It is perplexing what happen to Finns this last decade, I cannot understand. I think it has to be a very well coordinated traditional and specially social media campaign that was able to override 3/4 of a century of pragmatism and wise decisions.
But it is not just Finns, all Baltics and Scandinavians fell for it.

How come Moscow is more than a threat now than has been the Soviet times where they were really powerful and messing with countries right and left, near and f. Once Finland guaranteed no NATO in the 50s, Russia left Finland to prosper like no other country in Europe did... and now, this. Russia has been, for a decade say, year after year, after year... that they would consider NATO in Ukraine as a no-no. It is not just that Ukraine cannot choose its destiny, but that we dismiss Moscow's concerns after being invaded multiple times by the West through Ukraine... a claim they may have! Especially when certain politicians have been mentioning for a decade to partition Russia into different microstates!

Funny enough, after decades admiring the Scandinavians, the most sanity in Europe seems to be in the PIGS countries now. Probably due to their skepticism to governments' propaganda, it is what saved them from the abnormal levels of Russophobia that social media had been flooded with all these years

Not a Putin fan, but that speech is taken out of context. He was making the point their history is very interlinked, and that it is hard to argue (Northern Ireland is indeniable Ireland, but its history is very related to UK so a compromise was made to maintain peace, can you imagine if Catholics forbid Protestants to vote there?) . Funny enough, most of Ukraine land was acquired/given to Ukraine while it was under some sort of Moscow's dominance. The original Ukraine was just a territorial fraction of what it is today. Ukraine should

Again, in the ideal world, Ukraine should have full autonomy to decide its future, but the Washington and Moscow alike did not like that. I am Ukrainian, would work for a neutrality formula. US does the same with Cuba and Venezuela and US has 0% chances of being invaded by Chine through any of those 2 countries.

What I do notice is the irrational hatred of thinking the other as sub-human... I saw that behavior far, far more in Ukrainians than I did with Russians (at least till 2024).

Why too simplistic:

Palestine got invaded, ethnically cleaned and massively murdered for decades.

Ukraine was cultural a divided country where West and Russia alike used one band or the other to rein power on the entire country. However in 2014 the West overstep the pro-West, pro-Russia alternation with a Coup. Immediately 1/3 of the country got itself completely disfranchised (no vote, no representation, no even could speak its language) and a civil war ensured and then even that 1/3 got without no pensions or services. The sad thing is that the coup was not even needed since Viktor Yanukovych was going to be voted out in just 11 months, but Washington was not having it and needed its coup to put the alternation to an end and be able to make its long-wished constitutional changes to Ukraine . The rest is history.

Russia is not saint here, not at all, but Russia did get invaded and massacred multiple times by the West and every single time through Ukraine... I think if Moscow have a bit if concern it is perfectly warranted. Ukraine should have done what Finland did in 1940s-2010s, side with the West but full warranties to Russia of being fully Neutral and away from NATO.

That is funny, all IT systems Spanish government is using still completely US (and even Israeli) sphere, but just the fact of raising concern for the most suspicious systems of being straight data collectors to funnel to the US (like GDPR was ever properly monitored) they place Spain to the Chinese orbit.

This Spanish government just want to balance between the two powers (Actually, after the 1st Global Digital Rights Forum, I don't even see the Spanish government wanted to be in the middle, just with a toe out of the US orbit.). Nevertheless, this is why "foreign entities" have since 2014 start financing the extreme-right in Spain (among several other actions) to destabilize that trend.

This is actually critically! I love little distros, but it does break my heart that they cannot give the same reassurance on potential malware as Mint would. Many here we are anti-AI but FOSS could benefit a lot from it... it can automatized checking for malware on peanuts. DistroWatch, Flatpak store, Debian backports, etc should be using AI already across the board to check for malware and that would level dramatically the plain field for all.

After the first year fully immersed in Linux, I would say most would agree with that statement "One can turn any distro into another", at least in what matters to them.

To any newcomer I recommend to choose the environment (The tendency is for the tech-minded that come from Windows is to choose KDE, less tech-minded or straightforward thinking choose Cinnamon and exclusive Mac and Android users tend to choose Gnome).
The second thing to select is your stand on Stability vs Cutting edge. The rest of features are far, far less relevant and you can easily fine tune to your like and these is what people mean with that above statement (even the environment and stability could be customized too but most would not be able to do it).

At the end, the distro is a choice where you pick the first two parameters and the exact distro you pick is more based in convenience and/or philosophical criteria.

My case: I played with 5 environments and KDE is my cup of tea. Then, I choose a distro in the middle of the road with updates (OpenSuse Tumbleweed) and while extremely happy two updates within 8 months gave me two hiccups (nothing mayor) but I decided I needed more Stability. While I consider Fedora to be the "best" distro by just a hairline, since it has the most resources, but philosophically I am against due to IBM being its main backer, not to mention, US may cause problems "exporting" in a near future... yes you can fork, but you still being dependent in the main source for a while, not to mention supporting IBMś aims. So I am Debian (MX Linux actually) all the way now. However, I recommend to most Mint (for the most conservative) and TuxedoOS (for those looking for a more contemporary look) to most people I encounter.

The rest of distros, or are just niche (for instance Deepin and Kylin cater for Chinese language, Cachy for gamers, etc) or are distros with far less resources to do it properly, but I passionately applaud their existence since they all are contributing with the good cause.

As I mentioned more in detail in other post, Proton is not the pro-MAGA many had misinterpreted. It is just sloppy at the marketing campaign and its leader makes statements that can easily misunderstood too.

That said, Proton has decided to aim for the masses, which has proven to be a winning business formula here. However, in that quest, it's natural that concerns from top-tier privacy users (Linux users, those wanting non-Google push notifications, too-many-eggs-in-a-basket, etc.) get relegated in favor of the bulk of their primary target customers, the regular Joe who simply wants to move away from email and web traffic scraping. We should all applaud that decision, but we also recognize the limitations and big risks of having a single company holding some 80% of this privacy market, both for us and even for Proton. It would be better to foster a healthy, diverse, and more equitable privacy ecosystem.

Thanks so much, this looks worth a deep look! Iĺl need time to interpret this properly.

Signal, I agree... it has flags for me in so many ways.

Tor. Unlikely though. For sure many nodes are controlled and now they are using massive power to unlock the traffic, but was not set up as a honeypot per se, it is now, probably, technologically quite compromised though.

Mullvad. Funny, your suspicions probably got enhanced when Mullvad makes a browser based on Tor's. But I still not highly suspect of Mullvad. Quite steady organic growth, profitable, no much pronouncements or catering to certain "targeted" groups... No mayor red flags for me.

Absolutely! Location does not guaranteed anything. The only case against US, four eyes... etc is that they have the power to shut it down easily so they can use it as a threat. Switzerland has, for years now, showed the same drive as any other country to do just that.

Now, I have seen very principled individuals in the US, I would say even more than in the Europe! It is not surprise that we see cases like Lavabit where a right owner chooses to close shop rather than compromise its customers. I hope GrapheneOS will do the same.

Of course, nobody is going to have evidence here, if there was any the cover would be lifted. But one can guess chances here:

Proton: "Unlikely"... but there is a but. They never cater for the ultimate privacy and they make typical blunders of a company wanted to growth really fast. Now, that they want to be a behemoth in Privacy makes it more vulnerable to requests from law enforcement. Also, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have it easier to penetrate within Proton massive headcount growth.

Tuta: "Very Unlikely". The people behind started very young and had a sustainable growth. The people are very visible (unlike Crypto AG) so least likely to be working for an "agency".

Mullvad: "Very Unlikely". I think their story is similar to Tuta (haven´t followed it that much though).

GrapheneOS: "Very Unlikely". But in the last year I have raised some minor concerns, but I haven change my rating yet....

/e/: "Very Unlikely". I know the dude behind for 2 decades, he wouldn´t. However, /e/ never claimed full privacy and from the beginning says he would comply 100% with "lawful" requests, but it is not a honeypot, not that would make much difference to an intelligence agency if they wanted it.

Signal: "Potentially"... yes, yes... audited, solid privacy code... but still does not make sense to me many aspects; financially solvent from day one, the extreme unquestioned massive and vast support from launching till today... if i have to bet in all of these providers, this platform would have been my take as potential compromised one. I still use it to communicate with family since I trust better than WhatsApp, but I would not use it for critical journalistic info.

I have not seen evidence of Proton "going the far right route" yet. They are just sponsoring channels that ever mention privacy and far right ones frequently does that too. You can blame proton for no scrutinize, but not of siding with the right or the left. Proton is just focusing in mayor growth and nothing else, for better or for worse.