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

Proton spam and the AI consent problem

dbushell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 446 posts

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#351

Post by pluralmonad »

vee-kay wrote: post #344
BafS wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's time for the famous quote "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin Edit: format

I will respond to a quote with another famous quote: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." The only ways to prevent terror attacks is by either going deep undercover into terror organisations, or by doing surveillance and investigation on suspected terror links.

So in the case discussed above, every single person is a suspected terror link? I no longer think you're here in good faith.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#352

Post by vee-kay »

pluralmonad wrote: post #350
vee-kay wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your plus is someone else's minus. Of course, if you or your family are not the victim of a terror attack, you may not care if others are impacted by it. After 9/11, USA did the biggest crackdown on terror, including domestic security overhaul such as stringent security checks in airports, more pervasive surveillance, etc. Microsoft has recently given FBI recovery keys for Bitlocker to unlock a suspect's laptops: htt…

"Every nation takes advantage of the opportunities that are terrorist attacks in a similar way" If you think these crackdowns are for your own good, then it is you that lives in an idealized world.

Please stop defending terror supporter companies, with such illogical statements.

You have no clue what idealism means.

An ideal world is one where no terror attacks happen.

Proton has been actively campaigning against police and government in a terror prone region. Proton is openly encouraging terrorists to evade scrutiny.

If you support terrorism under any pretext, then we are done here.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#353

Post by vee-kay »

pluralmonad wrote: post #351
vee-kay wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will respond to a quote with another famous quote: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." The only ways to prevent terror attacks is by either going deep undercover into terror organisations, or by doing surveillance and investigation on suspected terror links.

So in the case discussed above, every single person is a suspected terror link? I no longer think you're here in good faith.

What case discussed above? You have not discussed any case here.

And the links I shared in my original comments show a dangerous situation, not a "case".

Proton has been actively campaigning against police and government in a terror prone region. Proton is openly encouraging terrorists to evade scrutiny.

Proton (or any legitimate company, for that matter) has no business doing subversive activities in terror sensitive areas like J&K. If they do, then they need to face the repercussions.

https://tfipost.com/2026/01/profit-over-people-proton-vpn-ge...

If you support terrorism under any pretext, then we are done here.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#354

Post by vee-kay »

chrisjj wrote: post #296
MiddleEndian wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's fine. If 20% of the emails from some company (let's say Paypal) are spam, then all email providers (especially Gmail, the largest provider) should mark ALL of their emails as spam by default until they stop spending spam. If they want to keep spamming, they can at least humiliate themselves by telling people to check their spam folders for their emails.

It proved not fine for me on an occasion of missing a service email and losing an account as a result.

If you lose an account due to negligence, it's on you, not the service provider.

Spam/junk folder is not "ignore" folder. You need to periodically check the contents of the spam/junk folder to see if any legitimate emails fell into that waste basket.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#355

Post by vee-kay »

duskdozer wrote: post #13
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. The number of services i use where the apps continually add new marketing preferences which are defaulted to ‘enabled’ despite the fact that all other preferences are disabled is disgusting and clearly used by some companies to ignore people’s actual preferences. LinkedIn is one of the worst offenders.

Have you noticed certain financial providers sending blatant marketing emails with no unsubscribe option and a comment along the lines of "these emails are not marketing"

The trick is create a filter to weed out such junk. And if a company sends me marketing fluff without unsubscribe option, then it goes in the junk/spam folder, and I may eventually discontinue my account with that service provider altogether.

Because I periodically check my sp/junk folder to see if legitimate emails got dumped there, so I eventually know who's a spammer and who's not.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#356

Post by [deleted] »

bigyabai wrote: post #288
vee-kay wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> because it was found that terrorists and perverts were using it for terror communications and digital sexual abuse. Lol, nondescript "terrorists and perverts" are the laughingstock of Western politics. Eyes roll whenever someone justifies drastic action on vague terrorism/perversion accusations: https://youtu.be/ud9zBKJJQe4 My bigger concern is Modi's international reputation for exacerbating crime statistics to ma…

[deleted]

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#357

Post by taneq »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #216
SCdF wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The three examples you listed are implementation details, so it's not clear if this is a serious post. Which datacenter they deploy code in is (other than territory for laws etc, which is something you may wish to know about and pick from) an implementation detail. A better example would be: imagine every single operating system and app you use adds spellcheck. They only let you spell check in American[1]. You will g…

Unrelated but interesting to think about terms like "queens English" now that the queen is gone. Will we be back to kings English some day? I suppose the monarchy might stay too irrelevant to bother changing phrases.

They’re already calling it the Kings Birthday public holiday in Australia and it just seems wrong.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#358

Post by Terr_ »

pluralmonad wrote: post #347
hattmall wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really strange thing is that so much of it doesn't work. Like I get that the SOTA models perform some tasks quite well and have some real value. But the AI being implemented in every corner creates a lot of really bad results. The Shopify code assistant will completely wreck your site and basically gets nothing correct. It will write 100 lines to change a color of a single DIV. The Amazon product Q&A will give yo…

Saw an AI generated product feature list on walmart's site that listed a stainless steel rack as microwaveable. If someone can sue mcdonalds for hot coffee, I imagine someone burning their house down while microwaving steel probably could sue too. Intelligence of the plaintiff not withstanding.

> while microwaving steel

There actually are microwave-safe steel objects, it depends on their shapes and conductive paths.

After all, the whole inner-box is already a metal surface being blasted by the microwaves that come in through a small hole...

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#359

Post by chanux »

ink_13 wrote: post #253
davidee wrote: post #231

I've been using proton for a year after migrating from Rackspace and I'm done. Not because of this article, but I might as well pile on: 1. I use a custom domain. Turns out that there are two competing features, not-at-all documented. If you use a catch-all, like I do, AND use specific addresses for sending, the two are incompatible to some degree. Which is bonkers. Example: with a catchall I can create any address I…

What are you going to do instead? I am very close to moving from a 20-year-old GMail address to a custom domain and was planning to use Proton as the email host.

I use migadu.com for setting up email for my domains. I have very low usage and their pricing model is just perfect for me.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#360

Post by XorNot »

janalsncm wrote: post #297
everyday7732 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, it's the same attitude that they used to create the AI in the first place by using content which they don't own, without permission. Regardless of how useful it may be, the companies creating it and including it have demonstrated time and again that they do not care about consent.

I’d argue that a lot of the scrape-and-train is just the newest and most blatant exploitation of the relationship that always existed, not a renegotiation of it. Stack overflow monetized millions of hours of people’s work. Same thing with Reddit and Twitter and plenty of other websites. Legally it is different with books (as Anthropic found out) but I would argue morally it is more similar: forum users and most autho…

I don't know, it feels odd to declare people wrote "because they enjoy it" and then get irritated when someone finds a way to monetize it retrospectively.

Like you're either doing this for the money or you're not, and its okay to re-evaluate that decision...but at the same time there's a whole lot of "actually I was low key trying to build a career" type energy to a lot of the complaining.

Like I switched off from Facebook aboutna years after discovering it when it increasingly became "look at my new business venture...friends". LinkedIn is at least just upfront about it and I can ignore the feed entirely (use it for job listings only).

Post reply on HN