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

91–100 of 619 posts

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#91

Post by fsckboy »

polote wrote: post #89
fsckboy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, the end result is not the same either way. I'm not taking sides on privacy or the threat of govt (or other sourced) tyranny, I'm just explaining the logic to answer your question: Let's say you engaged in a long history of using protonmail innocently, then one day you decided to start commiting crimes for the first time and attract police interest. You would know that your historical logs were not kept, and it wa…

I said the end result is the same. Not that it is the same. In both case they give the IP when the police ask for it

In both cases they don't give the IP.

in the case where they receive a court order, they first log your IP and then they give it.

but you know this from their terms of service.

if you stop using protonmail when you start your criminal career, they will not give your IP because they didn't save it.

it's different in the end, not the same.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#92

Post by Sebb767 »

cedws wrote: post #64
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 am also paying for ProtonMail. They come off as a very dodgy company willing to twist the truth themselves. They claim that they can provide E2EE for email, being careful not to give away the fact that this is impossible for regular emails to non-PM customers. Frankly I only use them because they're the biggest "private" email service and that provides a kind of safety in numbers.

As a business in that space, you probably need to have dodgy marketing in order to convince mainstream users. I'm not disagreeing that it's bad, but it's probably necessary business-wise.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#93

Post by istingray »

Disclaimer: Paying Protonmail customer

I wanted to test how Protonmail is doing for new users I created an account from scratch just now over Tor.

1. Am asked to verify new account by entering a cell phone (edit: this is horrible. They lie and say account creation is anonymous, as pointed out by the poster below)

2. Upon login, "Basic" logs are selected which do not display IP. You can enable "Advanced" logs to log IP. I would suggest Protonmail make it crystal clear that these "Basic" logs do not store IP. In 2021, lies by omission are not good enough. Get rid of the soft language.

3. Their help page [1] says that "Advanced" (IP stored) logs are enabled by default. However, I created the account and it's just the Basic (no IP) logs. https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/authentication...

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#95

Post by vntok »

neltnerb wrote: post #80
istingray wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this doesn't matter, what's important for you about being a Protonmail customer? (also a paying Protonmail customer)

That your emails are supposedly stored encrypted, that if other services support it end-to-end email encryption supposedly can be enabled easily, and that supposedly you cannot be served targeted ads because they cannot read the contents of your email (not that they have ads anyway). Of course Protonmail is accessible via Tor. Not that you should need to do that to remain private.

> That your emails are supposedly stored encrypted, that if other services support it end-to-end email encryption supposedly can be enabled easily, and that supposedly you cannot be served targeted ads because they cannot read the contents of your email (not that they have ads anyway).

Gmail does all of this for free though, right?

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#96

Post by sigmoid10 »

istingray wrote: post #77

Disclaimer: Paying Protonmail customer Their homepage says "By default, we do not keep any IP logs" In 2021, any soft language like this should be a red flag for anyone who is against surveillance. Maybe in 2018 it was good enough. But in 2021 it's not. Come on, Protonmail, you're supposed to be leading the way -- don't make me figure it out myself. Replace immediately with "By default we don't log IP, but may be req…

People really don't seem to understand that Protonmail is a western company in a western country with pretty generous surveillance laws. Yes, your email text may be encrypted, but everything else is free game to the authorities unless you use additional protection.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#97

Post by istingray »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #75
polote wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not kill people except the people we kill I see that you want to protect Protonmail, but if they want to stop being misleading they can just remove the IP log sentence

It's not misleading in that many services do keep records by default. If people don't understand what default means, they should grow their understanding, not be outraged that their uninformed opinion was wrong.

Default means "we do whatever the fuck we want, any assumptions are your fault"

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#98

Post by cartoonworld »

Youden wrote: post #41
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.

It's impossible to choose a "secure" email provider, unfortunately.

Email can't guarantee E2EE without a block cipher tool like GPG. Even if your provider stores and transmits only encrypted email data, once sent it does not maintain that guarantee while being passed by another entity's MTA.

If you email google, google gets to do whatever googly stuff it would like to do with its algorithm. If you email exchange, roundcube, ISP, hotmail, it could wind up being archived to tape, or simply be sitting for a long time in some unencrypted mail spool, maybe in a public cloud. If you selfhost, you would be forgiven if you find you have made a mistake or simply got pwned.

I've never selfhosted email, but I understand it is a lot of work to set up if you aren't familiar, and while maintenance is okay once you get rolling, there are occasional emergencies or hiccups that require intervention.

Aside from being much slower, regular mail is quite better since you can easily inspect the envelope for evidence of tampering, while email will be imperceptibly copied.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#100

Post by mytailorisrich »

keewee7 wrote: post #48
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.

They do seem to be a far left group using the "climate" umbrella. This squatting 'action' has nothing to do with the environment, it's class struggle.

Unfortunately this sort of extremist group is harmful to people and organisations genuinely trying to do something for the environment.

Post reply on HN