131–140 of 165 posts
Anyone know why they have this weird onion url „protonirockerxow.onion“? Kinda hard to remember.
In just so many countries (including those many people never know are in too) the state-led war on privacy and communication freedom is getting hotter and hotter. Some countries do it openly, some manage to look liberal until you look closer. Just try to start marketing a proprietary privacy-oriented messenger app or something like that and the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep, demanding you to…
"the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep" - for the US, I'm emotionally inclined to agree with you. ProtonMail was developed in Geneva, where I grew up. It was a spin-off from people who worked at CERN, like the World Wide Web itself. Geneva is also a United Nations base, and many other NGOs are headquartered/have offices in the area for that reason (the Red Cross, WWF, Amnesty, Greenpeace). There…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep" - for the US, I'm emotionally inclined to agree with you. ProtonMail was developed in Geneva, where I grew up. It was a spin-off from people who worked at CERN, like the World Wide Web itself. Geneva is also a United Nations base, and many other NGOs are headquartered/have offices in the area for that reason (the Red Cross, WWF, Amnesty, Greenpeace). There…
Protonmail routinely hands over information to the authorities. They also determine themselves what cases should be allowed to bypass the requirements for a search warrant. https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/
They say they may decide to terminate an account or preserve the requested account data without a court order.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technolgoists need to remember that tech is nothing without law.
Lawyers and law makers need to remember technology will continually outpace them. Both in execution of ideas and in value creation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Politicians need to remember that The Law is nothing in the face of technology. (You can't block fundamental math, you can't block decentralized apps that hide their traffic as something else, you can't prevent knowledge from leaking out, from anywhere, etc.)
You are thinking in absolutes. The politicians don't. They're fine with 99% solutions that cover the general population. The remaining 1% of dissidents will be dealt with by throwing them in jail, not by making the technology impossible to access so that they are forced to give up their efforts. Look at north korea or china for examples.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Protonmail routinely hands over information to the authorities. They also determine themselves what cases should be allowed to bypass the requirements for a search warrant. https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/
I just read the provided link and it seems to me that that will not provide anything without a court order. They say they may decide to terminate an account or preserve the requested account data without a court order.
Conveniently the page is never update to say whether these court orders were actually delivered.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not but its been around now for 17 years without a major security breach.
Except for that time when Google's data centers were completely owned by the NSA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
Lastly for all Protonmail's righteous talk about governments. They're own /24 is announced by an Israeli company that does defense contracting[1] and has their own hardware division - the RAD Bynet Group who makes lots of network hardware including hardware that does deep packet and SSL inspection[2]. Proton mails seems to like to brush this off but for a company that wants to position itself as a player in the fight against government intrusion into privacy, it has a pretty bad smell.
https://bgpview.io/prefix/185.70.40.0/24
http://www.bynet.co.il/en/defense/
https://cryptome.org/2015/11/protonmail-ddos.htm
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bynet-data-communica...
In just so many countries (including those many people never know are in too) the state-led war on privacy and communication freedom is getting hotter and hotter. Some countries do it openly, some manage to look liberal until you look closer. Just try to start marketing a proprietary privacy-oriented messenger app or something like that and the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep, demanding you to…
The problem is that privacy is not the only thing we care about, and the balance between different needs is a complicated political problem - which is exactly the kind of "soft", people problem which complexity a typical software engineer would underestimate.
Turkey is becoming more and more authoritatian, indeed. However, they're also sharing a border with ISIS and there's a lot of terror activities in the region. Fighting such threats always leads to increasing influence of the military and secret services, and their new capabilities will be used both to fight terror and suppress citizens.
These things are a double-edged sword; any simplistic view on this is inadequate, regardless of whether it's positive or negative.
Anyone know why they have this weird onion url „protonirockerxow.onion“? Kinda hard to remember.
You can't just choose your onion url, since it's directly derived from your key, and that's probably the best they found (if you want to have any choice at all, you have to bruteforce try keys until you find one matching the pattern, so everything more than choosing a few letters gets difficult/expensive)
(x) Don't use public DNS such as google (or the DNS provided by your ISP such as Vodafone). Look for an anonymous non-logging service preferably outside Turkey (x) Tor is is one of many layers for anonymity to circumvent blocking. Don't "just" install the tor-browser or tor-proxy on your system but run tails from a clean machine. If you know what you're doing you might want to help others by isolating whole networks…
what's the point? DNS isn't encrypted, so it's trivial to log/intercept your queries.