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

481–490 of 619 posts

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#481

Post by leokennis »

newbie789 wrote: post #107

I’m aware that this is a very silly sounding question, but I’m very confused about what’s going on here. If the subject of this investigation had been using ProtonVPN to connect to ProtonMail, would this have (in a marginal way) protected their anonymity? If Proton Mail can be compelled to begin logging, surely the same must be said of Proton VPN right? It’s interesting how many “privacy focused” companies tout being…

Completely unrelated, the only company I know of that deserves the "it's Swiss so it must be top notch" is Victorinox, their pocket knives and multitools are second to none quality wise.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#482

Post by IanSanders »

alternatetwo wrote: post #318
kazen44 wrote: post #154

for those who are curious, this seems to be the reply from protonmail on reddit[0] >Hi everyone, Proton team here. We are also deeply concerned about this case. In the interest of transparency, here's some more context. In this case, Proton received a legally binding order from the Swiss Federal Department of Justice which we are obligated to comply with. Details about how we handle Swiss law enforcement requests can…

So Switzerland is evidently not a democracy anymore. Sad to hear.

just a buzzword

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#483

Post by ClumsyPilot »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #298
ivan_gammel wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH in 2021 people engaging in potentially dangerous activities should be literate enough to understand, that no business will guarantee them full security and decline all requests from authorities to disclose their identity. The wording you suggest is equivalent of „do not dry your cat in microwave“ instruction - a legal protection from dumb customers, that does not contribute meaningfully to safety. For the non-Swi…

What kind of "climate activist" draws this much heat?

UK has been arresting climate activists by the hundreds, it's pretty surreal here.

https://twitter.com/MetPoliceEvents/status/14342276656791429...

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#484

Post by ornornor »

newbie789 wrote: post #107

I’m aware that this is a very silly sounding question, but I’m very confused about what’s going on here. If the subject of this investigation had been using ProtonVPN to connect to ProtonMail, would this have (in a marginal way) protected their anonymity? If Proton Mail can be compelled to begin logging, surely the same must be said of Proton VPN right? It’s interesting how many “privacy focused” companies tout being…

As far as I know, Swiss laws regarding online privacy aren’t all that great. They’re even more regressive than other countries. Swiss quality doesn’t mean much in software, if anything most Swiss companies are very much behind in terms of best practices or modernity of software. Whenever I see “Swiss software quality”, I run the other way now that I know how the sauce is made.

Even the government sucks at online security, see the debacle of the city of Rolle and the cyberattack they suffered last month. If this is not pure ignorance and incompetence, I don’t know what is.

Not even mentioning several “made in Switzerland” software company whose only claim to Swissness is that they have an office with two people in Switzerland and all the rest are European or Indian contractors (not that these people are worse, just that it’s a marketing thing to tout Swiss software if you’re going to outsource 90% of your development offshore)

Most of the time, claiming Swiss anything is a marketing move and an excuse to justify charging much much more for something.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#485

Post by Jommi »

junon wrote: post #472

This is strike two. ProtonMail went under fire several months back about opting to use Google's reCaptcha for login in a time crunch, rather than setting up hCaptcha even if it took a little extra time. The tradeoff was cost vs. user privacy and they chose cost, which is NOT why a lot of us pay PM to begin with. This is unacceptable, but unfortunately there are no alternatives that hit all the check marks PM has in t…

Read the actual case details here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28431834

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#486

Post by Jommi »

Everyone in this thread is missing the real context and the information that has been coming out in the past 24h of the case. Read more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/pil6xi/climate_...

TLDR:

1. Protonmail received Swiss legal request that was based on proven legal grounds and thus had to comply with.

2. They started monitoring the user's account and informed them that their data was requested. (Informing is required by Swiss law)

3. Only data Protonmail keeps by default is account creation date. Now they also logged the IP of the tracked account.

4. This IP information was given to the Swiss authorities.

5. The Swiss authorities gave this information to Interpol.

What should Protonmail have done differently here?

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#487

Post by muixoozie »

skarz wrote: post #67

We know that PM saves all kind of metadata and happily provides it to any kind of agency. You have to use an anonymous VPN service (obviously not ProtonVPN) in combination with ProtonMail, if you want to avoid exposure by PM. ProtonMail lost it's essence to be honest. As soon as my subscription runs out I'm gonna host my own mailserver instead. There are no advantages in using ProtonMail snymore.

>As soon as my subscription runs out I'm gonna host my own mailserver instead.

I might end up doing the same. I think I'm stubborn enough to pull it off. Personally I got my eye on https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

I've been in the market for a service like protonmail because I'm trying to degoogle. Reading news like this and looking at the price of these services for two accounts has me thinking twice.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#488

Post by Y_Y »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #392
zwayhowder wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By using the classics of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histiaeus#Ionian_revolt_(499-4... Sure the bitrate is a bit slow and it's UDP only but our governments have proved over and over again that they can't learn from history.

> In 499 BC, he shaved the head of his most trusted slave, tattooed a message on his head, and then waited for his hair to grow back. The slave was then sent to Aristagoras, who was instructed to shave the slave's head again and read the message, which told him to revolt against the Persians. Since this was a trusted slave, the tattoo seems unnecessary. The slave could just tell Aristagoras "Histiaeus says to revolt…

The fact that the slave had been signed confirmed the authenticity to the recipient.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#489

Post by vages »

jakobdabo wrote: post #465
grappler wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad to say, Proton's onion service is for their old version. Proton has recently rolled out a new updated version of their service, and as far as I'm aware they don't offer a Tor onion service for that newer version. So Proton users who like to connect via Tor onion services have been faced with a choice of either staying on the old version of ProtonMail, or giving up on connecting via a Tor onion service. It definit…

I don't think you can use Proton without JS. You need JS for cryptography; the emails get encrypted/decrypted/signed/verified on client-side.

Of course; should have been obvious.

Perhaps there is a greater reliance on scripts in the new version, but this makes it seem more likely that they've abandoned the Tor version.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#490

Post by tempodox »

junon wrote: post #472

This is strike two. ProtonMail went under fire several months back about opting to use Google's reCaptcha for login in a time crunch, rather than setting up hCaptcha even if it took a little extra time. The tradeoff was cost vs. user privacy and they chose cost, which is NOT why a lot of us pay PM to begin with. This is unacceptable, but unfortunately there are no alternatives that hit all the check marks PM has in t…

You cannot expect anyone to openly not comply with the law on your behalf. It looks like ProtonMail had to log and cough up that IP in the context of a criminal investigation. The politics of how it became a criminal investigation in the first place have nothing to do with PM.

The submission title doesn't reflect the details.

Post reply on HN