https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469

Mullvad co-founder donated money to a Swedish political party that wants to limit African immigration to Sweden

Tor isn't saying 'This speech should not be allowed', they're saying 'This speech is speech we disagree with, and don't want associated with TOR'.

You surely recognized that your second paragraph directly contradicts your first as you wrote this?

Free speech is about government making certain forms of speech illegal. Criticism of people/ideas and freedom of association are themselves acts of free speech.

Freedom of speech does not equate to freedom from all consequences, like disapproval and discontinuation of business relationships. If, for example, you advocate for the legalization of making CSAM, expect to be made a social pariah.

> Free speech is in essence, absolute.

Your point is moot. If speech is entirely absolute until violence is threatened, some of the most destructive crimes in modern society would become entirely legal.

Even under U.S. law, free speech has well-defined limits.

You’re already making concessions to non absolute free speech in your comment about free speech being absolute.

I have yet to meet a free speech absolutist who was actually absolutist. At best they still struggle with violent speech and at worst they buy out a large social media platform and start censoring shit they don’t like.

The thing is: freedom of speech (Like all other freedoms), is a two-way street.

You're free to say whatever messed up stuff you want to me, and I'm free to tell you to "Go F*CK Yourself"

> The only threshold should be calls for violence or murder.

There are other universal exceptions which I'm guessing you are forgetting:

  * Slander
  * Fraud
  * Treason (actual treason - e.g., passing info
    to the enemy in a war for survival)

Unfortunately, real life always has grey areas; no simple algorithm can address it.

No it is not. This is literally classical liberalism, as espoused by Voltaire.

Tor itself was invented by the US Naval Research Lab and still today is funded >50% by the US Department of Defense.

if you don't, some will say "you are not treating this seriously, it's not a joke, humans life's are at stake and you can't even bother writing a professional response"

If anyone recommends VPN, it is usually the one. Others have greater chance to be scam or selling your data.

They have a product good enough that they don't need a huge advertising budget that involves every channel on YouTube

Because they have a very strong track record of good performance, reliability, and defense of privacy. VPN businesses largely sell trust and Mullvad has earned a lot of it

Are they? I can only imagine MordVpn makes a lot of money

Free speech absolutists can still have opinions, criticize others, and choose who to associate with. They're not advocating for censorship or legal penalties for speech.

I interpreted this as just a clumsy rewording of the old quote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

Free speech advocates support the right of everyone to set up a stall in the marketplace of ideas, but don't have to support every idea that sets up a stall.

A publisher of gay erotica might support free speech, and find themselves alongside revolutionary communists, hitler-heiling nazis and radical islamists distributing bomb-making manuals - but the groups aren't allies or friends outside of that.

Despite your implication how is Oreboro Party far-right, wikipedia actually states they are:

characterized as left-wing, right-wing, populist, nationalist, and conservative

and:

Ideology: Populism, Swedish nationalism, Left-conservatism, Anti-corruption, Anti-establishment, Anti-immigration

Political position: Syncretic

So basically everyone can (dis)like it for some reason...

It's ok, everything Wikipedia doesn't like it calls a "far-right conspiracy theory"

Like the issue of the grooming gangs in the UK

Örebro Party is also pro-surveillance.

Every single country on earth participates in remigration, it is not ethnic cleansing by any stretch, given the amount of white people being deported from the US, Europe and other places all the time.

Europe has this absurdist political compass that calls any anti-immigration party "far-right", even when their official party platform is center-left or far-left in every single other respect (like Örebro's current platform of substantial expansions of social welfare program funding). Same is true in France, where you have a party with far-left socialist economics and anti-immigration sentiment that is bucketed as "far-right".

>Daniel Berntsson the co-owner of Mullvad, donated approximately US$500,000 to the far-right Örebro Party in Sweden

Thank you for naming the party donated to.

It's a shame that refusing to consort with fascists is conflated with "being political".

One of the reasons I left so called "civil" society is that for lack of a better phrasing I often found the tent to be too big.

It's a false equivalence. If I design a censorship-resistant network, it doesn't imply that I endorse everything flowing through that network. And just because I'm in favor of free speech doesn't mean I can't criticize the speech of others as a private citizen or organization.

A. Is Tor openly accepting donations from child porn networks?

B. This isn't "Swedes being against African immigration", this is a party asking to renege on the citizenship of part of the population. "Remigration" isn't stopping immigration, it's looking at people's ancestry to strip them of their actual, present citizenship.

If we look at the origins and funding of the Tor network, it's pretty clear that CSAM is not the priority, although it is a priority. But mostly it's about preventing terror groups like ISIS from freely organizing massacres in France, Germany and maybe even the United States.

Listen, I've been enough time on this Earth to know what is behind immigrant demonization, and it's not a particularly dark instinct. It's a well orchestrated distraction maneuver to have the lower classes find somebody to blame that is not the brutal increase in accomodation prices, that leads, de facto, to wage-slavery for big chunks of the population.

So no misunderstanding, millionaires gotta have the poor white Swedes blame the poor brown Swedes. True intelligence requires analysis of the power relations. The Mullvad boss can do without my money, and possibly I can spare my empathy for the next immigrant that will be beaten, burned or sent back to a war-torn country or a climate-change disaster zone.

Yep, you don't hear about them because what would they announce? Day 10000 of being not-an-asshole?

Not sure what this is supposed to say; free speech != equal speech.

If all speech were truly equal, calling for the death of all black people is speech that is equal to calling Israel’s action in Gaza a genocide.

From what I recall, talking to one of the Tor founders about this, Tor was created with overseas US military personnel in mind. E.g. A soldier’s location could be compromised through foreign ISPs if they accessed sites like .mil domains directly. Tor was a way of preventing this problem. There were other use cases but this one stood out for me and it was one of the initial ones considered.

Meh, and yet anyone can run a relay or onion service in a few clicks.

It's the best tool regular people have for privacy without a doubt.

>The regular person using it doesn't get as much of the privacy benefits, but the charade is making it seem like they do.

Just false.

If your model is simply to avoid corporate surveillance and tracking its a fantastic defense.

If your trying to go up against nation states, it never claimed to protect you from that.

That's a lot of allegations.

> the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users

Tor is pretty clear about what their mission is, it's at the bottom of the Tor Project homepage https://www.torproject.org: "To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding."

Claiming anything else is useless conspiracy thinking without evidence.

> It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory

The original idea came from the US Naval Research Laboratory, yes (as a way to mask the origin of messages to hide the command boat in a fleet), but the funding statement is patently false. In 2024, the majority of their government funding ($2.1M out of $2.5) came from the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, with the rest of the government money coming from even more innocuous sources. You can find this information on p41 of their IRS form: https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2023-2024-TheTorPro... also accessible from their Reports page at https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/

They also clarified that in this more readable post: https://forum.torproject.org/t/transparency-openness-and-our...

Certainly, you can speculate about the motivations of the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and whether that's a front for more undercover objectives, but that front lines up pretty well with the US's (former?) foreign policy of undermining (unfriendly) dictatorial regimes, and Occam's Razor applies.

Ultimately though, the tools that Tor provides can absolutely be abused by bad actors, and ever since Silk Road, I've become convinced that the Tor network is overrun by a wretched hive of scum and villainy, where those morally defensible activities are utterly outnumbered by the criminal ones.

> I thought the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users.

Both things can be true... the original need for the network necessitated the mission of the foundation itself... you can't have a global network that only spies use, or you're not blending in, so you have to make it about a public good that many civilians will also use.

Other systems like I2P, SimpleX, Tribler, Datura etc. take additional steps to mitigate such kinds of Sybil attacks that people talk about against Tor, and new methods are being worked on all the time.

Splitting up your traffic across multiple nodes/circuits/etc. as well as persistent dummy/decoy traffic are some methods I've seen discussed recently.

> if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time

IMO This is a colossal "if" and not something we can realistically determine besides saying "we know it happens sometimes, but certainly not all or even most of the time."

Everyone's threat model is different, and hiding from state-level actors is generally 1. much too complicated to succeed at, and 2. you're probably not that special in the first place that you'd actually be targeted. The privacy community is bursting at the seams with all manner of tinfoil-hat wearers and wild conspiracy theorists that think some dark boogeyman is out to get them.

I'd also like to see a source that proves "most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra."