I am still with proton since the owners being pricks doesn’t change the reasons why I like them for my email: They have made it clear what they will and won’t give to authorities and I can act accordingly.

That said, I did look into going mullivad+tuta but decided against it. Since tuta requires you to use their desktop client if you want an “offline” copy of their emails and that just seems like a mess when they inevitably do something shitty and I need to wait for “support” to get back to me for why I can’t download my emails and go elsewhere. Whereas I can just keep the bridge running and open thunderbird every week or two with proton.

Got it. NYC personally attacked rossman over taxes he totally says he paid and then a clerical error made it worse. Obviously.

NOBODY (… except apparently Rob Zacny) admits to tax fraud. EVERYONE is totally innocent but they pay the fines anyway because those tax collectors are just so mean.

Also: You don’t need a 600 an hour lawyer to say “My client has never lived at that address. You can see this from the taxes he filed for the past ten years. This was a clerical error and all related fines should be removed. Now let’s talk payment plan on those taxes”. Yes, it costs money but that is what running a business is about. Especially one where you are going to have disputes over whether a subsequent hardware failure was your fault or not.

And if he was really at a point where 1500 was going to kill his company? His company was already dead.

… No, he was prosecuted for unpaid taxes. Assuming that was actually a clerical error, any halfway competent lawyer can get charges related to that thrown out. The unpaid taxes… not so much.

So… he didn’t pay his taxes and then fled to Texas?

Not sure of a good summary of it since the outlets that acknowledge rossman tend to joke about how angry he is and then avoid doing any actual business with him.

But he did a vlog style video or two about how he is a failure as a business person but it is actually New York’s fault and having a business in NYC is impossible and blah blah blah and he is moving to Texas. He still tries to keep his mask up for the most part (expect that to change REAL soon…) but… people don’t move a business from NYC to Texas (and yes, Austin is still Texas…) if they care about workers’ rights…

They do a lot of business in the US and would likely not want to get banned at a time when people are genuinely looking for a VPN that doesn’t pretend it will fight off seal team six for you or an email service that isn’t run by google.

Rossman has straight up chud vibes from when he was ranting about the situation where someone was allegedly screaming slurs at a delivery person through their amazon doorbell.

Also he is a guy who had to flee NYC because he couldn’t run a business with regulations and instead go to Texas (?).

I… very much do not like this. But the reality is that tech companies are FULL of libertarian tech bro types who only care about “policy” as it equates to their bottom line. And a LOT of companies are going to suck up to trump in the hopes of not being made an example of by the wannabe mafia administration. And the follow up response is still bullshit but it is useful idiot bullshit, if that makes sense.

Gonna look for alternatives but not optimistic.