chapotraphouse @hexbear.net oscardejarjayes [comrade/them] @hexbear.net 9 mo. ago

Proton's doing a fundraiser

I was thinking "Oh, maybe I'll donate. They're donating to MSF and Tor? That's cool." And then I saw this part.

20 comments

All “privacy” services are compromised by the CIA and NSA unless they’re hosted by Russian and Chinese companies. It’s not inherently a bad thing because some things like VPNs kind of need a ton of users to keep you “anonymous.” But it’s worth keeping in mind.
- if people only use a vpn to break the law they're missing the point, and giving the feds the ammo to seeth about how vpns are only for criminals
I told my left-liberal gen-x labor aristocratic tech industry peers that their beloved Bell¿ngcat is an op (which Elon Musk has also said ), and they didn’t take it well. They probably still LARP on the site, useful idiots that they are.
I thought this was about Valve's fork of wine for a moment and I was about to rant
- Valve's proton is super great, love it. Proton, the cloud service, I'm a bit less into. I've thought about switching to Tuta or Riseup, but my proton email is already connected to enough stuff to make it a pain. Probably still better than google though.
  
  Its miles and miles better than Google... but I would recommend using an email service that at bare minimum open sources all its code.
  
  Oh and obviously do not pay for it. Not too hard for the powers that be to trace a credit card transaction, if they get interested enough to.
  
  And fucking no, no do not use fucking bitcoin, its not secure, its easy traceable... god now i need a smoke just thinking about the total insanity of cryptocurrency.
  
  Oh right fuck, for the love of GOD dont use Windows or Mac.
For reference, this is the full list:

Source (edited the link because I messed up the markdown)
- Yeah, most of those are cool, but Bellingcat, Liberties, and Forbidden Stories are all really sus.
Their free mail is neat and relatively secure. They've always been too aggressively corporate and profit-focused to ever feel that trustworthy though.
I can't imagine how people survive without being like "oh they sold out French climate activists? they wanted my phone number? of course it was an op, damn" like I still saw people reasoning only protonmail is compromised. Like there aren't further ways to divert traffic and break certain forms of encryption practically everyone knows about know! I can practically sense when something is part of a fed reality show. But intuition and caution cannot help people who give them piles of plausible deniability no one deserves.
Is there an alternative that isn't an FBI front?
- Hand delivered mail
  
  Written in an invented language only the two of you know
- If you want private communication, you have to encrypt your emails with PGP/GPG. You could also connect to the email with a VPN, this is an additional layer of security, not an alternative to GPG encryption. There is no email provider that you can trust.
- Not really. Email is inherently broken due to capture by just a few big corps and "anti-spam" requirements. You could try to use GPG but that requires the other party to be on board and for you to have shared keys and for both of you to use secure inboxes, i.e. self-hosted.
  
  At that point you might as well use a messaging service that's meant for secure communication from the ground up.
- private/self-hosted smtp servers i imagine. it just doesn't strike me that these email services that offer free inboxes would be any good for privacy concerns (proton mail, tutanota, whatever). but they're good to sign up for shit i suppose.
  
  Self-hosting email is a nightmare. The actual self-hosting isn't that bad, but getting your emails not blocked usually is.
Fuck proton
Thats pretty funny as I recently got a bunch of shit in some Tech lemmy or something for pointing out that ProtonMail recorded the IP of a French climate protestor after the French asked Europol to ask the Swiss government nicely, and then I pointed out that if they are even /capable/ of doing that then at best they are falsely marketing themselves as secure and private, and also poorly designed as a service.

The whole ostensible idea of doing a secure messaging service of any kind is more than encryption. It is making it so its just not actually possible for you to comply with a subpoena due to actually being clever in the way you design your software and how it uses what hardware.

But I just got dogpiled on because 'its the law moron they are a business they have to comply IDIOT'.

oh well. Techbros be techbros. I guess that means 'performative privacy advocacy' is a thing. Bleck.

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