Summary
Proton Mail, known for its privacy-first email services, faced backlash after CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party and its antitrust stance.
The company initially posted and deleted a statement supporting Yen’s comments, later claiming an “internal miscommunication” and reiterating its political neutrality.
Critics question Proton’s impartiality, particularly as it cooperates with Swiss authorities on legal data requests.
Privacy advocates warn that political alignments could undermine trust, especially for Proton’s users—journalists and activists wary of government surveillance under administrations like Trump’s.
VPN: Mullvad
Password manager: Bitwarden
(or if you are advanced user, KeePassXC + Syncthing for full control of your DB)
Email: I use Tuta, but I am honestly not that confident in it to recommend it, unlike the above.
Airvpn has port forward i believe.
I guess if you really really need port forwarding, you need to look at dodgy choices like that.
But unless you absolutely need port forwarding, stick to Mullvad. If it is only about torrents, consider getting a seedbox instead of or in addition to VPN.
I’ve had a good experience with AirVPN. I mean, I only use it for torrenting, but… Is there a good reason not to go with them for torrents?
I don’t think there is particular problem with torrents. The problem is, when your VPN is active, you probably send all your other data through it. That is why dodgy seedbox is much less of an issue compared to dodgy VPN. A seedbox only has access to your torrents, a VPN probably has access to all of your communications.
While AirVPN claims no logging, with prices that cheap and already having to skirt the law to be able to provide port forwarding, it’s not very credible. There is a good chance your data is being sold to someone and/or getting stolen since good security costs money.
Now there is no guarantee AirVPN has these issues or that Mullvad doesn’t, but Mullvad goes to great lengths to build their trustworthines, e.g. 3d-party audits, not even having disks in their servers to ensure logs can’t be stored, etc.
Oh, okay, I understand what you’re saying now.
Yeah, I don’t trust any of the VPN providers. There’s just no evidence that they’re trustworthy. I reach for Tor (or i2p sometimes).
I typically run all the torrenting stuff in a container, I’ve never actually used that VPN to browse. I just spin the container up and down when I want my bandwidth back.
Nice. Good to see you know what you are doing. I see no issue with this setup.
That said, most people will use VPNs for their whole system. So when you nominate AirVPN without additional context, that is what most people would use it for. Please take care in making clear what you recommend it for going forward :)