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Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

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Re: Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

#141

Post by 0xBDB »

lynx23 wrote: post #58
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a stereotype and probably not true. Many deep thinkers are humanists. It's probably more likely around the hyper rational types, but my boss is the most empathetic engineer I've ever worked for. This is anecdotal but your comment seems fairly clearly overbroad

I've seen the stereotype confirmed on HN several times already. Whenever I, a blind pedestrian, voice my concerns about driverless car technology, I am being downvoted and outright critizised. The undertone is "How can this single person try to block an emerging technology". That pretty much confirms the statement that tech people sometimes have a hard time with human concerns.

I am empathetic to your concerns but I may or may not agree with your proposed solutions. I do think it's always important to keep in mind that empathy and compassion aren't the same thing, or always aligned. Compassion is more utilitarian. Driverless cars will save a lot of lives when the technology is good enough, and the compassionate thing is implementing the technology when it saves more lives than it endangers. If that's the non-empathy you are getting from the HN community then the community is right, but again, I genuinely empathize even so.

Re: Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

#142

Post by alephnerd »

_heimdall wrote: post #139
alephnerd wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of laws like Blacklists/Deny Lists. A platform is default allowed until it denies to comply with Law Enforcement Requests. When that happens, a platform can by denied/blacklisted. This is why Protonmail is blocked in India and not Gmail or Yahoo. If Proton AG decided to ignore US Law Enforcement requests, it would get shut down the same way. This exact thing happened to Lavabit in 2013.

I may be getting out over my skis here, hopefully someone will correct me if so. But I believe this is the main distinction with a Common Law system, where everything is default legal unless regulated by legislation. Effectively, laws are only blocklists under legal systems based on Common Law. I don't know for sure if India is Common Law, though given its history with the British Empire I would guess that it isn't.

India is Common Law as well.

Former British Dependencies like India, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, and Australia are ruled under Common Law with additional colonial authoritarian flourishes, as these dependencies could be overruled by Westminster until the mid-late 1900s.

England, Wales, and North Ireland are themselves Common Law, and it's somewhat common for Indian lawyers to cross apply to join the English Inns of Court as well. That said, modern India is starting to transition towards an American style common law system over the British one, as America has way more of an impact in India today.

Civil/Roman/Latin Law is a continental thing. You'll see influences of it in former Spanish, French, and Russian colonies.

Re: Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

#143

Post by ridiculous_leke »

recroad wrote: post #14

India for all intents and purposes is now an ethno-national state with no press freedom, severe persecution of minorities, and human rights violations aplenty. I grew up in India when it was a relatively secular state. For example, when the Babri Masjid (mosque) was destroyed by Hindus in the early 90s, the national magazine, India Today and major newspapers led with the headline, "India's Shame" and acknowledge how…

Such claims have absolutely no relevance to the story. The block request came from Tamil Nadu police where major politics is on the opposite end of the spectrum. I wish I could go back to the time where people actually read the article and stay on point.

Re: Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

#144

Post by ijhuygft776 »

nimish wrote: post #100
ijhuygft776 wrote: post #78

Why don't they ban phones too?

They severely restricted the buying of SIM cards after the Mumbai terror attacks on the flimsy basis that the terrorists used cell phones to coordinate them . In practice it means that it's a massive pain to get a local number when visiting family. VOIP intra-country is also illegal, but it's not clear if that's regulatory capture or for similar "national security" grounds.

> it's not clear if that's regulatory capture or for similar "national security" grounds

The reason given doesn't matter that much... they give whatever reason they think most people will approve.

Re: Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

#145

Post by pritambaral »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #24
cedws wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK government has tried to ban encryption time and time again. This is what happens when you have old/incompetent career politicians in power instead of deep thinkers like scientists and engineers.

It's worse than you think. Read the Criminal Justice Act (Offensive Weapons) Order 1988 (S.I 1988/2019) and marvel at some of the nonsense some politician thought it important to ban. My personal favourite is "Death Stars", since it creates the mental image of some constable trying to confiscate a superlaser-equipped battlestation.

Here's the relevant text of the legislation:

> the weapon sometimes known as a “shuriken”, “shaken” or “death star”, being a hard non-flexible plate having three or more sharp radiating points and designed to be thrown;

Re: Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

#146

Post by bmicraft »

EasyMark wrote: post #99
goda90 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, They also banned tinted windows in cars after an assualt happened I think every jurisdiction should put limits on how tinted the windshield and front windows can be. Being able to see where a driver is looking is important in many situations in order to avoid collisions. It's especially important for pedestrians and cyclists that have to cross the path of cars.

I think this sort of government hand holding is unnecessary and promotes the surveillance state. I'm all for going back to the levels we had in the 70s. People should be given the means to be safe but it shouldn't forced on them, same with surveillance. I think putting bumper guards on everything in life leads to a society that is afraid of everything and values safety over liberty, like the society of today.

As a cyclist I have to be very aware of people opening their car doors into my lane. This is a direct safety concerns for me and not some hurr durr soorvwaylanze concern about slippery slope fallacies. You wouldn't say this about OSHA either (I hope).

This is not about protecting the person tinting their window, but everyone around them. As such, it doesn't even qualify as government hand holding. Your not protecting someone from themselves.

Re: Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

#147

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

dartharva wrote: post #126
bluish29 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The mosque was converted by a judgement from India's Supreme Court Many would say that doesn't change anything because they think that Indian supreme court is just another tool in the hand of Modi's government [1] [2] [3]. [1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/12/27/i... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/02/wh... [3] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/india-s-justice-sys…

Many would say that regarding this decision, yes. But they'd be overlooking the kind of exceptional dilemma the court faced in this case - it was not just about determining what club gets a legal right over public property, but about defusing a several generations-long historical and religious conflict of vastly higher scale. In the end they had to pass a judgement that antagonized the least number of people and prev…

Isnt it just convenient. To hell with due process and law and justice and equality.

Give a judgenent that offends least number of people, be it right or wrong.

You know how that sounds like? A corrupt judiciary that's at the whims of satisfying the ego of masses.

Btw

>The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if the capital punishment is awarded to the offender.

This quote from an actual judgment made by supreme court of India literally says so. To satisfy collective consciousness of masses, a man must die

Re: Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

#148

Post by _heimdall »

behringer wrote: post #129
_heimdall wrote: post #30

There's a pretty egregious misunderstanding of how email works in both the article and the proposed ban. Protonmail can only end-to-end encrypt email when the receiver is also using Protonmail. The email spec has no support for a universal encryption method, one of the reasons we'd be better off not using email at all today. They also don't explain how the inability to track the sender's IP is specific to Protonmail.…

That is completely untrue. Email supports end to end encryption between any two servers. You set each server up with a list of supported protocols and denied protocols. If either side can't agree on the encryption algorithm, then the email does not go through. If both sides do agree, which is almost always the case if both sides are using industry standard encryption methods, then the email is end to end encrypted. O…

There aren't many services that support e2e encryption though. I've been a Protonmail user for years and only remember being able to send encrypted emails to other PM users, maybe Fastmail also supports the same protocols?

Regardless, if I'm not mistaken encryption protocols are layered on and not part of the official email spec. I'm not 100% on that so may it was added to the spec as an optional feature, but by no means is it common (especially with the market share Gmail owns).

Re: Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

#149

Post by alex_smart »

davchana wrote: post #115
nottorp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not thinking big enough. Next email should come from the Indian government's email. Considering how tech aware they are, I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of indian gov email acounts with passwords like 1234...

What if it comes by postal mail i.e. India Post?

What if it comes by a pigeon? Oh no!

Re: Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

#150

Post by behringer »

_heimdall wrote: post #148
behringer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is completely untrue. Email supports end to end encryption between any two servers. You set each server up with a list of supported protocols and denied protocols. If either side can't agree on the encryption algorithm, then the email does not go through. If both sides do agree, which is almost always the case if both sides are using industry standard encryption methods, then the email is end to end encrypted. O…

There aren't many services that support e2e encryption though. I've been a Protonmail user for years and only remember being able to send encrypted emails to other PM users, maybe Fastmail also supports the same protocols? Regardless, if I'm not mistaken encryption protocols are layered on and not part of the official email spec. I'm not 100% on that so may it was added to the spec as an optional feature, but by no m…

PGP supports all email carriers.

But there's also server side encryption that is end to end. If both the sender and recipient uses a trusted mail server that uses encryption then nobody between the two can see the email.

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