I really wish he had chosen some other means for accepting donations. PayPal has gotten so bad that I literally can't donate money to a worthy cause because I can't even change my fucking address on file without some generic error message popping up.
Lavabit abruptly shuts down
631–640 of 671 posts
Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you get a refund?
I did pay in advance for few years but I wont ask for a refund, I will consider it as a donation for those legal battles.
Ok thats your choice however the company wasn't liquidated so they should refund their customers who are asking.
Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
So guarantee you will be regarded as a "terrorist" and then put yourself somewhere in the middle of international waters? At least when the ship disappeared off the face of the earth it would be easy to figure out what happened.
Pretty sad world we live in that this is entirely realistic.
[deleted]
Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
So guarantee you will be regarded as a "terrorist" and then put yourself somewhere in the middle of international waters? At least when the ship disappeared off the face of the earth it would be easy to figure out what happened.
Pretty sad world we live in that this is entirely realistic.
I suppose, but looking at it another way: for the first time in human history we can imagine a world where this wouldn't be the case. We are closer to that world than we've ever been, even if right now the west is moving away from it again.
Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down
#635Please donate to their defense fund. It's not often you get a chance to directly support a cause like this. The link is at the bottom of http://lavabit.com/ , but I'll repost it here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_b...
One of the benefits of a high-paying software industry job is that I can afford to support causes like this now. I suspect many other HN readers are in a similar position. I encourage everyone to give what they can, as standing up for our rights at the cost of ten years of labor is an incredibly difficult thing, and deserves reward.
Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'd be nice to see Obama pardon Snowden, too.
Pretty sure we are going to be into at least two or three presidents trying to hang Snowden from the flagpole. They will never pardon him because of their fear of the next sysadmin exposing crimes of the state.
Do you blame them for that fear? This time it's spying, next time what if it's troop deployments? What if CI names get leaked by someone who finds the CIs to be scumbags?
Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down
#637When the FUCK did we become a nation that starts shutting things down that don't comply with the government? What really have we come to? Reminds me of Nazis Germany, except replace communist and socialist with Free Thinkers, The Innovators. First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist. T…
> When the FUCK did we become a nation that starts shutting things down that don't comply with the government? This is not new. When a company doesn't comply with fire code, the business is shut down. When a company doesn't comply with law enforcement, it's shut down. This is the case when the law is just or not (until the courts rule it unjust, best case.) But to your actual point: we've been a nation that enslaved…
> But to your actual point: we've been a nation that enslaved an entire race, locked up another one because of war, genocided yet another, banned speech against the government, ruined careers of famous scientists and actors because of political affiliations, passed laws against sex acts, shot water cannons and unleashed dogs at protesters, shot others, tore up the shanty towns of veterans, trained our soldiers to be racist so they'd be more effective, classified encryption as munitions, and on and on and on and on.
Yes, and police in US has historically acted to protect the regime and not the citizens regardless of whether the citizen actions were justified and lawful or not. Environmentalists have been dealing with this for decades[1], so it's not something new and probably not getting worse: internet activists' homes could as well have been raided, family members handcuffed and their eyes pepper-sprayed. This is fairly common, unfortunately. The question is what do we do about it?
[1] See the "If a tree falls" documentary for an excellent example.
Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'll be interesting to see whether companies start to shift to using encrypted email over the next few decades - it's not that hard to set up if you know the counterparty will be using encryption of the same kind, and if it's not a service bought in from an external company you can fairly sure it is secure. Companies could at least insist that intra-company email is encrypted, which would be a huge amount of their n…
Key exchange is still a huge issue. Sure, you can post a public key online, but I have no guarantee it is actually your key. How do I do business with somebody new? The core problem with widespread crypto use today is not encryption, it's trusted key exchange.
This is a really interesting problem that needs to be solved. We need some sort of P2P secure protocol to exchange keys between people. Bypassing all sorts of stuff and connecting directly and sharing over an encrypted channel. This sounds really tough the way the internet works right now but I think solutions will come up now that there is a real need for them.
Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second to that. If you want security (at least on a servers/ISP level) choose some 3rd world country which government (preferably not very fond of USA) does not have technical means on surveillance. I live in a small EU country and government’s IT forces are just laughable, so I can just imagine that in less civilised countries it should be close to non-existent. Combined with strong encryption to protect data in b…
I understand what you mean but I think the term '3rd world country' could be a bit discouraging to some of our American friends who might not have a clear picture about realities in our part of the world. For example I also live in a small EU country. By no means this is a 3rd world country - we have pretty strong IT industry (e.g. some globally successful antivirus companies etc.) and the country is certainly develo…
Are you czech by any chance ? I think it's a great place and completely understand why your people would be against government surveillance. The days of asking random people for IDs just to make sure they aren't spies still aren't forgotten there.
Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that most 3rd world countries will just come knocking on your doors and take everything away, if the US goverment requests it. After all, those countries wouldn't be 3rd world countries, if they had the power to resist US threats/requests. Or they are part of the "axis of evil" (or whatever the current propaganda term is), in which case the internet connection to that country could either be cut off, o…
I would imagine that for example in Ukraine US may request stuff, but then the low level chief of the Police in the town where you reside would give you a hint in exchange for money. That's how it rolls there. What US is going to do about that? Bribe the Ukrainian police to bring you to their Embassy? ;-)
That's a good point but don't assume that the CIA/US-govt is above bribing or even threatening/blackmailing agencies in foreign countries. They do this all the time!