Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 619 posts

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#41

Post by Youden »

gigel82 wrote: post #18

So with FastMail under Australian privacy-bashing laws and now this, what are our options for secure, private e-mail?

Honest question, because I've been asking it of myself: what do you expect from such a service?

I basically decided to just give up. Email is an insecure protocol and there's not much that can be done about it. Choosing a "secure" email provider feels like choosing a "secure" VPN provider: it's impossible to verify the provider's claims so it's a kind of security theatre.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#42

Post by leipert »

Happy user of posteo here which claims to strip IP addresses and there IS no relation between accounts and payments. All government requests are transparently documented.

The web interface is roundcube, but if you just use IMAP, it could work for you.

No custom domains though for sending stuff, catch all redirects obviously work.

https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#43

Post by istingray »

COGlory wrote: post #37

Disclaimer: I have a ProtonMail account that I pay for. I have seen a ton of disturbing pieces about ProtonMail. Every time I've looked into them, they seem to be maliciously motivated and usually not true, or otherwise twisting of the truth. This has been a confusing thing for me because why is there a small subset of people so vehemently against them? In this case, I'm not surprised. They say quite clearly they can…

I'm also a Protonmail customer.

Tor solves this. Protonmail's Tor support is lukewarm. They have a Tor based login without captchas. It's mentioned on their homepage in the bottom menu under "Onion Site", (/tor). And there's one blog post from 2017 that still promotes their v2/shorter onion address.

I expect Protonmail to push its users to login through Tor. "Don't trust us, trust math". Embed Tor support in their apps as well. Rebuild their iOS app to offer to drive all connections through Tor.

And frankly, for $50 a year for email, I expect Protonmail to be thinking ahead about this, rather than me coming up with dumb ideas on a forum. Protonmail was neat in 2018 but 3 years later it's stagnant.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#44

Post by rossdavidh »

civilized wrote: post #19
gregsadetsky wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO's position on Twitter is that "by default" (from the sentence you're quoting) means when there is no criminal investigation, but when there is a legal order in place, Protonmail will collect the IP... https://twitter.com/andyyen/status/1434600373059297284 "As described in the link above, under Swiss law, we can be forced to collect info on accounts belonging to users under criminal investigation. This is obvi…

"We won't keep logs on you, except if you're in trouble with The Authorities, then we'll definitely keep logs on you and rat you out" Weird definition of privacy we've got going these days

If you thought that Protonmail (or any other company) was going to go to break the law in order to avoid keeping logs on you despite a Swiss-backed warrant saying they had to do so, then you had the wrong impression. But I never got the impression Protonmail was saying that.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#45

Post by drexlspivey »

Raed667 wrote: post #14
drexlspivey wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logging is the liability not the other way around. You can’t be forced to hand over something you don’t have

You can be forced to log though. I'm not sure how your tech-stack has to look like for you to claim that you can't log IP addresses and user-agents etc...

Some VPN providers run their servers without hard drives.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#47

Post by jokoon »

keewee7 wrote: post #34

Why is a "Climate activist" being arrested?

I don't really know but eco terrorism is something that is more than likely to increase, with all the floods, forest fires, hurricanes, Greta thunberg, ipcc reports, and recently Biden authorizing some oil contract thing.

Something is going to move.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#48

Post by keewee7 »

mikl wrote: post #30

I guess there isn’t much Protonmail can do if the prosecutor shows up with an ~Interpol~ Europol warrant. I wonder what this “activist” did to earn himself Europol attention. At least before the world went insane, that would only happen for serious crimes.

The Climate Action youth movement is sometimes explicitly anti-capitalist in a very "direct action" way.

Vandalising banks is stupid and also an efficient way to make powerful people dislike you.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#49

Post by civilized »

rossdavidh wrote: post #44
civilized wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We won't keep logs on you, except if you're in trouble with The Authorities, then we'll definitely keep logs on you and rat you out" Weird definition of privacy we've got going these days

If you thought that Protonmail (or any other company) was going to go to break the law in order to avoid keeping logs on you despite a Swiss-backed warrant saying they had to do so, then you had the wrong impression. But I never got the impression Protonmail was saying that.

I have never used the service and don't know or care a thing about it. But their advertising is laughably inconsistent with the reality of the service provided.

If it's illegal to provide a completely anonymous email service, then you should not claim to provide a completely anonymous email service.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#50

Post by polote »

COGlory wrote: post #37

Disclaimer: I have a ProtonMail account that I pay for. I have seen a ton of disturbing pieces about ProtonMail. Every time I've looked into them, they seem to be maliciously motivated and usually not true, or otherwise twisting of the truth. This has been a confusing thing for me because why is there a small subset of people so vehemently against them? In this case, I'm not surprised. They say quite clearly they can…

One of the first sentence on their website is "By default, we do not keep any IP logs". If as soon as police show up (Which is almost the only case that people would want their IP hidden) they give IP logs, it is clearly false advertising. The fact that only the anonymous feature is important to you will not change the fact that they do the opposite of what they advertise regarding IP logs
Post reply on HN