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Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

theintercept.com

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Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#181

Post by traceroute66 »

_kidlike wrote: post #135
jegp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your stack? After reading this, self hosting suddenly appeals to me.

forget about self hosting email... I tried it for years, and even if you get it working (needs months), it will eventually stop working again. The problem is that in order to get the big boys to accept you as an email provider, you have to jump through infinite hoops, and be treated like a criminal and/or scammer in the meantime (or at best a business that is trying to send newsletters). You will never get a human to…

> I tried it for years, and even if you get it working (needs months), it will eventually stop working again.

I've been self-hosting for decades and have never, ever seen the sort of problems you suggest. Once its working, its working.

When people have a problem, its usually because they are trying to either:

   (a) host off a home internet connection; or
   (b) host off a less than reputable hosting provider.
Both of which should frankly come to no surprise to anyone with a modicum of technical know-how.

Hosting off a home internet connection, assuming the ISP will even open the ports in the first place, has been something to avoid since, well, basically forever ... certainly anywhere after the late 90's.

Hosting off a less than reputable provider is the same. I'm not going to name names, but certain providers are well known for originating spam or not responding to abuse@ messages.

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#182

Post by privatelypublic »

eek2121 wrote: post #68
fivefives55555 wrote: post #9

I've been following this on X/Twitter and I think one of the most egregious things that's important to point out is that folks from Phrack reached out to Proton in private multiple times, and Proton ghosted them. Proton only engaged with them and then reinstated the accounts after Phrack went public and their X/Twitter post went viral. It also looks like one of the writers filed an appeal with Proton and Proton denie…

Proton does not require a shred of proof that you are a real human being either, fyi. I'm not actually attacking them for this specifically, because I feel that we need privacy focused tools, however the fact that I was able to create a few hundred proton email addresses in seconds by injecting usernames/passwords was scary, even to me. I'm surprised they aren't on spam block lists worldwide. Their captcha is child's…

I dropped Proton when a ton of services (all the major A and B tier cloud providers I tried for starters) could not/would not activate an account with a proton email.

Email is a critical infrastructure these days. Most people have neither the time nor the will to deal with emails failing to send and/or be delivered. (Send or receive)

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#183

Post by privatelypublic »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #174
int_19h wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never really understood the point of that. If you are exchanging emails with someone using one of the most popular email services that together make 99% of the marketshare, their server retains your email unencrypted anyway. So the only time that encryption will really matter is when emailing someone who is also using Proton.

Proton also supports PGP emails... for the dozen or so people who are setup to receive them.

So does m365.

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#184

Post by overfeed »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #155
overfeed wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go out on a limb and say it: it's an American cybersecurity agency. Proton's CEO/Proton[1] loves the current US admin. I wouldn't be surprised if they comply now and ask questions later, if at all. 1. According to the now-deleted Reddit comment from the official Proton account glazing Republicans, so I assume they were speaking on behalf of all of Proton. https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-…

Half the American tech landscape is either running toward Trumps bed or bending right down and making all the right mating signals in hopes of some interest, but a few pro-republican comments from the Proton CEO should be held as immediately and deeply suspect of this company being a honeypot? People of all kinds can say certain positive things about the Republican Party for different reasons in specific contexts and…

Ideological rigidity or not, I'll bet dollars to donuts that Proton disabled the accounts at the behest of an American agency. All the highfalutin talk is missing my main point.

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#185

Post by overfeed »

billy99k wrote: post #165
moogly wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, at least, it's less about the initial comments than how he handled the fallout from it.

Why should there be fallout from supporting the current admin? Tech companies colluded with the government during the biden administration to censor American citizens. I never saw any outrage. Only memory holing and denial

> I never saw any outrage

You probably aren't looking hard enough. There was plenty of outrage, and congressmen excoriated tech companies for "suppressing right-wing voice"

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#186

Post by guywithahat »

gruez wrote: post #11
guywithahat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can disable an account without knowing who owns it, although they do have credit card/payment information now, and I don't think new accounts get encryption services unless they pay. That said, if your inbox is encrypted, protonmail does so on the client side with a second password. They can maybe delete the account, but proton mail doesn't know what the encrypted data is. What happens to new emails sent to a dis…

>and I don't think new accounts get encryption services unless they pay. source? Their compare plans page specifically lists "End-to-end encryption" as a feature for their free plan. https://proton.me/mail/pricing#compare-plans

I thought I made a new account a while ago (as the front end for an OSS project) and it wasn't encrypted, and then when I checked encryption was moved to the paid membership. It looks like I may have just been confused though, because you're right it looks like it's still part of the free tier

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#187

Post by billy99k »

overfeed wrote: post #185
billy99k wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should there be fallout from supporting the current admin? Tech companies colluded with the government during the biden administration to censor American citizens. I never saw any outrage. Only memory holing and denial

> I never saw any outrage You probably aren't looking hard enough. There was plenty of outrage, and congressmen excoriated tech companies for "suppressing right-wing voice"

Not in Liberal/Left leaning communities. They called for more censorship.

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#188

Post by moogly »

billy99k wrote: post #165
moogly wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, at least, it's less about the initial comments than how he handled the fallout from it.

Why should there be fallout from supporting the current admin? Tech companies colluded with the government during the biden administration to censor American citizens. I never saw any outrage. Only memory holing and denial

> Why should there be fallout from supporting the current admin?

Well, why or why not doesn't matter; there _was_ backlash. And to my recollection, he made some rather bizarre defensive posts on Reddit that were later deleted and replaced with a corpo response.

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#189

Post by pengaru »

traceroute66 wrote: post #181
_kidlike wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

forget about self hosting email... I tried it for years, and even if you get it working (needs months), it will eventually stop working again. The problem is that in order to get the big boys to accept you as an email provider, you have to jump through infinite hoops, and be treated like a criminal and/or scammer in the meantime (or at best a business that is trying to send newsletters). You will never get a human to…

> I tried it for years, and even if you get it working (needs months), it will eventually stop working again. I've been self-hosting for decades and have never, ever seen the sort of problems you suggest. Once its working, its working. When people have a problem, its usually because they are trying to either: (a) host off a home internet connection; or (b) host off a less than reputable hosting provider. Both of whic…

I too have self-hosted for decades, there was a brief period of annoyance where I had to set up SPF records long ago, but since then it hasn't been problematic AFAIK (not that I'm in constant contact with people on all the major providers).

However, a close friend and fellow ex-sysadmin who also has self-hosted since the 90s, has had some headaches in recent years. He upgraded his dedicated server at the same US provider I use, without attempting to preserve his original IP addresses.

He hosts email for his wife's small business, and with the new IP addresses has come a lot of problems. Her billing is performed primarily via email, when the emails get blocked, her income is directly affected. It's so bad sometimes I'd say it's straining their marriage.

This isn't at a disreputable hosting company. It's simply the reality of provisioning new systems receiving new ipv4 addresses inherently from a pool outside the pre-spamers-and-scammers-everywhere era, these addresses have passed through a dumpster fire of abusers.

At this point I'll never retire my dedicated server just to hang onto its IP address with a clean history I've controlled since the 1990s. Even if the machine becomes nothing more than an overpriced reverse proxy to somewhere else I run the real back-end on... the address has become the primary value.

So when advising people begin self-hosting, at least consider the reality of available ipv4 addresses they're likely to end up with. Even the reputable vendors have been used by malicious actors buying hosting with stolen credit cards and fake identities. We can't have nice things.

Re: Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency

#190

Post by overfeed »

billy99k wrote: post #187
overfeed wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never saw any outrage You probably aren't looking hard enough. There was plenty of outrage, and congressmen excoriated tech companies for "suppressing right-wing voice"

Not in Liberal/Left leaning communities. They called for more censorship.

Yours is an entirely different argument to what gp was claiming, and undermines the crux of gps position.
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