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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

#31

Post by nicce »

antonymoose wrote: post #19

PSA: Proton deletes “unused” accounts after one year, and defines unused in some opaque sense where receiving but not sending emails is “unused” so I’m in a nasty position of my iCloud account being unrecoverable. Going to have to spend nontrivial time off boarding my account.

Do they still use that old shady billing? You could get "credits" from coupon to upgrade your plan, and once it ends, it automatically subscribes and your account bill goes to negative. Unless you pay that, your account is locked. Happened to me some long time ago and haven't used Proton since.

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

#32

Post by idle_zealot »

nsagent wrote: post #18

I've need a paying subscriber to Proton since 2018, but I recently canceled my subscription (which ends in November). I just got fed up with the constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings. Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering). Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin…

I'm using Fastmail and Mullvad. Both seem to work pretty well and are reasonably priced. You could also host your own on VPSs if you're feeling adventurous.

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

#33

Post by a0123 »

gruez wrote: post #4

Can proton even win here? The obvious solution would be "we don't take down unless there's a court order", but then you'd get exposé pieces saying how protonmail is a den for drug dealers/pedophiles/doxxers/cyber criminals.

No.

They currently do cooperate and they go get the odd bad press about this.

So doing what they actually claim to do would change nothing. Their current stance is just a cop out.

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

#34

Post by commmentator »

j-bos wrote: post #28
commmentator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll note that Proton's PR only mentions the second date - " last one on Sep 6 with a 48-hour deadline." Proton doesn't mention that the first email from Phrack which Proton ignored was weeks prior to that, which is what led to the second email in the first place. You'll also note that Proton doesn't mention that their Abuse Team refused to re-anable the account after the article author did the appeals process, as…

That's a great point. I guess at this point it'd be ideal for them to treat this an incident and do a proper postmortem with timelines and decision calculus.

Definitely agree. A frank postmortem would be a good thing to see.

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

#35

Post by rvnx »

Sunspark wrote: post #10
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…

You are trusting them. They control the client, how the keys are created/stored, etc. Javascript, etc. If they were to suddenly turn one day, they could. This is the weakness of cloud services.

It is very possible for them to inject custom JS to a specific user.

You are the bosses at Protonmail, do you want police at 6 am shaking your kids, seize all your devices, loose all agreements with PayPal and Visa/MasterCard, because you want to protect a guy who distributes child pornography or plans a terrorist attack ?

No way, so you tap on the shoulder of the CTO and ask him to push a temporary update or turn on a feature flags, in order to collect the missing information.

This is true for all companies who control the client.

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

#36

Post by esseph »

nsagent wrote: post #18

I've need a paying subscriber to Proton since 2018, but I recently canceled my subscription (which ends in November). I just got fed up with the constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings. Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering). Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin…

> constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings

This is something I had not heard (also have been a paying user for a very long time).

I've never encountered a bug, to my knowledge. I did dislike that when they released photo storage they didn't have a proper search feature.

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

#37

Post by teekert »

esseph wrote: post #36
nsagent wrote: post #18

I've need a paying subscriber to Proton since 2018, but I recently canceled my subscription (which ends in November). I just got fed up with the constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings. Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering). Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin…

> constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings This is something I had not heard (also have been a paying user for a very long time). I've never encountered a bug, to my knowledge. I did dislike that when they released photo storage they didn't have a proper search feature.

Same here, no bugs in Proton apps and I’m still a happy subscriber.

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

#38

Post by mulmen »

nsagent wrote: post #18

I've need a paying subscriber to Proton since 2018, but I recently canceled my subscription (which ends in November). I just got fed up with the constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings. Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering). Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin…

I use Fastmail and I’m mostly happy with it. Their design team is thoughtless so their web and mobile offerings are disappointing. The mail hosting itself seems to be excellent though.

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

#39

Post by 2cents5ewe27366 »

nsagent wrote: post #18

I've need a paying subscriber to Proton since 2018, but I recently canceled my subscription (which ends in November). I just got fed up with the constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings. Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering). Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin…

I've been happy with Startmail, good customer service, they don't offer any of the non-email cloud services though.

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

#40

Post by alsetmusic »

j-bos wrote: post #28
commmentator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll note that Proton's PR only mentions the second date - " last one on Sep 6 with a 48-hour deadline." Proton doesn't mention that the first email from Phrack which Proton ignored was weeks prior to that, which is what led to the second email in the first place. You'll also note that Proton doesn't mention that their Abuse Team refused to re-anable the account after the article author did the appeals process, as…

That's a great point. I guess at this point it'd be ideal for them to treat this an incident and do a proper postmortem with timelines and decision calculus.

But that would be contrary to their clear intention thus far: to sweep this under the rug. /s

I had previously liked Proton. I started seeing bits and pieces of info about their security being lackluster over the past year or so, causing doubt about their credibility. I'm definitely done with them after this.

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