>But last month, Proton disabled email accounts belonging to journalists reporting on security breaches of various South Korean government computer systems following a complaint by an unspecified cybersecurity agency
That said, if your inbox is encrypted, protonmail does so on the client side with a second password. They can maybe delete the account, but proton mail doesn't know what the encrypted data is. What happens to new emails sent to a disabled address is anyone's guess though. Honestly I think they're doing the best they can given the circumstances
This is the weakness of cloud services.
I would expect their own apps to be open source, are they not?
If you, or someone else, like please audit the repos. Could be cool to see trusted forks of some of the clients.
As if disabling the issue tracker and stonewalling pull requests wasn't bad enough, seeing how it is built out of multiple layers that communicate via gRPC was what made me instantly lose all trust in Proton. I don't know who's been doing their hiring but just from one look at that kludge it's evident they've lost the plot altogether.
(There's a third-party alternative called Hydroxide, but it's experimental. Haven't been able to send emails through it from Thunderbird yet, though I've only looked into this for a few hours recently.)
Full disclosure, I use Proton and overall trust them so unless I see strong evidence of abuse or lies on their part I'm inclined to post contextualizing comments on stuff like this, b/c well I don't wanna host my own mail server, at least not in prod.
You are the bosses at Protonmail, do you want police at 6 am shaking your kids, seize all your devices, loose all agreements with PayPal and Visa/MasterCard, because you want to protect a guy who distributes child pornography or plans a terrorist attack ?
No way, so you tap on the shoulder of the CTO and ask him to push a temporary update or turn on a feature flags, in order to collect the missing information.
This is true for all companies who control the client.
source? Their compare plans page specifically lists "End-to-end encryption" as a feature for their free plan.
Soon or later we will default to analog means. It’s not looking good.
I think it'd be crazy to make a service worse because of worry over potential hit pieces that might whine about a perfectly reasonable policy. It isn't as if Proton Mail hasn't been accused of those things before anyway (along with accusations of being a honeypot and not private enough).
It's better to have integrity and fight for your users than to cave just to avoid click bait articles by people with irrational views.
They currently do cooperate and they go get the odd bad press about this.
So doing what they actually claim to do would change nothing. Their current stance is just a cop out.
While I like the idea of a safe and uncompromising service, proton seems less so now.
It also looks like one of the writers filed an appeal with Proton and Proton denied the appeal, so they manually investigated the incident and refused to reinstate the account and then only did after this got attention on X/Twitter.
So make no mistake about it: Proton didn't just disable the accounts after whatever CERT complained, which would have been bad enough - they also didn't do anything about it until this started getting lots of eyes on social media.
According to Proton's response in the linked reddit post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45227356
They say: "Regarding Phrack’s claim on contacting our legal team 8 times: this is not true. We have only received two emails to our legal team inbox, last one on Sep 6 with a 48-hour deadline. This is unrealistic for a company the size of Proton, especially since the message was sent to our legal team inbox on a Saturday, rather than through the proper customer support channels."
Proton doesn't mention that the first email from Phrack which Proton ignored was weeks prior to that, which is what led to the second email in the first place.
You'll also note that Proton doesn't mention that their Abuse Team refused to re-anable the account after the article author did the appeals process, as per Phrack's timeline at the top of their article.
I had previously liked Proton. I started seeing bits and pieces of info about their security being lackluster over the past year or so, causing doubt about their credibility. I'm definitely done with them after this.
The whole "we have only received two emails" is a classic move of every company caught with their pants down. Considering Proton's history, they don't get the benefit of the doubt on this one.
As for the "company size excuse" sorry but considering the business you claim to be in (the private and secure email), having an on-call skeleton crew legal team available over the weekend for urgent requests is a bare minimum (and I'm pretty sure they have people available to hand over everything the cops request if "the proper process is followed").
Remember that they have turned over information in less than 24 hours before (for what they call an extreme case of course). So the "size" excuse doesn't hold. Doesn't matter how urgent it is, if they are the small bean they claim they are, there is no chance they can have a turnaround of less than 24 hours.
Again, it's not what they did that's the biggest issue, it's the coverup. Just like last time they got in hot water. Because the coverup raises a lot more questions.
I’d like more details about the initial CERT contact if anyone knows anything
Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering).
Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin alias service. Any suggestions for easily porting all those accounts to a new provider? Manually changing each and every account to a new email seems painful.
This is something I had not heard (also have been a paying user for a very long time).
I've never encountered a bug, to my knowledge. I did dislike that when they released photo storage they didn't have a proper search feature.
I'm glad it works for you, but their offering is frequently buggy and broken for me.
I was a a founding paying member of Proton Mail. I loved them and evangelised them for years. But after a decade, the quality of the offering, especially the mail and calendar, is almost a joke, and the company seems very distracted chasing the next big thing (the half baked password manager being one).
Comparing Fastmail’s UI and feature set with Proton, you quickly realise they are leagues apart.
And no Fastmail doesn’t provide e2e encryption. For that I use Signal, and for the few occasions where I need e2e encryption in email, I use PGP.
My only wish is that there was more client support for JMAP protocol. Even thunderbird doesn’t support it, and I can’t go back to IMAP because I like labels. Thankfully Fastmail’s own web interface is so good it is not a big issue.
For a VPN, what do you need it to do? For tinfoil hat privacy stuff, get a VPS in Estonia or something. If you just want a secure tunnel while working remote, get a WiFi access point with Wireguard and Dynamic DNS at your home (it's free plus you probably have more bandwidth).
"You are considered active if you log in and use our services once a year. Simply logging in to any Proton service on our web, desktop, or mobile apps at least once a year is enough."
If this would be the case they would not be approved by any payment providers at all.
On top of that, add the possibility that hosting companies and upstream network peers would shut them down.
You do know what law required Proton to act as it did at each step in the story, right? You wouldn't just come up with random non-sequiturs, right?
That's not to say I feel any sympathy to the target - who by all counts has done a fair bit of damage. But this sort of hacktivism / vigilantism simply isn't helpful. There's a high likelihood that one or more nation states / law enforcement agencies may have had active operations directed against this threat actor derailed by such activity.
tl;dr - If you're going to conduct such activities, practice proper OPSEC. And don't let your desire for attention / recognition take priority over staying on the right side of the law.
daft_pink•1h ago
luqtas•53m ago