t care all that much about encryption, infomaniak is looking good, in my opinion.
+1 for posteo
I don’t have any fancy use-cases but Posteo has been good for me too.
Just looked into posteo. Great pricing (1 euro/month?) and they’ve got encryption. And organic vegetarian lunches!
Mailo.com. It’s ugly as 2005 websites but it just works. You get IMAP, family accounts. It’s just email. Old and reliable french company.
it may not be “beautiful” by what passes as “modern design” but i think it’s great, just the way it is. it’s the modern full page “responsive” scroll til you die shit designed for small screens that suck ass.
Try Fastmail, you will be impressed
After using Tuta for a year and not really enjoying the experience I surveyed the landscape and picked Fastmail. I adore it.
It being in a five eyes country will certainly earn it some strikes against it among the privacy crowd, however.
Email is inherently unsafe. Privacy advocates know this. But we all still need it for managing accounts and such.
Any provider just reliably “doing email” and not actively harming its users in some way is going to look pretty good to most of us.
Email is something we simply cannot live without. They are primary sources of communication to reach you like account notifications, what accounts you’ve registered with it and vice versa.
It is unfortunate, but that is indeed the case.
Which is why I said:
But we all still need it for managing accounts and such.
The important part is to not put all of your eggs in one basket. This makes it so you can migrate off of one at a time rather than your entire life at once.
Ye, I’m finding that with Google. You don’t realize how tightly locked in you are until you try to leave.
A counterpoint though, is that putting 12 eggs into different baskets means having to manage 12 baskets. It’s a trade off
It is a trade off, but it’s well worth it, since most of it requires no actual maintenance (after you migrate of course) unless you have to leave for some reason.
I moved over to Tuta personally for email. And Tuta is EU-based if that matters to you. If you use other Proton features there are alternatives there as well.
For Proton Pass and Authenticator, there’s Bitwarden (and self-hosted Vaultwarden). Which supports password storage, 2FA codes, and Passkeys across basically all devices. Also supports SSH agent forwarding if you work with that a lot.
For Proton Drive, Koofr seems to be a good option for cloud storage, also EU-hosted. They also have an additional locally-encrypted Vault for files you want additional security on. Things like 2FA bypass codes you get when you set up your accounts but don’t want want hanging around in the open at all.
Here’s Lemmy’s reply from yesterday triggered by the same concern:
https://lemmy.world/post/53735981
Gmail was actually the easiest one to separate from, if you just count the transferring email addresses. It is a pain in the ass because so many services fight like hell to hold onto your google account you sometimes have to jump through hoops to remove it–a security risk in itself.
The big sticking point for me so far is photos… there are other options, but itś all integrated into my phone in weird ways I don’t want to bother with right now.
GMail is not that easy. Because, there are places and services that use e-mail clients that are easy to be sent to and received by GMail. I’ve experienced this with ProtonMail for a while, where there’ll be services and individuals that could not reach me through my Proton e-mail and I’ve had difficulty reaching out to them.
mailfence is pretty good so far. very basic but there are nice clients for IMAP these days
i can’t get mail from some places to mailfence. sending is fine. no errors with the connection. no bounces. senders have looked at their logs, they’re fine. mail is sent. it is received. mailfence just loses it somewhere before it makes it to my inbox and they won’t help with anything at all. so i gave up with them.
same. i started migrating to proton. and have my own domains. but use them through prot. now with this horsecrap i gotta get a third thing going… and migrate there. :/
I’ve been pretty happy with Purelymail.
iCloud does the trick and would work on google devices
if you’re already invested in apple devices, icloud for email is definitely worth the look. it’s often overlooked for that; hell, a lot of apple users don’t even realize it can do email.
I’ll continue to use ProtonMail myself. But, I can’t in good conscience feel in reason to support this company with my money and I’m especially concerned with relying on ProtonVPN so that will be getting uninstalled.
This is just not how you win people over and I’m tired of this day and age in tech where companies like this, pad their PR up with promises then do a 180 on their attitude towards everyone who uses their products that makes everyone second guess them. It’s bad enough we have things like Discord who has spent a couple years, making themselves look good and cozy for the public market that have alienated its userbase.
Bluesky showing their true colors and then we have this asshole CEO on Proton taking a dump whenever he pleases on the values of why we bothered using Proton in the first place.
iVPN is a good alternative. What concerns me is his disregard for proper security review of AI generated code, because that is one of the stupidest things a company focused on security and privacy can do. Even if one has no issue with his previous remarks about Trump, this new one is legitimately a security issue that affects the product itself.
Is that especially likely? he’s one of the founders afaik, I think they all are
He has to go and the Proton workers have to form a union.
Every worker at every tech company needs to unionize.
Every worker at every company needs to unionise.
Every worker needs to unionize.
Every union needs to unionize.
Every union needs a state (protecting its interests and preferably under control of these worker associations)
So, a union?
Every worker at every
techcompany needs to unionize.FTFY
Glad I hesitated moving over completely from Google to Proton services, time to purge them completely
Proton prevents spying. Google is spying. You’re not doing yourself any favors. I’m moving from proton but Google is worse
Isn’t the fact that I want to get off Google mean I know that already
He didn’t say he’s going back to Google.
After those discussions with leadership and the board, “We’ve decided to actually cancel the re-interviews,” Yen said. “Why? Well, I think actually in a, let’s say, unintentional way, they have actually already served their purpose.” As in, employees are now talking and learning about AI.
These morons just don’t know when to quit.
Everybody needs to see You Can See Everything, and then needs to remember that all these fuckers are Liz Holmes.
So they admit it was all about scaring the peasants?
It‘s ridiculous. They claim they actually have a shortage of highly skilled developers and that‘s supposedly why they‘re focusing so hard on vibe coding. But this whole re-interviewing thing would just have made their actual problem of a toxic work environment of fear and shaming even worse. Who would want to work there? Not someone who has the privilege to choose. They needed to get rid of that CEO yesterday.
I like to think my plan cancellation last night helped. Now they gotta oust the CEO.
cancel 'em harder next time.
This was also the final straw for me, cancelled last night
I wish I ever used a product of theirs. so I could cancel it
This guy sounds so fucking emotionally fragile and immature. Wahhh go faster, wahhh make me more money!
When you foment a toxic workplace like this, the good employees leave and you get fucked, especially in a security conscious space like this.
Can you use AI to improve security? Yes. It’s objectively very good at finding holes, which is exactly what you want. But when you call your employees losers and tell them they need to be faster, and whatever the fuck an AI “re-interview is”, well you can get bent.
whatever the fuck an AI “re-interview is”
Its you, claude and andy alone in a room for 20 minutes with a bunch of tokens
andy doesn’t speak, he only types and farts
Their main selling points are privacy and security. Moving fast in all directions at once is the last thing you want to hear a company like that is doing
that would be like debian going from their tried-and-true two year cadence to letting claude do everything and release whenever it spits something out.
Canceled.
The optics management attempt in response to the 404media story verifies that i made the right move.
“Right now, everything seems consistent with it being damage control,” they said.
Oh dear.
What’s the consensus on a replacement for Proton?
I’ve seen Tuta mentioned the most
I’ve been very happy with Fastmail. A while back out of the blue they released a Flatpak app which is great. They also recently stood up a European region and I switched my data residency there without fuss.
I didn’t know they had a European region. Where’s the setting for data residency?
i can recommend mailbox.org and ente.com
When switching over to a paid mail service like this, do you start by forwarding all your your emails from google (or another service) and then slowly start migrating accounts to the new mail address?
Or is there anything I might be missing?
Mailbox looks interesting to me, and have really been wanting to ditch my gmail, it’s the last thing I have left under Google at the moment.
You can definitely do that, but most people that use paid service providers for email usually own their own domain as well, so they will reconfigure their dns records from Google Works info to the new provider
If you don’t have a domain and only want to get rid of gmail forwarding is the way to go
For what exactly? I store my photos on pCloud and for email I use Posteo
I use cloud storage (lots of files), email, password manager, and vpn. Sometimes collaborative writing in documents. I’d like to not have lots of subscriptions. Maybe managed nextcloud + separate email provider? Idk.
Putting all of those eggs in the same basket will come back to bite you in the ass the same way andy just did
I wouldnt want my mail man cooking my food, wiping my ass and doing my taxes while on their regular route, at best that will just result in them sleeping with my dog
Nextcloud was great for getting me de-Googled. I use it for contacts, calendars, notes, files storage, photo uploads.
Everything self-hosted and backed up with snapshot every few hours.
Whatever you decide to migrate to, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Give yourself the flexibility to move one enshittified service at a time.
I use a mix of Tuta, mailbox.org (for one of my other domains), vaultwarden/bitwarden, and nextcloud.
ikr I only use Proton for throwaway accounts, lel.
Way to get your people happy and productive dipshit. This cancellation is far too late. Now employees are going to keep their heads down, take zero risks and merely check whatever boxes required. He demotivated his entire workforce in one fell swoop. And for people like me who wasn’t using their product or know much about them, now I have a foul taste in my mouth for the brand name.
