> Recent concerns about a political donation by a Mullvad co-founder have raised questions about the Tor Project's funding relationship with the company.

It's kind of obnoxious that they assume everyone already knows the details of whatever controversy this is, and don't even provide a link to any explanation.

So what's the controversy?

> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission. We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms.

I disagree with this. Free speech is in essence, absolute. As soon as you start making allowances and exceptions the entire subject is moot.

The only threshold should be calls for violence or murder. AFAIK the Mullvad founder hasn't crossed this line.

They clearly just need the funding, which is few and far between on tools like this and they aren’t in a position to be able to take a moral stance. Can’t say I blame them too much other than the co-branding idea.

Content aside, is there anything or anyone forcing Foss projects to pick up this voice?

I understand that TOR is big and professional and all, but why does this read like a press statement of every tech corp under the sun? Do we have to talk like this?

Ooof I don't want these two to break up.

Mullvad browser is my favorite browser, and it's tor browser minus connection to tor.

Why is Mullvad making so much money and other VPN providers are seemingly not?

expected virtue signaling but at least they aren't stupid enough cut relationships completely.

> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission.

It's sad to see the backslide. In the olden days free speech absolutists would defend all speech short of fires in the cinema. Nowadays it has to be compatible with their brand of political correctness else they will tar and brush you or stay conspicuously silent.

You see the same backsliding in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other non profits. They are a lot more neoliberal now than liberal. Interests over values.

> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission.

If Tor hems and haws about political speech, they 100% lose any rhetorical cover against (fallacious but politically compelling) arguments like "so you're OK with CP, but you draw the line at Swedes being against African immigration?" (which is the political issue in question re. Mullvad)

The Tor statement doesn't mention the actual donation or party. Daniel Berntsson the co-owner of Mullvad, donated approximately US$500,000 to the far-right Örebro Party in Sweden. It's an ethno-nationalist party that is pushing for "remigration". From Wikipedia: "Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry."

There's really no end to this game of altruism olympics people seem to want to play.

It may very well be that one group continuing to do business with another group is still more beneficial to their mission than cutting all ties, even if they disagree with the positions/actions of the other group. FOSS projects lately are tearing each other apart based on who is politically "better" than the rest in their eyes. The level of hypocritical hate coming from groups that claim to be tolerant is truly wild.

And we see this in geopolitics constantly as well. Remember that almost nobody cuts off contact with an entire country in perpetuity, and for good reason. Try to think of game theory and how well tit-for-tat actually works out in most aspects of society... I think cutting off all contact usually isn't the smartest solution in most situations.

Who are we to say what's morally "right" enough in every situation, especially given all kinds of other information we are not privy to? We don't know what we don't know, yet people act like they have all the answers and that only their opinion can be the right one... even in this (and every) thread we see this play out over and over with people getting royally butthurt over simple misunderstandings of subjective terminology.

There's an endless amount of scenarios we could argue...

- Why does anyone still negotiate with person/company/country XYZ after everything they've done?

- Where does one draw the line and who gets to say where that is?

- Why do people insist on calling things "fascist" that are more of a misunderstanding or difference in opinion vs much more serious authoritarian actions or aspirations?

- Why are so many people who otherwise seem quite smart, have such narrow-minded black-and-white opinions with zero interest in the possibility that they might be misinformed? How does that make any scientific sense?

Why can't we just be nicer to one another and realize that true intelligence requires both humility and empathy? When we don't take the time to try to truly understand each other's intentions, that leads to people not talking. And when people stop talking, that's when the fighting (in any sense of the word) starts.

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Every time I'm appalled and both surprised and not surprised to see yet another rich CEO or founder be a genuinely awful person supporting causes that hurt people in some way. I guess it's just a prerequisite for the job? Are there CEOs and founders who aren't awful?

All speech is equal, but some speech is more equal than others.

"The Tor Project’s mission is to advance human rights and freedoms." - I might be completely barking up the wrong tree here, but I thought the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users.

It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory. And considering most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra, if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time what is connecting in and out then the entire chain can be figured out much of the time without any kind of timing attacks. The regular person using it doesn't get as much of the privacy benefits, but the charade is making it seem like they do.

I know lots of people really believe in TOR - fair play to them. I just know it in my bones it's not as it seems.