I think it's fair to say even if we adjusted for lower US taxes, higher livings costs, that the Californian worker would be far better ahead still.

There is a reason the entire Silicon Valley doesn't pack up and move to Finland. The money is in California right now.

From a purely business decision? Sure. But why does Valve support linux and attempt to bridge the gap with steam play if it's only about profit?

There are other reasons to support linux:

- Game devs are usually a fan of linux / vulkan / open source (windows is bad for developers, it's closed source everything) - Linux is still a market portion. Some engines like UE4 support cross-platform builds with minimal work - Supporting competition to microsoft, and the really poor DX software

Moral of the story is actually to use a VPN regardless of what you do, so you can't be held accountable for someone else's actions or lack of security of IT department of some company.

Once you get used to Linux updates happening without restarting or freezing your computer, you'll never want to go back.

In a world with security updates, updates seemingly every day, every week, and monthly large updates, this would be such a great feature on MacOS.

> "Once you get used to Linux updates happening without restarting or freezing your computer, you'll never want to go back."

I suppose those "System Restart Required" messages on the console from Ubuntu Server after updates are just imaginary then? /s

Ubuntu is turning more and more Windows-like it seems. I was on PCLinuxOS for a while, and updates were user-initiated, iirc. Most wouldn't require a reboot, unless there was a kernel update. You could do those updates and happily not reboot for days, only getting the new kernel when you did. Now I'll get icons and messages indicating that I have security updates available, and after a while I'll be told that I need to reboot (since it apparently did them for me instead of waiting on me to do it myself). Then it would bug me more and more often to reboot until it just left the message on the screen. I'm running simulations, I'll do it when they finish. At least it hasn't progressed to the stage of just rebooting at an inconvenient time, which seems to be the norm in windows.

Still, it's inoffensive enough that I haven't bothered tracking down how to make it act sane again.

As far as I know, Ubuntu is still the only one that can livepatch the kernel in the background without bringing down the whole system. (Maybe RHEL 8 can now too?) I think the “system restart required” message means that something was running that it updated, and the only way to guarantee that it stops and restarts is for the user to restart the whole system.

I just assumed that they installed the new kernel in a different directory and pointed there via grub or whatever when rebooted. I wasn't thinking about live-patching the active kernel. That's pretty nifty if they can pull that off.

I just want them to not do anything, even security updates, without my explicit permission despite their fears over the security of my system. I have reasons I'm not updating right now. It comes down to the question "who's damn system is it, anyway?"

The update might happen but any running programs won't pick up the updated libs and will still be vulnerable until you actually reboot (or restart the programs).

This isn't true. I have to restart my Linux desktop all the time. On Manjaro, sometimes I won't even be able to get the next batch of updates for some reason until I do a restart.

I'm sure that there are ways to avoid ever restarting, but none of the major Linux desktops have figured it out as far as I can see.

My Manjaro install always ends up in a weird state after software updates. The issues don't clear up until a reboot.

Websites choose to use AMP because it has favourable search results.

Google is trying to monopolize the internet, and they also sell data / ads. So inherently "spending more time in google ecosystem" leads to inherent value.

Isn't Netherlands in the nine eyes?

EDIT: "We will never share your personal information with any third party, except when we need to respond to a legal request from Dutch authorities" - https://www.wifimask.com/terms

As a VPN service that means it is not thoughtful about privacy.

As a counterpoint: any VPN service that claims that they will ignore the authorities legal requests is lying. No matter what, as soon as it is a business, has a registered address and a nominal director it can be put under pressure.

I think this is true. We want to be as honest and open as possible, that includes being honest about the laws we have to comply too. On the other hand, we have a strict no log policy, we have nothing to hand over to authorities accept for the registered email address, a hashed password and the last 4 numbers of a creditcard. Authorities will need to find different ways to get the information they want.

A 'no log policy' is a hard one, it may be true but you can't really prove a negative. So it is as good as your word and your reputation, which in this case may be very good but it may not be enough to reduce skepticism.

FWIW I do tech DD for a living and I've seen several places that had 'no log' policies on the outside and yet they would occasionally - or even structurally - log data in order to comply with the law.

The 'WBT' (Retenion duty for Telecommunicationsdata) has been disbanded, which should work to your advantage, but the GDPR makes explicit room for the accomodation of legal and regulatory requirements and this in turn may transcend your 'no log' policy. Please make sure you have appropriate legal advice on the subject, it is complex and getting it wrong can really bite you.

Best of luck with your company!

Your comment makes me think of a "Warrant canary" which we could set up to inform our customers that we have been served with a government subpoena: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

Thanks!

Is anything a VPN company says any better than their reputation? We can't see what's going on behind closed doors.

Even the authorities asking for data have an interest in keeping the VPN's reputation alive in case the VPN does cooperate.

Obviously if they are a Dutch company, then they must comply with Dutch regulations and authority demands. This is to be expected.

What is under their control (which I have not investigated) is how much logging they do. If they do the absolute minimal logging, then there's very little for the Dutch authorities to review. This of course excludes the very likely possibility that the overly performant Dutch intelligence service is monitoring everything from every angle (they have thus far proven to be very, very capable of doing so).

Yes.

Our intelligence agency (AIVD) allegedly facilitated the planting of stuxnet (they had a guy in there or something)

So it'd be reasonable to say that "we're not uncooperative"

Excellent point.

> the capital gains which is lower, as it should be

Why should capital gains be lower?

I don't think censoring facts is ever anything but black and white. The fact that Taiwan exists, Hong Kong exists, Falun Gong, Tibet...

These are all real things. There shouldn't ever be a reason to hide the fact that they exist no matter if todays reality wasn't todays reality.

I mean, yes, I'm an American and it's no surprise to anyone that I think censoring speech is deeply problematic. (I think telling people how much money they're allowed to spend on political ads is also problematic, though most Americans seems to be cool with that restriction. It's really hard to draw black and white lines when you get into the details.)

But when I see other people (in China, in Europe, really in most places that aren't the US) supporting tighter speech restrictions than we do, I understand that that's for some reason other than them being assholes, or childish, or hypersensitive, or whatever. I probably wouldn't like their reasons if I fully understood them, but I also accept that being an American means I don't fully understand them.

[As a side note not directed at you but at some others in this thread, it sounds like trying to draw this distinction gets me labeled as some kind of communist shill. What the fuck ever.]

Facts are rarely black and white. Look at USA reporting about Venezuela or Cuba. It's factual, yet it also implicitly takes sides.

Which facts? How are they presented?

You are confusing perspective with facts. A cup is filled with water, you can say its half empty or half full. The cup has water is a fact. Whether its half empty or half full is perspective. But at the end of the day, there is still water in the cup.

I'm relating perspective to facts.

Palestine has a UN seat, Taiwan doesn't. Taiwan has control of their territory, Palestine doesn't.

Which one is more 'a country'?

The most important and missing information at the start of the article is _why_ the OP had their information posted on the forum, why they were getting sent this package.

OP is a very well known security researcher. Here is his self-bio:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/about/