• 2 Posts
  • 70 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • I was really excited about this. I’d been looking for a reason to try Proton’s products, and also a reason to move my family off of LastPass. After signing up for Pass Family, I did find the Proton Pass product to be superior to LastPass in most ways. I appreciate that Proton provides a way for me to request, and vote on, new features. At that point, I couldn’t have been happier with the decision, and had started the process of getting the family moved over.

    Then I made the mistake of upgrading my Proton Mail plan. While using Proton Mail, I got a lovely offer to upgrade, with a pro-rated price of on $0.99 per month. Nothing on the offer page indicated that it was anything other than an add-on to my existing subscription. Amazing, I thought. Now, in addition to moving off of LastPass, I can move off of Gmail too. And I could transfer my domain over to a privacy focused provider. All for a great price! What the offer didn’t say, was that by upgrading my Proton Mail plan to Mail Plus, I would immediately lose access to Pass Family. I only found this out after the fact. No big deal, I thought. I’ll just reach out to support and they’ll help me get this sorted. I could not have been more wrong.

    Support has routed me through a number of account upgrade paths with the promise that these would then allow me to downgrade my Proton Mail account and get back on Pass Family. Instead, it’s left me stuck with a Proton Unlimited account that I have no use for, and no way to share my Proton password vault with my family. It seems my only choice is to cancel my Proton subscription entirely, and go back to LastPass. With no option for a refund from Proton, it’s basically $50 down the drain. Now, at this point, I could not be more disappointed with the experience.

    edit: Ultimately, support was able to help me get back on the Pass Family plan. I won’t say it was easy. Proton only allows you to have one subscription plan at a time, so having different subscription levels for their various products is not possible with a single account. That’s disappointing, because I would like to have all my Proton products linked to one primary account, while selecting the subscription level that’s right for me, for each product. That said, I do want to recognize that technical support did as much as they could to help, and they deserve kudos for their patience.


  • I see your point. I have no illusions that democracy is healthy in modern times. Perhaps not ever? We don’t even live in a democracy any more, we live in a corporatocracy.

    But doing nothing will solve nothing.

    edited to add: In fact, it’s our complacency that our corporate masters depend on. Corporate news is designed to overwhelm you. Advertising is designed to lull you to sleep. Together, they make it seem like there’s nothing you can do. But that’s not true. You can do something. Maybe not the things I suggested, but something. It will make a difference, even if it only makes a small difference for a few people. Isn’t that better than nothing?










  • My personal experience with buyouts from private equity investors is that they will milk every single cent out of the company as they crush its soul. They’re looking to make a huge profit, relatively quickly. Yes, the stock market is also looking to profit, and big share-holders have a lot of sway, but publicly traded companies don’t have to answer to a small number of ultra wealthy puppeteers in quite the same way private equity held companies do. Also, there are certain employee protections, particularly around layoffs, that apply to publicly traded companies but don’t apply to privately held companies. This seems to be one of the key strategies in the PE playbook:

    1. Buy the company / take it private
    2. Slash costs everywhere, including yearly layoffs.
    3. Push the remaining employees to adopt a “lean” or “customer first” mindset, which really means “do more work, faster, for less reward”.
    4. Profit?

    As much as I dislike Ubisoft, I don’t dislike anyone enough to wish that process upon them.


  • I get emails from school, with a link that opens a 3rd party app, which only displays a link that opens in the default browser. I’ve asked the school to just send me direct links to the announcements, but they say they can’t. The site doesn’t require authentication, but the URLs have UUIDs so I can’t just guess what the link would be. The app is quite literally just a data exfiltration layer that does everything it can to make sure you can’t bypass it. Good luck getting any other parents to give a shit though.