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Comment by someguydave | Hacker News Reader

That's a fair criticism. I don't think the Gmail glossy brochure mentions its threat model either.

They do for their new Advanced Protection Program[1]. The regular Gmail service is not really marketed to the security concious users.

It's like comparing Android to Qubes OS. Not really fair. For what they are, Google products are surprisingly secure.

[1] https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/

Qubes has a nice fat attack surface known as the hypervisor. I'm skeptical when people point to this as the panacea of computing security.

In practice it's a rather thin attack surface and serious cloud providers rely on it so it's both well-tested and any exploit can be used on much more valuable targets than your OS.

It's not a panacea. There are physical threats, there are threats from the very hardware you're using. But, like it says on the box, it is a reasonably secure operating system.

Yes, Qubes is only as secure as Xen which, itself, has had some pretty big security flaws pop up [1]. At the end of the day one has to decide what kind of trade offs they are willing to make in order to balance simple UX and security.

[1] https://blog.quarkslab.com/xen-exploitation-part-2-xsa-148-f...

And, in turn, as secure as the hardware, with ROWHAMMER giving means to flipping bits in arbitrary memory locations, including recent work showing that one VM can flip bits in another.

For Qubes 4, they are planning to deprecate the Xen paravirtual drivers in favor of the HVM drivers. These drivers are much more battle-tested and less complicated than PV drivers.

Also, with their recent foray into enterprise support, they will hopefully be able to expand their auditing efforts in the next couple of years.

I think the parent was talking about sandboxing and permissions

Does anyone have experience using Google’s advanced protection service? I’m wondering if it’s worth managing the dongles.

I signed up last week and it isn't inconvenient at all. Security keys are only used when you first sign in to a device, after which devices are "remembered."

> "Google products are surprisingly secure"

For one their products are not "secured" from Google seeing your private data...

Neither is ProtonMail. They see all email plaintexts unless you're using end-to-encryption like GPG/PGP. They only encrypt data at rest, and we can only take them at their word that they're even doing that.

They claim (tho I haven't confirmed myself) to do encryption at the device - automatically between Protonmail accounts (right now though, they do not support sending pgp encrypted email to a protonmail account with a keypair not generated by them... Which seems a _very_ odd design decision):

In simple terms, end-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted on the sender’s device (before it even leaves their computer or mobile phone), and can only be decrypted by the recipient on their device. This means that no third party which transmits or intercepts the email between the sender and recipient (i.e. internet service providers, the NSA, or even ProtonMail as the mail server operator) can decrypt and view the message.

This powerful protection is possible because ProtonMail has PGP email encryption built-in. End-to-end encryption is done automatically without user interaction whenever messages are exchanged between ProtonMail users. For an enterprise using ProtonMail for their email hosting, this means all communications between employees are automatically protected with end-to-end encryption. ProtonMail can also support sending/receiving end-to-end encrypted messages with recipients who are not using ProtonMail. The use of end-to-end encryption makes ProtonMail a better choice for security conscious individuals and organizations.

Using keypairs generated by them is the same as not encrypting the emails at all ...

> End-to-end encryption is done automatically without user interaction whenever messages are exchanged between ProtonMail users.

Which would correspond to a tiny fraction of all email a normal user exchanges and Even corporate users would be unprotected if they were to use protonmail to communicate with third parties such as service providers.

Protonmail has the ability to get all your messages plaintext. Because they have to SEND your email to the recipient. Unless you encrypt the plaintext, when you jump domains and email someone outside of protonmail, they can get text

Gmail isn't floating around any brochures on security though - it's pitch to the majority of its users is "It's Google and Mail and where most people have their emails. You don't want to be that one weirdo at @yahoo.com do you?" and that just about does it. ProtonMail is trying to recruit users with the brochure.

That said, even though the argument is a bit flawed here, I think most attracted by it would still prefer ProtonMail for other sound arguments.

Do you really believe people use gmail because of its brand?

I don't know about any security brochure, but I know I can setup 2FA to use push notifications (not an insecure SMS number), and can check where all of my logins are from, and have "suspicious" logins blocked automatically, etc, etc. I can also create single-use passwords for insecure devices (such as a youtube password just for my apple TV). Not to mention how amazing they are about spam detection.

I think their security posture is actually excellent.

There are absolutely people (many of them) who use GMail because of its brand. They most commonly will say "GSuite" though.

Yes, absolutely. I would guess at least 90% of the users are simply there by defaulting to it. The tech community is not the target market for Gmail. I never said they had bad security, simply that they were not advertising and trying to attract users from it.

Do you really believe people use gmail because of its brand?

Yes. Most definitely. I don't use Gmail and I recently had a discussion with my coworkers about Gmail. When I asked why they use it one person said, "because it's Google" and another said, "What else would I use? Yahoo or Hotmail? Hahahah". A third person responded by saying , "it's just easy because it's Google so it connects to everything else from them."

Many people think google is professional. My AP lit teacher said so. I thought it was stupid at the time, but in terms of professional capability, google offers the most services (at the cost of surveillance and advertising). And many other people would question using something like hotmail or yahoo because it's different.

> Do you really believe people use gmail because of its brand?

Absolutely. No doubt in my mind.

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