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Comment by kiwee | Hacker News Reader

That is suspicious to me. No address, no contact, no support.

I've been a happy customer for years. The contact is info@rsync.net - it's on the pricing page. I've emailed support a few times and they answer very promptly.

Rsync.net has been around forever - like 15 years. They predate the concept of 'cloud'. They were the first to use a 'warrant canary', in 2006. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary)

They are also regulars here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rsync and (for example) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13277835

RE the warrant canary: all legal analysis I've seen points to the canary being functionally useless. A court would throw out the defense immediately, removing a canary pointing out that a warrant has been served is the same as tweeting that you got a warrant.

It's the minimal legal hack: completely useless in a court but massive generator of internet comments

Though it generating discussion around the warrants themselves is a good feature

It's still useful as a rhetorical tool against enforcement. If someone gets imprisoned for saying "no comment" and refusing to actively lie, that would hopefully cause an enormous outrage.

You don't "remove" a canary, you just stop updating it. The intent being that they can't force you to keep updating it.

They can't force you. Just like they can't force you to not tweet.

They can sure sue the hell out of you after you stop updating though.

The idea is that forced speech is different than free speech. That means that someone can force you to not say something, but not force you to say something.

so there are two things:

- The government cannot force you to update the canary. A court cannot get you to update it, because it's forced speech to demand an update.

- You created the canary of your own accord, and are responsible for its effects. Not updating the canary is, effectively, speech.

Though, from [0]:

"Realistically, though, courts compel speech all the time. Court-ordered apologies, disclosures, and notices are not unusual. And if ever a court would be inclined to compel speech, it would be in a situation like this one, where a company intentionally set out to get around a gag order with this kind of convoluted sea-lawyering."

[0]:http://law.stackexchange.com/questions/268/is-there-any-lega...

What if they could do it instead of you, even if you use distributed signing how difficult would it be?

What?

http://www.rsync.net/resources/index.html

"Unlimited Support From Real Engineers: support@rsync.net - +1-619-819-9156"

The address is in TOS http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/tos.html

"524 San Anselmo Ave., Suite 107" Does not sound like a real address as there seem to be 100x more companies registered with the same address.

Decoupling your physical mailing address from your office location makes a lot of sense, since changing the address would be very disruptive. Same reason you'd use Google Voice over giving someone your direct number.

And more and more companies these days don't even have any fixed physical offices, with remote-first cultures. What's the address of Trello? You won't find it on trello.com

It's not like you're going to actually walk there. If it's a legal address registered for the company, that's enough for every interaction you need with them.

They've been around for a long time and have a very good reputation.

It's unfortunate that you're being downvoted just for being cautious/skeptical.

Various aspects of rsync.net are periodically discussed on HN. About 417 days ago I raised a similar issue to yours, namely who is behind this company and what is the address.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10674029

At that time the owner responded on HN with clear information. It's unfortunate that, more than a year later, their website is still a bit of a dog's breakfast on this issue.

Sorry. I'll get this fixed today - we used to have a proper 'about' page before we redesigned the website and somehow it got lost ...

Founder is John Kozubik, who was previously the founder of JohnCompanies - the first VPS provider.[1]

Address is 524 San Anselmo Ave., San Anselmo, CA 94960.

Phone number is +1 619 819 9156.

http://www.rsync.net/resources/index.html

[1] Began offering FreeBSD jails in Aug/Sept 2001. Nobody had coined the term 'VPS' - we called them "server instances".

My recollection is he and his company were very well regarded. FWIW.

The owner is active on HN, it's a legit service.

What makes my suspicious is that I can't find any information on the company itself anywhere on the site. Where are they headquartered? What's their contact information? It's not even clear under what jurisdiction they operate.

Points well taken.

Again, we had all of this in place prior to an ill-advised website redesign.

As I said higher up in this thread, I'll make sure this gets republished and put in place properly today and I will add some verbiage that addresses your specific point about HQ and jurisdiction.

In the meantime, I will confirm we are a US firm with locations (ie., our own racks - not rented hardware) in San Diego, Fremont (San Francisco, basically), Denver, Zurich and Hong Kong.

Hi, I just did a quick tour on your new site and I see that this link is broken (I was curious to see how it's implemented): http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/veeam.html

Phys-sec means you don't just advertise your location, and keeping control over how people can contact you is another way to prevent social engineering attacks.

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