Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/a-dangero...

It was also Swedish EU commissioner who wants to ban end-to-end encrypted chats and brought various proposals to the EU for this.

> Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy

Generally, this is because Swedes trust the state.

Hot take but it makes sense to get rid of privacy under certain circumstances. What if we created a political system where you can trust the government to do a good, honest job. Privacy is needed because goals of the government aren't always aligned with goals of the society, but what if that wasn't the case.

Once you lose privacy, you can never get it back.

The population may trust the government now, but totalitarian regimes are returning to fashion and love when they can skip the data collecting bureaucracy and go straight into building or offshoring their gulags.

yeah, what if? :P

The problem is that while the goals of today's government may align with all of society (which is already never going to happen), that says nothing about a future government. That future government may have far more nefarious interests and then use data gathered under the government that was trusted to achieve their goals.

I wouldnt trust their state, the one that argued for infecting their entire population with covid to achieve herd immunity, the one that bent the knee to the US when they wanted a sex scandal to arrest Assange, the one who wont release information they have about blown up gas pipelines in their back yard. I shouldnt pick on Sweden, all countries are like this now.

I think Sweden was one of the best countries how it handle Covid. Assange is a farce on the other hand.

What does social democracy have to do with hating privacy?

The UK, US, Australia, and other capitalist flagships are all trying to do the same. Not to mention the Patriot Act.

"Crony capitalist", it's not actual capitalism when the government has its fingers and regulatioms in everyone's finances.

I guess the human temptation to want to know what people are saying behind your back goes beyond political/economic systems.

Social democracy is also capitalism.

I’d rather word that differently. High-trust societies with little expectation of privacy and valuing community tend to do well with social democracy. Otherwise people end up abusing the system and it’s hard to catch them if privacy trumps community needs.

Here in ex-USSR country people are very pro privacy and individualist. At the same time we try to copy a lot of Nordic stuff from our neighbors. It’s a shitshow how those cultures mesh. A lot of welfare abuse, hiding beyond muh privacy to avoid scrutinity.

Not sure about the others but UK is a bona fide social democratic country.

> "This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia," said Yen.

They can go anywhere in Europe, since that type of surveillance seems to be illegal

The issue is that countries may not care. The Danish government famously refuses to comply with EU verdicts that makes logging all phone calls and spying on text messages illegal. The Danish supreme court and the European Court of Human Rights have agreed with the government that "it's fine" in a "please think of the children"-moment.

That's outrageous. Would you have a source for this?

There was a whole special interest group set up to handle the law suites: https://ulovliglogning.dk/ all the law suites are on their page, but in Danish. One of the previous ministers of justice flat said he didn't care, as long as it help catch "the bad guys". This a guy who was the leader of the Conservatives. A party that brands itself as the party of law and justice, except when they don't like the verdicts apparently.

You can also read about the reaction to the verdict in 2017 (again in Danish): https://www.version2.dk/artikel/bombe-under-ti-aars-dansk-te... where the EU deems the Danish logging unlawful, and the police and the government reacts by ignoring the verdict and wanting even more logging. There is a bunch of followup and related links at the bottom. The site is a tech news site owned by the Danish Engineers Union.

There's a Wikipedia page on what is being logged and retained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention#Denmark

It's somewhere between an over-interpretation of EU rules and a misunderstand of the usefulness of the collected data, but the end result is that every single person in Denmark is basically logged and tracked 24/7, unless they go completely offline.

Thanks so much!

Should be noted that Denmark is not the only country that weasels its way around bans on mass surveillance like that.

Take Belgium, which took the "mass surveillance by default is illegal" and introduced a law that forced mass surveillance in areas that exceeded a certain legal threshold, designed specifically to include every single town in Belgium except for some tiny town where almost nobody lives.

Other European countries have applied similar workarounds. They're all pretty much dead the moment they hit the courts, but as long as the public doesn't know and nobody bothers to start a lawsuit, the mass surveillance continues.

"Data retention", as the industry calls it, is still active far and wide across Europe. Some countries retain said data for days at most, others for years.

That seems to be a contradiction. If the courts (the body tasked with deciding what is and isn't illegal) agree with the government than by definition its not illegal.

What happened to the ideas of offshore data centers and seasteading and pirate radio? Is it time to bring those back (again)?

only musk can save datacenters from reaches of earths governments.

by transporting every cargo to USA for thorough inspection before flight.

Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than putting it up?

The problem would be all the debris up there. Maybe destroying one satellite would destroy them all.

> Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than putting it up?

Probably not for Starlink. You’ve got mass-manufactured satellites in a constellation launched on a reüsable, profitable platform on one hand. And on the other hand you have experimental expendable ASAT weapons.

How much does it cost to launch ball bearings into an intersecting orbit? They are even cheaper to mass-manufacture.

The anti-satellite side has a budget hundreds to thousands of times cheaper, based on average ball bearings to satellite density in orbit, with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.

> How much does it cost to launch ball bearings into an intersecting orbit? They are even cheaper to mass-manufacture

Approximately as much as a finished satellite or block or gold of similar mass. The bulk of the cost is in launch and aiming.

Imagine you're standing on a simplified earth that's a perfect sphere, with no air resistance, and have a gun that has a muzzle velocity of orbital speed.

There are 40,000 SUVs randomly located on the planet.

You fire randomly in the horizontal plane.

What's the probability of you hitting an SUV, and not yourself in the back 84 minutes later?

The earth is big. The probability isn't zero, but for any given orbits period it is low. And both the ball bearings and the satelites will re-enter after a while.

> You fire randomly in the horizontal plane

Why randomly, if you're aiming for objects in an known orbit?

Because you wrote:

> with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.

If you miss one — and you probably will without active guidance, imagine aiming said gun at an SUV seven time zones away — everything's in a different place by your next close approach. Your ball bearings and the target both, thanks to chaotic pertubations, boosts, drag, etc.

Is not changing BGP route cheaper than taking down a satanlite ? Sorry, satellite.

It was always stupid, because that is not how laws work.

Norway has also been a popular destination for these types of services.

As a Norwegian I would not feel safe hosting such here.

Of the ~10 parties with a chance of a seat at the parlament, absolutely none have any clue what so ever when it comes to IT security matters.

The major parties have multiple times attemted to push egregious laws like collecting all internet metadata in our country, and storing it for years. They argued it wouldn't be a risk because only authorized personel would have access...

Sheer luck has twarted those attempts.

There are 5 million people living in Norway and you have 10 parties in the parliament? Talk about divided country.

Denmark is a little under 6 million people, there are currently 12 parties eligible for election. That not really uncommon, the Netherlands also have a fairly large number of parties.

It seems more crazy to believe that two, three or four parties can represent 80 million or more people. The truth is that many of the parties in countries like Norway and Denmark are all fairly similar. They mostly agree on the basics. Six of the twelve parties in Denmark are, in my mind, variations on Social Democrats. I'm sure many would disagree, but they vary on issues, that in countries like the US, would be considered implementation details or narrow topics.

I assure you forcing everyone into one of two options results in way more division. You can probably imagine why.

A continuous spectrum is only divided if it has too few bins.

Norwegians seem to me, an outsider, quite cohesive as a society. Much more so than just about any place i’ve spent time in. But they also seem to allow for a fair bit of diversity in certain things, politics being one — but only within certain parameters, so I suspect the differences between the parties are more around specific issues up for debate than big ideological / identity concerns, as they are in the US, for example.

This is fairly common for smaller parliamentary systems; you can think of it as a side effect of proportional representation.

This is quite normal in Europe.

E.g. there are currently 14 political parties with at least one seat in the UK Parliament - but most of them only have a very small number of seats.

500,000 people aligned to a party platform isn't wild.

Claiming that 100,000,000+ are aligned to a party platform is much more crazy.

That's much less divided than, say, the US, with its two party system.

Any party is much less likely to have a dominance, and they'd have to play along with the others to form a coalition.

I'd argue that this is much more what a democracy should be like and much more representative of the wide range of people and voices that our countries (Norway, Netherlands, etc) have compared to the "divide-in-the-middle" politics that are common to the US.

If someone knows a Norwegian datacentre offering colocation, that has no connection to USA, please let me know.

I have no experience with them, so not a recommendation, but perhaps https://greenmountain.no?

They're owned by an israeli company nowadays fwiw

They deploy Pegasus from there or what would Israeli company need in there ?

Seems mostly to be a real-estate investment but the ownership structure is a bit opaque. Their DCs host some critical infrastructure for banks.

Oh, I missed that.

I somehow missed them. Thanks for the information. I’m afraid that the lack of public prices and an invitation to contact their salesman means it’s as expensive as it could be, but I’m sure Proton can afford.

Having worked in the hosting and colo business in Scandinavia, it's normally not cheap. It's been a few years, but you're starting around €500 per month (in 2016 I think we could get you started at €350) and frequently you'll need to take at least a quarter of a rack.

Most hosting companies doesn't even really want colocation anymore, it's sort a niche product.

That's normal for colocation. It's not a jellybean service. It's something you have to individually negotiate with your supplier. We've been spoiled by being able to rent virtual servers that are all the same within one provider. Colocation is not all the same. ("Jellybean" is what electronics people call basic parts that are commodities, as opposed to, say, highly specialized integrated circuits. Some say it comes from when electronic part stores would have them in jellybean jars. You could just grab one out of the jar because the individual differences didn't really matter.)

There are some places that have jellybean colocation offers (e.g. Hetzner does - notice their normal business is jellybean servers and they run their own data centers, so it looks like a no-brainer to fit colocation into that business model), but it only covers a small portion of colocation possibilities.

But typically colocation is just one of those products where every deal is fully custom. That's just how it is. So you have to buy enough of the product to make it worth the salesman's and engineer's time, meaning at least a couple hundred dollars a month worth.

By the way, the same is true for business internet access. If you pay the cheapest price for internet (as every residential user does), you get the same basic service as everyone else. But if you're willing to spedn enough money, your ISP will negotiate with you. Though I hear it sometimes takes some prodding to get past the "residential area == ordinary residential connection" assumption (and in many cases their network may not support certain upgrades). And it's true for business transactions in general. You want five screws, grab the best match off the shelf. You want five million screws, we'll make them to your exact specifications boss. (Also related: If you owe the bank a hundred billion dollars, the bank has a problem.)

There's several that don't have immediate exposure to the US, like Bulk, Telenor, Blix, Orange Business Service (former Basefarm). Most of these are in or around Oslo.

Lichtenstein is closer and uses the CHF.

But is an absolute monarchy (e.g. non-independent judiciary).

I feel like you need to complete this thought. Australia has an independent judiciary, and look what they did to tech privacy. So I'm not seeing how it follows that an absolute monarchy is a hindrance.

This is very specious reasoning. At least in Australia if you have a legal problem there is a full court system set up that can help you – Liechstenstein is basically just a state owned by a single man attached to a bank (LGT) owned by the same man.

Australia's "full court system" completely failed to stop "Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018", where by people can be compelled to install security backdoors at the behest of law enforcement.

It looks like Prince Hans-Adams is much more able to protect peoples civil liberties than Australias westminster system.

But it isn't.

To quote wikipedia: "Liechtenstein is a semi-constitutional monarchy".

It is probably as close as you get though in modern europe.

It's a country where if the Prince decides he doesn't like you, well, he can bring the entire administrative arm of the state down upon you. It's basically a European version of the UAE – not a great place to be.

They had a popular vote to decide if the prince could overrule the democratic government, and the people voted that they prince could. seems to work for them, they hare rich and happy

Yes, because it's a tax haven. That doesn't mean it would be sensible for Proton to move there!

How delightfully paradoxical to see democracy vote itself out of power.

And their military defense is outsourced to Switzerland.

Mullvad operates out of Sweden. Unlike proton, mullvad doesnt have to respond to court orders. proton gives up user info thousands a year its right on their transparency page.

Proton isn’t giving up VPN users. It’s giving up mail users. There’s a huge legal difference.

All entities with known physical addresses have to respond to court orders, or men with guns will break into those addresses and kidnap whoever is supposed to have responded.

Correction:they do in fact have to respond to court orders, but they can't give any info as they simply do not have it.

Mullvad stores account (kyc) + payment information in line with Swedish tax laws for (I think) 7 years.

What Mullvad apparently don't have are data-plane logs. But then, surveillance laws mandate forceful & secret compliance in certain cases (Mullvad may be exempt but who knows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018290)

Doesn't Mullvad accept cash without identifying information?

Yes, they do. They accept Monero too.

If privacy service providers have to keep logs anywhere, they lose all technical credibility—doesn't matter if you're registered in Panama, the Netherlands, or Mars. Perhaps, we should design systems where compliance is impossible and data simply doesn’t exist by default.