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Lavabit abruptly shuts down

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Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#521

Post by jarek »

rayiner wrote: post #352
unimpressive wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you'd probably prefer people stay in the US, but would you like to make a recommendation for our viewers at home looking to get away?

Where are you going to go? People playing up third world countries don't know shit. The day-to-day corruption in nearly every such country is so bad that after awhile you'd rather have someone reading your e-mail but otherwise leaving you alone. And let me tell you from first hand experience--it is soul sucking to live in a country like that where you're constantly surrounded by people living on the edge of subsisten…

> Someone commented about Brazil yesterday how debts are inherited in that country

Oh, that's a lot worse than a country where you inherit social class.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#522

Post by reledi »

WhoIsSatoshi wrote: post #227
skrowl wrote: post #59

So.... what should we use now?

Is MEGA ( https://mega.co.nz/ ) an acceptable company? What's the HN consensus on this? Kim Dotcom does appear a bit sketchy.

In the last few months he's been very verbal about being pro-privacy and anti-NSA on his twitter feed [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/kimdotcom

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#523

Post by eqyiel »

MrGando wrote: post #246

This is terrible, I'm thinking about migrating my personal stuff out of Digital Ocean to some VPS host under the Netherlands legislation or other... any suggestions?

For a NL VPS host I would like to recommend tilaa.com. No affiliation, just a happy customer.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#524

Post by jvdh »

wmboy wrote: post #403
lmkg wrote: post #15

For the unfamiliar: Lavabit was a webmail service, that (claimed to) encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers. The linked email would lend some credence to those claims. It was originally designed in contrast to gmail scanning your email for targeted advertising, but my imperfect memory says that their system should also have been resilient to "we…

So... there would be market for a secure email service that ran on a ship/vessel that was permanently in the middle of international waters? (might have to have multiple vessel's for redundancy purposes)

People have thought about this, and Sealand actually hosted a very secure datacenter.

The problem is that you have to connect up to the Internet somewhere, and they can always get you there. Either tapping and listening in on sessions, or just plain disconnecting you.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#525

Post by mariuolo »

MyDogHasFleas wrote: post #190

Where's the "I wish you hadn't done that, lavabit, I'm a customer and I feel very screwed over by this action" comments? Or is this appropriate for any SaaS vendor? You're OK with this? Should all customers, even those who really don't care if the NSA could be watching, be put out because some feel that this cause trumps actually doing business and having customer-vendor relationships? I could see someone suing an Sa…

> Should all customers, even those who really don't care if the NSA could be watching, be put out because some feel that this cause trumps actually doing business and having customer-vendor relationships?

If they don't care, why pick lavabit then?

From my point of view they did exactly what they were supposed to do.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#526

Post by rwallace »

dkulchenko wrote: post #138

This is infuriating, and the worst part is that a clear solution isn't in sight. Sure, we can fight this in the courts, and a few secret programs might get shut down, but operations will just continue under a different name. We can encrypt our data, move our services and data offshore, but that just paints a big target on our heads - doesn't actually address the fundamental issue. This is supposed to be a democracy,…

I'm going to throw in a suggestion that I haven't otherwise seen made in this discussion.

Governments' justification for surveillance is that it's necessary for fighting terrorism. Okay, I can't say how useful it is for that purpose, I'm not privy to the relevant data; hopefully we can all agree fighting terrorism is a good thing as far as it goes, and it's clear governments believe surveillance is part of that.

And if surveillance data was only going to be used against terrorists, that would be fine. The reason many of us are so wary of pervasive surveillance is that we reasonably fear it won't stop there.

Would it be politically easier, would governments be more amenable, to attacking that problem instead? To say: fine, the NSA and its counterparts in other countries can have their surveillance, but only if the firewall between the NSA and other branches of government is strengthened to stop the data being used for any purpose except counterterrorism.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#527

Post by jaekwon »

ptwiggens wrote: post #337
toyg wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The political backlash attached to slapping an NSL on "Snowden's email provider" would have looked obvious to a 5-year-old, and any real player worth its salt would have run from Lavabit as soon as it hit the news. No, this has nothing to do with common criminals and everything to do with Snowden.

NSL's come with a gag order. There wouldn't have been any backlash as no one would have known about it. He shut it down because that was the only way to legally prevent the government from spying on his users.

Haven't NSL gag orders been found unconstitutional?

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/privacy/309277-judge-says-fbi...

I wonder why he didn't challenge it.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#528

Post by jaekwon »

mtgx wrote: post #200
raganwald wrote: post #5

I like the part where he can't tell you why he's shutting down. As if we won't engage in rampant irresponsible speculation that they have told him to decrypt and forward everything to them in real time.

He's most likely under a gag order. I thought that was pretty obvious.

Aren't gag orders challengeable? I thought they were found unconstitutional.

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/privacy/309277-judge-says-fbi...

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#529

Post by jaekwon »

kefs wrote: post #26

Seems like it would make sense for users to demand that any US based service includes a warrant canary, just like rsync.net's implementation. A global canary + separate canaries for individual accounts would also make sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary http://rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

Is this relevant?

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/privacy/309277-judge-says-fbi...

and

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/judge-orders-google-to-comp...

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#530

Post by krichman »

MrKurtz wrote: post #331
guelo wrote: post #183

The US government is destroying one of the few bright spots in the American economy with its out of control military. It is unconscionable. And the sad thing is it has been enabled by the betrayal by many of the web 2.0 giants, Facebook, Google etc. Google especially is sad to see since they were willing to forgo the Chinese market on principle, but then decided that taking on the authoritarian US government was too…

If you are seriously suggesting that abandoning the US market is a realistic option, especially for a multibillion dollar corporation, then you are (and I'm not using this word lightly) an idiot . Not to mention that there is no US equivalent to the rampant human rights violations and censorship in China.

The US violates human rights and then pretends that they don't, because "waterboarding isn't torture".
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