Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

Take Megaupload (not MEGA), they had unencrypted data, but complied fully with DMCA and operated fully legally.

Take MEGA, they have to comply with DMCA, too, even though everything is encrypted and they never can decrypt the data, either (MEGA does literally the same as up1.ca)

Additionally, Certificate pinning only works if I visited the site before the MitM started. And some carriers like T-Mobile just strip every Certificate Pinning header anyway, as they use proxies to compress data. (Chrome’s Turbo mode does the same).

Essentially, the site uses JavaScript for showing images without providing any advantage to either the user or the site.

MS probably doesn't even know. I recall reading that there were 6 different versions of the Service Pack update for Office 2000 depending on where you got them from, and they weren't all compatible with each other. Do you think after another decade of Monkey Boy and his winning business strategy of pitting all the departments against each other that they've improved? Nardella actually seems like a grown-up, but he's still a dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft exec.... less stupid certainly, but just as evil.

One of the biggest problems with Microsoft is that they are too big and disorganized. They have no vision, and no guiding principle, other than maintaining the lingering shreds of their monopoly. This is obvious from looking at the designed-by-committee, piecemeal UI for Windows, which is getting worse every release and not better. The best you can hope for for any particular feature from release to release is that it's just arbitrarily different and not broken or hidden or completely removed.

Windows clearly peaked with XP, but their UI peaked with Windows 2000. The only reason 7 is liked is because they backed off most of the bad things they did with Vista, and the only thing, the _only_ thing I think is better in Windows 8 than any previous version is Task Manager, which is not something I use often. But it is nice.

My #1 wish for Windows post-7 is that I could just use the "Classic" theme, but apparently Windows is now too sophisticated to do what it could do 15 years ago. Their UX department has gone totally off the rails or maybe was taken over by wild monkeys. Microsoft used to be _the_ place for good UI design back in the 90s. They were very scientific about it, and their designs were very well-thought out, based on CUA, and an absurd amount of user-testing and most of all, consistent. Not perfect, but they were very good. But as soon as graphics cards could do more than 256 colors and Photoshop was invented, everyone went wild and UI became the lawless, Wild West funhouse it remains today. Except in the past few years, everyone decided that the "flat look" is cool (news flash: it's ugly and hard to make out) and now we have UIs that are as usable and good-looking as Windows 2, but without the consistency.

I'd thought Microsoft had run out of sharks to jump with Windows 8, but they keep finding more. But here's the thing. I still like Windows. I just wish I could make Windows look at work like it did when it looked and worked well (I'm not referring to the underlying technology, which is presumably improving all the time, although I still think Windows 8 is absurdly slow compared to 7 and much worse compared to XP... and I have empirical evidence. I do a lot of work in a Windows 2003 VM running on VirtualBox (long story) and it's much faster than the Windows 7 host and doesn't suffer from the, oh gee, everything's going to go "Not Responding" for 30 seconds to 2 minutes for no apparent reason that I see with the apps (at least MS apps) on the host.

Yeah, if you have this concern strongly, well, we're working on browser extensions which will prevent any potential risk here. However, like I said to someone else, unless you reverse engineer every update to your OS, you really shouldn't be commenting. This is just as much "giving a foreign entity control over your data" as using an OS provided in binary form is giving a foreign entity control over your CPU, which would be far, far worse really. Unless you're manually validating the code in all cryptography products you use, there's really no argument to be made here.

> Encrypt the image with the public key of your friends and send it to them, that is privately.

When you do this, say using PGP, PGP generates a static key, encrypts that key to their public key and encrypts the message using the static key.

This is essentially the same thing, the only difference being that the Up1 does only the static key portion and does not provide the public key portion, which you can do out of band using whatever method you prefer, be it PGP, SSL to a private server, OTR, TextSecure, etc.

And it allows the transfer of images and small files in this secure form to be incredibly simple and fast. Pipe into a command line tool or use ShareX, paste that link over a secured protocol and you've securely shared a file.

Of course, if you don't trust the public Up1 instance, feel free to run your own, it's all open source, server included.

> And, worse, I have to activate JavaScript, which decreases security by a lot.

It's a trade-off, privacy for a slightly increased risk of security, these days you're more likely to get exploited by a fucking web font than by a script though.

Worst case, like I said, don't trust the public instance if you don't want to (well, if you're the type who doesn't trust their OS provider at least). You can always run it yourself or wait for the browser extensions.

Anyway, for posting on a public forum it’s pretty useless, as it provides no benefit and requires the users to have JS enabled, which is, especially on Hacker News, not really a given.

Even the mods complained when an up1.ca link was used as submission link recently.

Using a standard protocol would be an advantage here most definitely.