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

Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

ctrl.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 258 posts

Re: Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

#241

Post by immibis »

ggm wrote: post #21
daenz wrote: post #7

State-funded email with E2EE. Every citizen gets an email address. You don't have to use it (and it will probably suck compared to competitors), but you'll have it as a permanent fallback address. And presumably it will come with some legal protections and due process.

India has come close to this. At one point they proposed one IPv6 /64 per citizen as an absolute right. It doesn't fit current address allocation models, or even routing models, but I can see what took them there. As an overlay network? It might be interesting.

One assumes that the /64 may change if they change providers, or else there's a big central routing point for these and you can only host them in India.

Re: Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

#242

Post by immibis »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #90
conjuredbytes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For ICANN accredited registrars, aren't there rules about when and how a registrar can delete or revoke a domain? You can submit complaints to ICANN here: https://www.icann.org/compliance/complaint

Yes, and one of those cases is anytime you don't pay them rent to renew your lease before the expiration.

If you didn't have to keep paying for domain names, big businesses would have registered all the interesting ones two decades ago. Same for physical property.

Re: Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

#243

Post by immibis »

kiririn wrote: post #202
nulbyte wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find RackNerd suits me just well. They are a great provider. I found them on Low End Boxes. I pay $25 a year. The only thing I ran into was the IP that was assigned was in one blacklist. It was one of the notoriously overzealous blacklists that hate everyone, though it was simple enough to request removal. No problems since.

Also a happy customer of racknerd but beware the owner has a dubious history in the hosting business and is currently undergoing related criminal proceedings https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/180381/some-juicy-court-dr...

This link is login-walled.

Re: Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

#244

Post by dredmorbius »

NavinF wrote: post #107
dusted wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run my own mail server as well, on my own domain, own server, physically present in my home. It's increasingly becoming a hassle.. Especially sending mail from a "consumer" line is tricky, they block outgoing port 25 and no longer really provide a relay host for you to go through either.. I basically had to infiltrate my current ISP to get access to people in netops and gaslight them into configuring reverse-dns an…

> Nation states absolutely should provide and host, e-mail accounts for their citizens Because nation states are well known for producing usable software at a reasonable cost to tax payers? IRL this would cost billions and everyone under 60 would forward their gov’t mail to gmail.

Much of the world already relies on nation-states for message delivery through the post office.

Because everyone utilises such systems, everyone has a vested interest in the privacy of such systems. Under liberal democratic governments, protections for privacy, security, and integrity are typically quite strong. Not inviolable, and you'll likewise find a significant set of criminal laws for crimes transacted utilising postal systems (mail and wire fraud, etc.), but specified and typically balanced.

Mind: that emerged over time, and a significant early interest of governements in operating messaging services was of course message intercepts.

That said, the early history of telegraphic and telephonic communications (both often privately owned and operated) is hardly much better. See the case of AT&T and the Republican Party swinging presidential elections, as told in Tim Wu's The Master Switch.

Re: Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

#245

Post by ggm »

immibis wrote: post #241
ggm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India has come close to this. At one point they proposed one IPv6 /64 per citizen as an absolute right. It doesn't fit current address allocation models, or even routing models, but I can see what took them there. As an overlay network? It might be interesting.

One assumes that the /64 may change if they change providers, or else there's a big central routing point for these and you can only host them in India.

I think, but cannot verify right now, they intended it to be a static assignment, tied to you. Initially a geographic prefix model. Yes, over time, it would decay as people move. But for rural poor, dalit, it would become a de facto routable identity. Analogous to voter ID maybe (I am told that there was a big push on voting rights for the agrarian poor)

Re: Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

#246

Post by schmudde »

seti0Cha wrote: post #212
rekabis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because nation states are well known for producing usable software at a reasonable cost to tax payers? The largest transfer of public property into the hands of private enterprise in human history was the Internet. At that time it was wild and limitless and full of promise. It’s pretty much stagnated from there. Just like scientific and medical research, tech research is the most effective and has the largest societ…

Inventing and turning into usable product are not the same skill sets, nor is maintaining. If, today, you survey which websites are the most robust, the most user friendly, the most performant, the most functional, or most economical, you are very unlikely to settle on one produced and maintained by the government, or even a university. I've noticed in recent years that some government websites have actually become f…

The public internet backbone (NSFNET 41) was officially decommissioned on 30 April 1995. This essentially marks the birth of today’s commercial internet.

The ground was set by the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act on October 2, 1992. This passed Congress with almost no debate. However, there were innovative politicians who attempted to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth for a public right-of-way.

The United States has very little publicly-owned internet infrastructure and few advanced digital public services. The USA also happens to lag behind other nations in simple metrics like the speed that ISPs deliver. Maybe it's a coincidence that many of these nations have more robust public services.

Re: Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

#247

Post by account42 »

sgjohnson wrote: post #120
Timshel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big difference you can fransfer your domain to another registrar if you are unhappy with it.

Not always. Most nation-state NICs won't let you.

You can't transfer to a different registry (since there is only one registry for each TLD) but where have you had problems transferring to a different registrar? Is this a case of the registry also being the (only) registrar? I don't think that's common.

Re: Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

#248

Post by account42 »

867-5309 wrote: post #140
googlryas wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it would be easier to just own an IP address?

the certificates needed to secure email require a domain name

There is no technical reason that certificates can't sign IP addresses - that is pure policy because IPs currently don't really represent an identity.

Re: Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

#249

Post by account42 »

koheripbal wrote: post #195
somat wrote: post #25

It is a bit overkill, but the closest you can get to owning your online identity is to "own" your own domain. sarcastiquotes used because you don't really own a domain you only rent it. I run my own mail server because I am a sys-admin and running a mail-server is something I do for fun. but the amount of agency you gain once you have a domain is staggering. people without a domain are pretty much second class net ci…

Having the gov't control you email isn't a good solution for various reasons. We've all seen the privacy abuses as well as abusive enforcement/gov't seizures from police and prosecutors. This is better in some countries and dystopianly worse in others. What we need is a system where we can efficiently route messages to/from public keys like the tor url system. This way you always own your address and no one can ever…

Public keys as addresses would be great for the perfect user but for real people they can come with their own failure modes that are much more real concern than abusive governments for most users (especially since your government will always have ways to get to you):

- How do you deal with a private key being lost? You can't treat this as a "almost never happens" scenario so you need a way to find people's (new) public keys which will be subject to all the same threat models as current domains or any other addressing scheme: there will be some kind of central authority.

- How do you deal with private keys being leaked? Again, you will need a way to revoke keys without having access to the private key which again is only doable with an external source of trust.

Re: Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)

#250

Post by account42 »

npteljes wrote: post #145
somat wrote: post #25

It is a bit overkill, but the closest you can get to owning your online identity is to "own" your own domain. sarcastiquotes used because you don't really own a domain you only rent it. I run my own mail server because I am a sys-admin and running a mail-server is something I do for fun. but the amount of agency you gain once you have a domain is staggering. people without a domain are pretty much second class net ci…

You have to trust a third party company either way, so I don't think you're closer by having the domain, from a trust / vulnerability standpoint. In fact I think that email is best hosted by specialists with experience - and I'm saying this after hosting email for quite some time.

Domains are much less of a wild west than accounts at a mail provider. Whil you do need to go through a private registrar, that registrar has to follow certain rules including letting you transfer the domain to another registrar.

This is a good reason for not using any of the new vanity gTLDs though as they can make their own rules unlike old gTLD (which are regulated much more closely by ICANN) and ccTLDs (which are regulated by the corresponding country).

Post reply on HN