Link: https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/

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.”

Wow, glad I never paid those losers for their slop services.

Same. Something didn’t sit right with me from the beginning.

Great. Right after I moved one of my main accounts from Google to Proton.

What are some better alternatives?

Edit: I found this article which helps. Although they didn't really cover one of the biggest questions I have: how good is the spam filtering in each of these services?

I would collect downvotes every time I called out this weirdo.

Feels good to finally hear him out himself as the fuckwad that he actually is

I love how that article lists off, ironically, Proton as first. Then it goes on to list Outlook which is as bad as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail is a joke.

Like, why not focus on alternatives that people ideally want from mail services? Not more of the same troublesome shit.

Yeah, it was funny. Especially as the search I did that got this article specifically said "free alternatives to Gmail and proton". But all the articles I reviewed had Proton as one of the top options.

I couldn't fully read it, since there is a paywall after some text.

But from what I've seen is just: trust us bro. ✨

Not a single piece of evidence that those claims are true, only a bunch of anonymous employees and one former employee. 😐

I'm searching for alternatives too. So far promising options are (in no particular order):

• Tuta
• Mailbox.org
• Posteo

They have some differences in offerings, so you'd have to explore which best fits your use-case. I'm leaning toward Mailbox.org with self-hosted OpenCloud for a 'cloud' drive.

Odd. I was able to read the whole thing initially, but I also now see the paywall.

Either way, 404media is a fairly reputable journalistic outlet. The article also included CTO Bart Butler's AI Manifesto, which corroborate the employees' comments. I don't see any reason to believe the reporting here is false, especially after the release of Proton's AI re-interview email earlier this week.

Thanks.

FWIW I recognize this account and I have the feeling it will find a lot of excuses to refuse to engage with the content of the article, so it is likely a lost cause.

From before things really hit the fan they had a slightly different excuse:

I’m aware that a link is attached which bypasses this restriction, but if I have to break the law to read the article or alternatively hand over my personal data, then I think it shouldn’t have been shared here in the first place.

And I had just gotten over my ick from his earlier comments enough to start using Proton Pass (albeit, only in the absence of really any good alternatives). Glad I only signed up for a month so I can cancel it, and glad I resisted the urge to move to their email when Tuta was giving me trouble.

If anyone knows any trustworthy password managers, ideally hosted in Europe with a privacy policy that boils down to "we won't share your data, advertise, etc." (this requirement tends to disqualify most of the usual suspects) please let me know! Password managers are the one thing I'm unwilling to self-host; I just don't trust myself that much.

I'm being (perhaps overly) optimistic that this might be the last straw for Andy, but we'll see.

The official proton account had this to say over on that other site:

It hasn't been the best couple of days.

We’ve read the various threads and we have heard your feedback. However, right now we need to focus on listening to our employees. They're the ones who've gotten us to where we are today, and they're the ones who are impacted the most.

We love this community, and we will come back to you. But in the days ahead, we need to get our house in order first

I'm hoping getting their house in order means kicking Andy Yen and Bart Butler out of it...

What do you like about Proton Pass that Bit warden doesn't have?

Bold behaviour for a company that has a customer base that are more likely to switch to a different provider. Good thing I didn't switch everything over to Proton (for reasons like this).