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

Proton is trying to become Google without your data

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 185 posts

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#121

Post by mr_toad »

adamhearn wrote: post #112
almet wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that bugs me with Proton is that it's still very complicated to integrate with thunderbird (or any mail app?), which makes it practically unusable for my needs. Having a tab always open in my browser for my mail seems so wrong.

Genuine question, how is a browser tab different than thunderbird? Besides storing a local copy of mail (which is obviously a huge win), I don't see a big difference. If anything I like the web UI better. However, for my uses I simply installed proton bridge + apple mail. It just works with all email services I use.

> Genuine question, how is a browser tab different than thunderbird?

Different protocols for one thing - HTTP vs IMAP and/or POP/SMTP.

Each webmail app does things it’s own way. Webmail conflates the app and the protocol and the provider. Some people prefer to have mail from different providers in a unified app.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#122

Post by doliveira »

mden wrote: post #80
charles_kaw wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you have any info on this because that is a wild claim. Not only has the concept and implementation of automated law enforcement portals been around since the 90s, the Snowden docs revealed that major providers were providing such portals. AND that their inter-datacenter communications were being piped directly into global intelligence databases without. These portals, NSLs, and other mechanisms have also been co…

You're making a wildly different claim than the initial one. The initial claim is "obviously Gmail and such are piped directly into global intelligence databases". Portals for law enforcement which likely require some kind of warrant and very likely have regular audits are not slightly the same thing as directly piping the data to the intelligence community. As for "their inter-datacenter communications were being pi…

Lots of "likely" and "were" in your comment...

I'll be honest, this is really the first time I've seen a tech circle in which this whole surveillance apparatus is not a common established knowledge.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#123

Post by Havoc »

0daystock wrote: post #107
Havoc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why, though? Not US based for starters - definitely willing to pay a premium for that. Nor five eyes or any of the other [0] eyes. > extol virtually meaningless controls like "it's hosted abroad" There is no value in abroad in itself, what matters is how trigger happy countries are with warrants etc. I'd like to be in a jurisdiction where it is possible for law enforcement to get to the data...but I'd like the logis…

A US Citizen has more legal and practical safeguards with their data hosted in the US than abroad, but unfortunately the widespread privacy anti-marketing has obscured this critical concept entirely in exchange for "Swiss are probably good at privacy stuff".

>A US Citizen has more legal and practical safeguards

Indeed. I'm part of the 96% of the world that is not though and I'm very wary of US tendencies to trawler net data collection.

>"Swiss are probably good at privacy stuff".

I think you missed my point if that is what you got from my post. I don't attribute any special merit to Switzerland in the Swiss banking sense...they just aren't in any of the major data sharing agreement from what I can tell. My data needs to be somewhere...so I'm just picking this on a lesser evil basis not perfect basis.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#124

Post by Terry_Roll »

ptero wrote: post #24

Proton is not perfect, but nothing is. We need more competition on the internet, and if Proton has a chance to provide an email and storage for an upfront price without trying to distract me with ads or pimp my data to advertisers, I want to support them. As a data point, I have been a very happy user of their plus service for the last 3 years.

There is a silent backlash against Proton, the most obvious is the domain is blocked by the US Antivirus company who scans all UK politicians emails through the UK parliament email address parliament.uk or British politicians are ignoring their constituents, some website contact forms reject protonmail email address as well. So I hope they give Google a run for their money.

Edit IF its not politicians ignoring emails, then we have evidence that a private US antivirus companies is illegally interfering in the democratic process of so called allies and you can work this out with mxtoolbox.com, but we all know the US of A views everyone including allies as an enemy, because their actions and occupations speak louder than words! Can send a man to the moon but cant stop a shooter speaks volumes!

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#125

Post by greazy »

drcongo wrote: post #31

Email and calendar aren't the things that keep people on Google, it's Docs etc. You can get good email and calendar anywhere. If their plan is really to take on Google, that's the bits they need to target.

I don't agree. The reason why people use Google products is varies. Some rely on docs heavily, others need (like myself) just email + cal + drive

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#126

Post by Nathanael_M »

metadat wrote: post #75
vzaliva wrote: post #40

I have been a ProtonMail user for a long time but have yet to make it my default email provider. The main problem is that I keep an email archive of all my emails: all sent and most received since 1995. It is 17Gb. I've imported it into Gmail, and it is instantly searchable. With ProtonMail, such a search must happen on the client-side due to encryption. I suspect it will not work very well.

The searching encrypted content problem goes away once you build an MS Outlook-ish standalone desktop (or otherwise offline-first, in the case of mobile) email client app which builds local-only indexes. The real cost (or long-term benefit) is you'll need a bit more local storage to have your cake and eat it privately.

“have your cake and eat it privately” has now permanently entered my lexicon, thank you.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#127

Post by brewdad »

0daystock wrote: post #107
Havoc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why, though? Not US based for starters - definitely willing to pay a premium for that. Nor five eyes or any of the other [0] eyes. > extol virtually meaningless controls like "it's hosted abroad" There is no value in abroad in itself, what matters is how trigger happy countries are with warrants etc. I'd like to be in a jurisdiction where it is possible for law enforcement to get to the data...but I'd like the logis…

A US Citizen has more legal and practical safeguards with their data hosted in the US than abroad, but unfortunately the widespread privacy anti-marketing has obscured this critical concept entirely in exchange for "Swiss are probably good at privacy stuff".

>A US Citizen has more legal and practical safeguards with their data hosted in the US than abroad

Citation needed.

I get that, in theory, US state level actors shouldn't be spying on US citizens acting within the US but the vast majority of us are more likely to get caught up in bog standard law enforcement activities. A US based provider will be forced to comply with a lawful court order from a US court. A Swiss based company (for example) can safely ignore such requests.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#128

Post by kodah »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #124
ptero wrote: post #24

Proton is not perfect, but nothing is. We need more competition on the internet, and if Proton has a chance to provide an email and storage for an upfront price without trying to distract me with ads or pimp my data to advertisers, I want to support them. As a data point, I have been a very happy user of their plus service for the last 3 years.

There is a silent backlash against Proton, the most obvious is the domain is blocked by the US Antivirus company who scans all UK politicians emails through the UK parliament email address parliament.uk or British politicians are ignoring their constituents, some website contact forms reject protonmail email address as well. So I hope they give Google a run for their money. Edit IF its not politicians ignoring emails…

My company VPN also blocks ProtonMail. I'm not sure exactly why, and I have zero evidence, but I suspect it's because it's the email that a whistleblower used a while back that was featured in congressional testimony.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#129

Post by noman-land »

almet wrote: post #84
ptero wrote: post #24

Proton is not perfect, but nothing is. We need more competition on the internet, and if Proton has a chance to provide an email and storage for an upfront price without trying to distract me with ads or pimp my data to advertisers, I want to support them. As a data point, I have been a very happy user of their plus service for the last 3 years.

The only thing that bugs me with Proton is that it's still very complicated to integrate with thunderbird (or any mail app?), which makes it practically unusable for my needs. Having a tab always open in my browser for my mail seems so wrong.

I agree it's not perfect but they have some pretty great instructions. I've been using the Bridge with thunderbird for multiple accounts and it works awesome.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#130

Post by jrockway »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #124
ptero wrote: post #24

Proton is not perfect, but nothing is. We need more competition on the internet, and if Proton has a chance to provide an email and storage for an upfront price without trying to distract me with ads or pimp my data to advertisers, I want to support them. As a data point, I have been a very happy user of their plus service for the last 3 years.

There is a silent backlash against Proton, the most obvious is the domain is blocked by the US Antivirus company who scans all UK politicians emails through the UK parliament email address parliament.uk or British politicians are ignoring their constituents, some website contact forms reject protonmail email address as well. So I hope they give Google a run for their money. Edit IF its not politicians ignoring emails…

I've definitely blocked protonmail domains before. The calculus is that 100% of the accounts from that domain are fraud and 0% are legitimate, so it just saves a lot of time to block it. Stops fraud before it even starts. This is, of course, annoying for the 1 legitimate customer mixed in with the billions of bots. But basically, they have an abuse problem that they need to solve. Gmail also has plenty of fraudulent accounts, but it also has a lot of legitimate accounts, so they avoid the *@gmail.com ban.

It sucks that people use wide swaths like this, but that's how the cookie crumbles when you have a problem at 3 in the morning that you need to fix now and then go back to bed.

Post reply on HN