These are hard times regarding politics and IT. Present developments, in particular in the USA, in China and Russia have an indirect or direct impact on various types of IT-components – concerning e.g. production sites, quality, tariffs and prices, data control, digital privacy. We in Europe who have supported Opensource and Opensource-based applications for decades, can – in my opinion – not ignore tendencies both of dictatorial regimes and capitalistic tech-giants to control the future of IT in general, the production of IT-related products and the efforts to control and analyze more and more of user-generated traffic. Be it for the surveillance and control of citizens or to earn money via analyzing user profiles and spamming them indirectly with advertisement. Even more concerning is the growing power of a handful of companies and institutions over the development and the ultimate direction of AI. The risks in all of these sectors to harm digital privacy (aside of the un-social media) are growing.

But we Europeans should also have an eye on who invests in what – and whether such investments come from countries which support aggressors against European countries or the EU. We sometimes need to take a clear position. Better late than never as in my case.

Opera – a technically good browser of a company that is financially controlled by Chinese investors

I have used the browser Opera for a long time. Not only because I have strong personal ties to Norway, where it once was developed. In my opinion it has over the years become both a very fast and a user-friendly browser. It offers a lot of features which some other browsers lack. I just name the ordering options for tabs. I loved it because it made my life easier when collecting and organizing hundreds of links and tabs during research. And it suppresses advertisement significantly better than e.g. Firefox.

However, since 2016 the browser-related part of company is controlled by Chinese investors. Now, I do not want to enter any discussion about the reliability of a Chinese controlled company regarding digital privacy. A lot of related discussions can be found on the Internet regarding the point that the head-quarter of Opera is still located in Norway and therefore assumedly follows strict European rules regarding digital privacy.

Actually, I do not regard many company statements about respecting data privacy as reliable at all. I would neither do so when such statements come from a Chinese controlled company, nor when they come from an American Tech giant – to say it frankly. However, I want to stress that I have at least not found any clear proof that my interactions with the Opera browser have enlarged the number of attack-trials on my systems from China or Russia beyond the (high) normal level. But this does, of course, not mean that e.g. my visits to newspaper articles were not registered and evaluated somewhere …

In times of an ongoing war in Ukraine I eventually say NO

My point to say good bye to Opera is a different one. We have an ongoing ruthless aggression and increasing war against Ukraine. The victims of the ruthless aggressor are mainly civilians and civilian infrastructure. The aggressor has got major and increasing support from China over the years. We as private persons in Europe do not have many options to do something against this war and Russia-supporting countries directly.

We Europeans, who love our freedom, our democracies and who continue with our struggle to unite under the rule of law and international agreements, we should no longer support the supporters of the aggressor – not even indirectly by using products which we can avoid. Therefore and eventually, bye, bye Opera … not because of technical reasons, but because of your capital share holders.

The Norwegian alternative Vivaldi

For those of my Linux friends who look for a European and Norwegian alternative: Try Vivaldi. Coming from Opera you will have no problems to use it. The free, but limited VPN of ProtoVPN requires some settings on your active firewall, though. Connections to certain servers via TCP port 4444 must be accepted.