Leon

It’s not so much this case in particular, but the idea of it and what it represents. Pluto being a dwarf planet or not is really just an astronomical categorisation, and that’s where the usefulness starts and ends. You won’t go to jail for calling it a planet, even though it doesn’t meet the standards.

The idea of using legislation on such an irrelevant thing is what rankles me. It’s frivolous and could be harmful. Perhaps not in this particular case, but legislating away expert opinion because it doesn’t fit with your personal narrative is a problem.

Right now it’s a planet, but this shit happens with peoples lives as well.

This is so dumb.

You’ll agree that Proton doing better would require them to move to a different country, right?

I’m okay with this. Sweden isn’t exactly known as a bastion of freedom. Our current minister of equality (Liberals) is pushing for a porn ban. The EU proposal colloquially called “Chat Control” was originally put forth by the Swedish EU Commissioner Ylva Johansson who belongs to the Social Democrats.

Also Mullvad doesn’t offer email accounts, does it? Seems that they couldn’t have a ‘no user data’ policy if they did since the emails would be exactly that.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t feel like it’s productive to repeat myself, but if you genuinely care for a response you can view it here: https://pawb.social/comment/18804733

Have a good one.

But like Proton, their VPN is incapable of logging access.

Mullvad’s VPN is incapable of doing so because their infrastructure is entirely built on volatile memory. This obviously doesn’t work with email because the emails need to persist, but this is isn’t a very big problem as that storage is encrypted.

My problem here is that access logs don’t need to be stored permanently. That could definitely be stored on a volatile medium, and then authorities could come over and confiscate it as much as they want. That sort of software architecture is entirely possible to set up, but Proton has made a decision not to.

“No personal information is required to create your secure email account. By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account. Your privacy comes first.” ~Protonmail.com

That is a choice. They could’ve chosen to not comply, they could’ve chosen to let the authorities raid their servers, and had their servers been set up in such a fashion that no data could be obtained, there wouldn’t be a problem.

They’ve chosen instead to log and give up information on a climate activist; not a ring of traffickers, or a terrorist group, but some dude or dudette that thinks that climate change is a bit of a problem and that the people in charge aren’t doing enough about it.

You’re being dishonest, is what’s not getting through.

I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. Do I realise that this creates legal problems for Proton? Yeah. So what? They’re a corporation, they get to deal with it. What this incident has shown is that their word doesn’t mean a thing. What happens when the fascist American regime starts demanding information on dissenters? Are they just going to fold and serve up whatever they ask on a silver platter, too?

What’s dishonest is saying “we don’t log, except when we do, and only when they’re serious criminals, or climate activists.”

I’m comparing Mullvad (a company) to Proton (a company) not their products. They both have a no-log policy (that’s a company policy) only one is actually no logs, and the other is “we sometimes log.” I don’t think you’re stupid either, so I don’t get what’s not getting through.

So Proton’s no-log policy is an apple and Mullvad’s no-log policy is an orange, is what you’re saying?

They both have no-log policies. One is “we never log” and the other is “we log sometimes” do you see the difference?

Proton said that had their user actually bothered to use any VPN, even Proton’s, there wouldn’t have been anything to give to authorities except for an exit node IP.

“She shouldn’t have dressed that way.”

Proton could do better, and it’s ridiculous that there are people out here okay with them not doing better.

Right, because corporations are widely known for going to prison when they break the law. Where exactly did they imprison Facebook for interfering in elections? Running illegal experiments on people? Pirating books and pornography? Surveilling children and selling their data?

Look at Mullvad. They’ve denied access to their data multiple times, they got raided, and nothing of use was recoverable. That’s what respect for privacy looks like. Proton could set their infrastructure up in this fashion, but instead they’ve chosen to just hand out user data freely.

What data? Here it is the IP address and only under order by authorities.

Whatever they gather. It says as much in the article; they started recording IPs once a request by the Swiss government came through.

ProtonMail can’t directly share data with foreign governments. In fact, doing so is illegal under Article 271 of the Swiss Criminal code. The police gained access to the IP address because Swiss authorities chose to cooperate with the French government. ProtonMail also points out how Swiss authorities will only approve requests that meet Swiss legal standards.

Under Swiss law, ProtonMail should notify the user if a third party makes a request for their private data and if the data is for a criminal proceeding. However, there’s a big catch/ loophole here. On its law enforcement page, ProtonMail highlights that the notification can be delayed in the following cases:

That’s based on the currently available laws. So if a law gets drafted that says “if we suspect someone to be complicit in criminal activity we want you to gather more data” we should just be fine with that because the authorities say so? Because the authorities are always infallible and incorruptible, right?

The details of this individual case isn’t the problem, it’s the precedent it sets that is. When Mullvad got raided for their logs there was nothing recovered because they don’t store anything. Proton stores things based on if the authorities ask them to, and when they find out that it wasn’t a terrorist or child-trafficker they go “woops we had no idea the account belonged to a climate activist.”

The authorities aren’t infallible. Some years back here in Sweden we had police raid, physically abuse, and kidnap a guy they suspected was a pedophile because he’d sent images of him and his 30 year old boyfriend having sex via Yahoo Mail. There’s no reality where this man should’ve been fucking beaten up and traumatised the way he was, but it happened, and there was no recourse for him. Nowhere down the chain of responsibility did anyone get reprimanded or investigated for misconduct.

Complying with the law is such a bullshit fucking excuse.

1. Authoritarian regime decides that being critical of the regime is illegal and makes laws to support this.
2. Activists use Proton for privacy.
3. Regime demands that they give up data on activists.
4. Proton complies with the laws.

That’s the issue.

Oh no it’s totally cool according to them. You can pirate at least 80tb worth of books, and then sell material based on it. It’s cool.

Paradise Lost is a fun read.

The point still stands. Email is a terrible operating system and should be murdered.

If you use the newer versions of Outlook it has some inane one-shot reply buttons you can click that is based on the content of the previous email and presumably some model built on you.

My work computer uses Outlook, and it usually has options like these

• Gotcha, thanks
• Brill, thank you
• I will do that, thanks

At my old workplace though, one of our customers would always respond with a couple of letters. Could be something like

Customer:
Hi. Could you update thing on website?

Us:
Hello!
Absolutely. We’ve rolled out the update, and you should be able to see it now.
Hope all is well over there. :)

Customer:
T M

Where T is short for “Thank you” and M is short for “Mary”

Ah. They were fantastic. Frustrating but awesome people.

I feel like people are overly antagonistic towards the technology, when the ire really should be directed at the companies. The tech has problems, like all tech does, but it also has its uses. Saw someone earlier today that had created a newsfeed with headlines rewritten to not be clickbaity bullshit.

I wrote a comment along these lines, he brought up “agents” in that SciShow episode without directly saying the word, and modern agents are really just a bunch of scripts tied together with an LLM. It’s not that complicated, and they absolutely suck at performing tasks that aren’t narrowly defined. Like you can’t throw it at some issues on GitHub and expect it to actually come up with solutions. People have tried that and the success rates are absurdly low.

SciShow can be incredibly sloppy at times. They had this episode about knitting a while back and lots of knitters basically fired back with “…did you guys try to talk to knitters about this?”

Hank Green seems really affable, it’s hard not to like him (knowing very little about him) but SciShow really needs more rigorous fact checking.

Oh they update a lot. The clients have gotten really snappy, which is nice because browsing photos felt a bit cumbersome before. There’s now automatic albums and facial recognition, if you opt in to that. Was going to say that there’s no editing tool but there is. It’s quite basic though, three tabs, crop, transform (rotate, flip, resize), and colours (brightness, contrast, saturation, and blur for some reason lmao).

There’s also a bunch of sharing features. You could share images or albums directly, or even create embeds for if you have a portfolio website. I pretty much only use it as a backup service though.

I guess they fill different niches. I use Ente for the e2ee, that’s pretty important to me. Immich definitely seems more like a drop in Google Photos alternative, I just use software on my computer to do that instead.

Ente is also open source and can be self-hosted.