Aceticon

You clearly have never owned a business if you think the very legal system which makes that company a legal entity with all the rights it entails (i.e. they're registered there) can't force them to do whatever the local laws say they have to do.

They can literally strike that company down of the Company Register and seize its assets because a company did not obey a lawful court order there (such as one from an Information Court).

The rest of your post is even more ignorant bollocks. This is not Privacy Legislation, this is Surveillance Legislation: the stuff that enables and backs the giant civil society surveillance systems revealed by Snowden, not the stuff that makes it a bit harder for Google to know what kinds of Porn you watch.

I'm seriously worried about what's going on around this.

There is quite the push here for people to move to VPNs under the legals jurisdiction of surveillance heavy states, not just the US and UK but also places like Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands which are British Overseas Territories with the same laws as Britain except were they passed specific local legislation that overrides British Law.

We're talking about places with Information Courts which issue secret mass surveillance orders to companies based in or operating there and it doesn't mater if that VPN is no logs because for all you know they've been forced to install realtime surveillance equipment/software and they can't even tell you because BY THE LAW OF WERE THEY OPERATE if they did so they would end up in jail.

I would expect that the kind of people who would leave Mullvad because one of it's owners is a far-right nutter are also the kind of people who don't want everything they do and say tracked by the likes of the US or UK.

Further, the push is pervasive. For example https://vpn.techlore.tech/ is supposed to help you choose a good VPN, only if you look at those VPNs based in British Overseas Territories (Gibraltar, BVI) they're listed as "Not 14-eyes" which that's bullshit - I was actually curious and went and look at how Legislation works in Gibraltar and, as I wrote above, they have the same as in Britain except were they wrote their own legislation that overrides British legislation, which means that (unless somebody can point me out the legislation in Gibraltar that overrides it), the very same legislation that support the mass surveillance activities in Britain as a member of not only the "14-eyes" international surveillance agreements but the actual "5-eyes" one, applies to Gibraltar and hence to the likes of IVPN.

Frankly, looking for a replacement for Mullvad whilst having some awareness of the mass surveillance shit in supposedly democratic nations is scary as fuck, since most VPNs, for all their (possibly theatrical) "No logs" and whatnot, are actually in places with Information Courts which can issue secret court orders forcing them to install mass surveillance equipment.

Absolutely, if all you care about is avoiding lawyer letters because of pirating stuff, any "No Logs" VPN will probably do, but if you're worried about the rise of the Far-Right then it makes sense that you're not into there being a real risk that all you're doing over your supposedly "No logs" VPN is in fact being logged directly into NSA or GCHQ systems (in the kind of country whose governments think being a leftwinger is "extremism" or even "terrorism"),

IVPN is based in Gibraltar, which is a British Overseas Territory and whose laws are the same as Britain except were Gribraltar passed their own laws to override it.

Unless proven otherwise (by finding actual laws passed in Gibraltar to block it) treat any VPN based in Gibraltar as being subjected to the same kind of secret mass surveillance orders from Information Courts as those based in Britain.

Lets not deflect the blame away from the political forces which have been subverting Democracy for decades.

Go look at the Chat Control vote in the EU Parliament: it wasn't the Far-Right that voted for that shit (well, at least not in my country), it was the big "moderate" "center" parties that voted for it whilst the rest voted against it.

The push for authoritarianism is coming from the well-entrenched, big, mainstream, neoliberal parties, the very people who believed the Power of Money should not have to obey the Power of the Democratically Elected State (using slogans like "Do not interfere in the Free Market" to justify having Money as as the top Power).

(Notice how in the US the Democrats are and have been for decades just as much into widespread civil society surveillance and zero privacy as the Republicans)

Mainstream, Neoliberal parties are the people who have shifted Democracy in most of the West towards Oligarchy, with billionaires and even trillionaires holding immense real power.

In most of the West the return of Fascists to politics is still pretty recent and as they're not the ones entrenched in power, it's not actually in their interests for widespread civil society surveillance to be in place since such mechanisms are meant to detect and stop challenges to those in power, not to put fringe movements in power.

Are you sure about that?

Think about it: only the people of a single one of all participant countries will end up happy (because their team won it) whilst everybody else will end up unhappy (because their team lost).

Granted, there are a few cases of a bit of happiness, like for the people of Cape Verde, without actually winning it but following unexpected very good positions, but those are a minority and tend towards smaller countries (which usually don't have enough population to have enough World-class players even if they're football-crazy, hence why any good result is a surprise).

I would say that logically, all in all at the end of it big single sport world cups like this generally end up with far more people unhappy because of it than the people which are happy.

At some point years ago I did some online test and it turned out my English language vocabulary was somewhere in the top 0.01% or something like that.

Which is kinda ridiculous because I'm not a native English speaker.

I think it's the result of years of lots and lots of reading things in English: books, newspapers, magazines, even online.

Then on top of that I moved to Britain, which did wonders for learning the local slang of at least the part of it were I lived and even meant some words I learned I only really know them in English (for example, terms used in professional Finance) because I learned them in English, not in my native language.

Also, a lot of the most supposedly sophisticated words are basically the Latin or Greek words barelly changed (sometimes not at all) or technical terms that originated in the dominant language at the time that tech was invented, so they're pretty much the same in all languages I know (so, say, the word "heliocentric" is pretty much the same in my native Portuguese, in Spanish, French, English and so on) so for things like scientific and technical terms having a good vocabulary is mostly language agnostic.

You can get infinite Revenue by giving everybody $2 if they give you $1 dollar.

Such a company could proudly claim to have 1 billion sales and $1 billion dollars in revenue whilst not mentioning the "small detail" that they took $1 billion in losses to make those sales - which is pretty much what you're doing there for SpaceX.

When judging an investment, which is what we're doing here when talking about their IPO, what maters is profit, not revenue.

Literally almost the entire infrastructure of Starlink has to be "rebuilt" every 8 -10 years, because that's how long their latest generation (v3) satellites last in average before they deorbit due to the air drag at low orbit or their electronics fail due to the higher radiation in Earth's orbit

Their business model hasn't even been proven to be profitable outside niche markets where they're the only solution for Internet and there are enough people/companies who can afford and are willing to pay a big enough premium for that service that it offsets Starlink's costs of having to manufacture and launching replacement for their satellites, all of which invariably die after about 10 years.

My personal version involves "Go to sleep" vs "Read just one more chapter of the book I'm currently reading".

I do know how the SMTP protocol works.

Just because the envelope is not sealed doesn't mean that the state should be allowed to get a photocopy of what's inside to be perused by some apparatchik if they feel like it WITH NOT EVEN A SUSPICION OF A CRIME MUCH LESS JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT

Is this shit Democracy or is Autocracy with a bit of Theater of Democracy on top?

They still get to eavesdrop on your e-mails.

You know, the digital version of mail.

Guess who used to open and read people's mail ... oh, yeah, the political police of every fucking dictatorship in Europe (both Fascist and Communist) during the XX century.

This is the shit these people in supposedly Democratic nations have enacted.

If you're a citizen in an EU member state, I suggest you have a look at who are the MEPs in you country who voted for this shit. In mine - Portugal - which had a Fascist dictatorship complete with mail opening secret police, this was passed entirely with the votes of the mainstream parties and even the far-right voted against it.

And nepotism.

And cronyism.

Coming from the upper-middle and upper class and having attended the right schools and become mates with the right people is very highly correlated with becoming a top level executive.