81–90 of 352 posts
This tool is turned against the poor and marginalized and used to eliminate opposition but not for making the system work better as it was supposed to.
In a sense society is being hacked by those in power using surveillance.
The ProtonMail guys always said that unless they were 20 miles from the littoral, in the sea side, they had to abide by national laws. So it was bound to happen. What makes me sad is how flimsy their entire premise (not necessarily "promise") turned out to be: all it took was some minor rascal in France to hug the wrong tree (so to speak), and ProtonMail is in the open saying they can't even protect the IP address of…
>I think there is a market for datacenters in open seas. The idea of having a isolated sovereign floating platform in the ocean doesn't doesn't really solve the problem of escaping the rules of national governments because it still needs network connections into those countries . Whether it's underseas fiber optic cables or bouncing signals off of satellites, the datacenter will be rendered useless if nations' citize…
Does it raise the bar for bothering to do that? Sure. But it’s certainly not absolute protection.
question... why did they have this information readily available for them? couldn't they not retain logs and delete this sort of information right away? is there some legal aspect that makes them have to retain it for a certain amount of time or something?
Be careful when companies market themselves as Swiss or that due to them being located in Switzerland means there is some extra layer of security or privacy. Sure, it's a more stable country than many other countries in the world, but not much different from most EU countries for example. And privacy wise there is no difference. Be also aware of the fact that many companies market themselves as Swiss, but all it mean…
We all need to make our own evaluation of the privacy promises of those services and whether they actually provide privacy above and beyond what other companies offer. We shouldn't rely on vague impressions that privacy is strong in company X merely because of their presence in a particular country (and which the company uses heavily for promotion).
The expectation that Proton would be able to disobey the legal requests of their local authorities with impunity is unrealistic. Protonmail makes certain claims about privacy, particularly about encryption. They don't make any claims that they have the intention, or ability for that matter, to defy local authorities at their peril. Like Grugq said in one of his presentations (paraphrased): "Don't expect your VPN comp…
This is exactly what baffled me about people saying "I'm cancelling my PM subscription" as if they didn't make this abundantly clear. In their transparency report, they state very clearly that they "may also be obligated to monitor the IP addresses" being used to access accounts engaged in criminal activity. Privacy activists, for some reason, don't take the time to read transparency reports.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion, email is the wrong medium for highly confidential communication. Especially, if someone's personal freedom or safety depends on it. Even if E2E works correctly, you still have to worry about meta data. Maybe Matrix over TOR would be a better alternative?
When someone's personal freedom or safety is at risk from their communications, said person should re-evaluate their career choices.
If they route all email over vpn, do they have to disclose the enduser's ip ? If so, how do they avoid that with standalone vpn ?
The ProtonMail guys always said that unless they were 20 miles from the littoral, in the sea side, they had to abide by national laws. So it was bound to happen. What makes me sad is how flimsy their entire premise (not necessarily "promise") turned out to be: all it took was some minor rascal in France to hug the wrong tree (so to speak), and ProtonMail is in the open saying they can't even protect the IP address of…
> I think there is a market for datacenters in open seas. Sealand's HavenCo tried it back in the 2000s. As it turned out, it didn't work well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HavenCo See: Death of a data haven: cypherpunks, WikiLeaks, and the world’s smallest nation https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/sealand-and-have...
There's no doubt in my mind there would be huge demand for such a thing. People hate that the government can spy on anything you do. The chilling effect is exhausting.