Mullvad

The story's pivot is governance: many posts treated Mullvad as a one-owner company, but the firm has two co-founders and CEOs. The other one, Fredrik Strömberg, showed up in the thread to say so directly and to draw a line between a private donation and the company's mission.

The reversal cuts both ways. Some long-time subscribers said trust in a values-branded company is inseparable from its owners' choices; others said they pay Mullvad precisely because the code, not the founder, is what protects their traffic.

In today's GitHub Trending: VeraCrypt (full-disk encryption, the TrueCrypt successor), RustDesk (self-hosted remote desktop, a TeamViewer alternative in Rust), Mullvad (client for the no-logs VPN), and SiYuan (a self-hosted Notion you actually own).

Four of the five are tools you run when you stop trusting someone else's cloud. The catch: each carries a trust dispute the community keeps poking. A signing lockout with a revocation deadline this week, a test root certificate filed as a CVE, an AI agent creeping into a privacy-first notebook.

Mullvad lays out the scoreboard: Britain's Tempora processed 600 million telephone events a day across 200 fiber cables; China holds half the world's surveillance cameras; the US runs PRISM, XKeyscore and Section 702. The twist is the framing: democracies just do it quietly while authoritarians do it openly.

The sharpest pushback came from the thread, not the article. A VPN essay warning about surveillance is itself a sales pitch, several noted, and one engineer with 21k karma argued the real lie is calling ad-tech tracking merely 'commercial.'