ProtonMail blocked by Vodafone Turkey | Hacker News Reader

ProtonMail blocked by Vodafone Turkey

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327 pointsstockmania158 comments

In just so many countries (including those many people never know are in too) the state-led war on privacy and communication freedom is getting hotter and hotter. Some countries do it openly, some manage to look liberal until you look closer. Just try to start marketing a proprietary privacy-oriented messenger app or something like that and the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep, demanding you to bake a backdoor in. Sad but true. I don't really know how are we (the people, who value privacy of themselves and of the others) going to win this war while keeping legal, it's an open challenge so far...

Technolgoists need to remember that tech is nothing without law.

Lawyers and law makers need to remember technology will continually outpace them. Both in execution of ideas and in value creation.

Lots of our technology cannot work without the support of a complex society and I think you can't have that without court and some kind of rules. We are interdependent.

> Technolgoists need to remember that tech is nothing without law.

It works both ways. A law can be almost nothing without technical means to enforce it efficiently. There can be cases that make a law [almost] futile so the governments give it up. E.g. many governments tried to ban alcohol but it's so easy (yet dangerous as it can blow up and set the house on fire, especially if the cook is drunk and/or the hardware is amateur) to produce at home that fighting it seriously just doesn't seem to make any sense. Some governments have tried to ban the phalaris grass as it may contain tiny amounts of dimethyltryptamines but it just grows all over everywhere so they have given up the ban as it was almost as ridiculous as it would be to ban sand, flies or whatever this common. The problem is to invent a medium for exchanging messages that is easy to establish independently (no need for uncommon devices, no special requirements to the underlying ISP) yet very hard to detect, compromise or disrupt. This sounds like a serious challenge yet not like an entirely impossible thing provided breakthroughs in mathematics/cryptography, physics and the telecom tech still happen from time to time. Some political/economical factors may also play on our side occasionally. My hope is for the whole Internet to morph into a fully-decentralized distributed network employing DIY P2P links as its organic and vital part. Perhaps this may happen once if something is going to make classic ISPs unprofitable and stimulate growth of MESH networks with something like i2P serving as a layer connecting them in one secure and reliable global network.

The technical means to enforce a law are a bunch of guys with sharp sticks.

They can hardly run around sticking everyone for having what everybody can have easily and what is not easily visible unless too many people start collaborating and reporting each other.

Take a look at no other than Turkey.

But programmers building the tools for perfect surveillance are the ones enabling them to know who to stick.

Everyone knows that. And yet the example with alcohol still works, so it's kind of a moot point.

Enforcement will never be completely universal and the more "free" the society is in general the harder it would be to enforce it via draconian means.

So the dry laws in the US and in other western (primarily Nordic) countries isn't that great of an example as these were still mainly liberal democracies despite the restrictions.

The similar laws in more authoritarian regimes would work quite differently.

And unfortunately we have too many modern examples of how effective governments can be at suppressing various behaviors and or ideas.

It's not entirely nothing. Even if gov. thugs are there to beat you, if you communicated with others safely, at least those people are still protected as long as you will not reveal their identity or whatever you've communicated about.

If the gov. just murders you and gets to your stuff, they can't analyze it to get at more people in your circle.

It just doesn't solve the problem of violent government. But there are still benefits.

Politicians need to remember that The Law is nothing in the face of technology. (You can't block fundamental math, you can't block decentralized apps that hide their traffic as something else, you can't prevent knowledge from leaking out, from anywhere, etc.)

You are thinking in absolutes. The politicians don't. They're fine with 99% solutions that cover the general population. The remaining 1% of dissidents will be dealt with by throwing them in jail, not by making the technology impossible to access so that they are forced to give up their efforts. Look at north korea or china for examples.

Ok so, let's assume europe and the US will not be like N Korea and China. How is a politician going to stop me from developing an encryption algorithm and using it to send my friends a message? This sounds completely 1984, thought police level insane.

Turn the screws too tight though and the talented will leave for greener pastures. This is definitely happening in Turkey (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42433668). This has happened in the past too, many times. You describe more the politicians that care more about their power then the general welfare of their nation. North Korea is a great example here.

China's an interesting case, as Xi Jinping is indeed turning the screws tighter as well, so far seemingly without any sort of harm. The historical record on this however suggests this is unwise. Time will tell, I guess. As I see it, at some point, censorship will end up conflicting with the type of knowledge / information needed to allow an economy to prosper.

On encryption, what "law and order" people need to recognize is that any crude tool "designed for law enforcement" will eventually be misused by criminals. Think if there was an enforced national house lock standard that includes a "police master key" that the police could use to open doors. I think most people would instinctively recognize the flaw, that in no short order a "police master key" would easily appear on the black market, making breaking-and-entering very easy (and consequently quite attractive to execute). Not sure why there are blinders on encryption, frankly the Internet needs way more security, not less.

"the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep" - for the US, I'm emotionally inclined to agree with you.

ProtonMail was developed in Geneva, where I grew up. It was a spin-off from people who worked at CERN, like the World Wide Web itself.

Geneva is also a United Nations base, and many other NGOs are headquartered/have offices in the area for that reason (the Red Cross, WWF, Amnesty, Greenpeace). There's a lot of local community support for the operators of ProtonMail.

Switzerland is not EU, although it is Schengen. International incidents occur all the time, such as the time I forgot to take my passport when going to school (my parents live in France, but I went to the International School of Geneva in Switzerland). Because people don't need a visa to cross the border, it would be easy for an intimidated web developer to flee the country. Attempting to get an extradition would then require an arrest warrant, which would require a criminal case to be brought against that person in absentia. Although intelligence services can try to threaten ProtonMail (and probably already have), there are a lot of options available in that area to keep individual staff safe.

"Just try to start marketing a proprietary privacy-oriented messenger app or something like that and the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep, demanding you to bake a backdoor in"

Nope...Been making one for 3+ years, worked on high risk human rights type stuff for over a decade and never happened.

Surprisingly most people doing things in this space don't have g-men kicking in the door. Live in UK, Ireland and many other countries and hasn't been an issue.

Might not seem real to a lot of people who are affected by certain biases but most Western government type people we meet at conferences etc are actually quietly supportive and respectly agree/disagree with what we are all trying to do. Not eveything is a black or white echo chamber - we are all citizens who understand nuance (for those of us fortunate to live on free countries - of course Turkey is no longer anything near that.)

FWIW Protonmail is very useful for a large chunk of threat models were security is pretty high but implementing PGP in all its various forms is a pain the ass.

Protonmail routinely hands over information to the authorities. They also determine themselves what cases should be allowed to bypass the requirements for a search warrant.

https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/

I just read the provided link and it seems to me that that will not provide anything without a court order.

They say they may decide to terminate an account or preserve the requested account data without a court order.

"We rendered assistance to Swiss law enforcement working on this case without having yet received a court order, but with the understanding that an approved court was on its way to us."

Conveniently the page is never update to say whether these court orders were actually delivered.

We got the court order. 100%. If not we would have taken the requesting agency to court.

Y'all rendered assistance to Swiss law enforcement prior to actually receiving the order?

Please update the page stating such.

That is why your privacy-oriented messenger app needs to be decentralized. And open-source.

> the people, who value privacy of themselves and of the others

The problem is that privacy is not the only thing we care about, and the balance between different needs is a complicated political problem - which is exactly the kind of "soft", people problem which complexity a typical software engineer would underestimate.

Turkey is becoming more and more authoritatian, indeed. However, they're also sharing a border with ISIS and there's a lot of terror activities in the region. Fighting such threats always leads to increasing influence of the military and secret services, and their new capabilities will be used both to fight terror and suppress citizens.

These things are a double-edged sword; any simplistic view on this is inadequate, regardless of whether it's positive or negative.

(x) Don't use public DNS such as google (or the DNS provided by your ISP such as Vodafone). Look for an anonymous non-logging service preferably outside Turkey

(x) Tor is is one of many layers for anonymity to circumvent blocking. Don't "just" install the tor-browser or tor-proxy on your system but run tails from a clean machine. If you know what you're doing you might want to help others by isolating whole networks using PORTALofPi to guarantee no DNS-leaks. Pro-Tip: build a LEDE based device and share your design with the community so others can benefit and give you input (because you will make mistakes).

(x) Don't use mobile internet if you don't know what you're doing (those who know what they're doing don't use mobile phones for critical comms)

(x) Use burner phones with anonymous SIM cards and aggressive hardware based compartmentalization. Check this article for good OpSec/compartmentalization tips (second half of the article after the discussion on browsers that looks dated).

(x) Despite popular claim VPNs don't give you anonymity. They shift the trust from your ISP to the VPN. If you pay for a VPN service by credit card consider what the payment provider knows about you.

see https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vodafone-blocks-protonmail-tu...

>Look for an anonymous non-logging service preferably outside Turkey

what's the point? DNS isn't encrypted, so it's trivial to log/intercept your queries.

You could run DNSCrypt and use a server that supports it:

https://servers.opennic.org/

I guess it's harder to monitor all DNS traffic in the entire country than asking the ISP to give records for a specific user.

DNS over VPN is encrypted (at least until the VPN server)

A totalitarian government blocking a service is a good sign they are unable to break its security and thus use it as a surveillance tool. It's a great advertisement for ProtonMail.

Unable to break its security or the service's owners are not cooperating.

Unable to break its security AND the service's owners are not cooperating maybe even

Vizzini: ... they block it because they can break it and want all of their adversaries to think it's unbreakable... Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I’m not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.

A small note (though it may be unrelated), some ip address ranges are not accessible from Vodafone TR (3G/4G) connections.

216.239.36.219 <- For example this address returns "HTTP 504" from Vodafone. There are some other addresses like this which happen to be around, randomly.

So it may be a misconfiguration on Vodafone TR Network, routers or such thing. Sample curl output below.

  $ time curl -vki 216.239.36.219
  * rebuilt url to: 216.239.36.219/
  * trying 216.239.36.219...
  * connected to 216.239.36.219 (216.239.36.219) port 80 (#0)
  > get / http/1.1
  > host: 216.239.36.219
  > user-agent: curl/7.47.0
  > accept: */*
  > 
  < http/1.1 504 gateway time-out
  http/1.1 504 gateway time-out
  < server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha
  server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha
  < date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:04:23 gmt
  date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:04:23 gmt
  < content-length: 0
  content-length: 0
  < connection: keep-alive
  connection: keep-alive
  
  < 
  * connection #0 to host 216.239.36.219 left intact
  
  real 0m10.909s
  user 0m0.012s
  sys 0m0.004s
  $ curl -vki http://84.19.190.203/
  * trying 84.19.190.203...
  * connected to 84.19.190.203 (84.19.190.203) port 80 (#0)
  > get / http/1.1
  > host: 84.19.190.203
  > user-agent: curl/7.47.0
  > accept: */*
  > 
  < http/1.1 504 gateway time-out
  http/1.1 504 gateway time-out
  < server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha
  server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha
  < date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:56:58 gmt
  date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:56:58 gmt
  < content-length: 0
  content-length: 0
  < connection: keep-alive
  connection: keep-alive
  
  < 
  * connection #0 to host 84.19.190.203 left intact
  $

They recommend ProtonVPN. Does anyone know the legal ramifications of using a vpn with shared exit nodes? EG: A 'crack' squad of computer crime investigators in Jackson Mississippi track illegally uploaded content to a forum originating from ip address [39.21.2.32] (which is a VPN exit node). Unbeknownst to you that is YOUR exit node now.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/digital-equivalent-rum...

Why would that be any different to getting assigned somebody's previous IP address by DHCP? It's non-incriminating because it can be demonstrated you didn't control that IP during the time illegal content was uploaded.

True. But my general ISP dhcp'ed ip address doesn't change much AND when it does I have decent odds someone (who would do illegal uploads) wouldn't be dumb enough to do it over a non-VPNed line.

In these cases, a request for the identity of the account associated with $IP at $timestamp would typically receive a response such as "$IP is a shared IP address used by many different accounts simultaneously. As we do not log individual sessions at layer 4, it is impossible for us to provide you with this account information."

Literally how Private Internet Access responded to an FBI request.

Not endorsing PIA in any way, though do use the services.

I lived in Izmir in the 90's, and the vibe was actually fairly liberal. The locals seemed to feel pretty free, optimistic, and not overly worried about their government. Sad to see things regressing so much.

Everywhere is regressing at the moment. Brexit, US protectionism, China's a dictatorship again.

It's like none of the 'leaders of the world' have read any history. Or they have, and are arrogant enough to think 'that won't happen now that I'M in charge'.

Sure, but Turkey is a little different. It's going from, for some people "no issues, I'm influential and popular, if perhaps a little controversial", to suddenly "I'm in jail now, for probably months".

This is not a recent thing. Turkey has been topping the incarcerated journalists per capita list for years.

It could also have to do with the unprecedented means of mass surveillance available today.

Turkey is special. They openly arrest Journalists opposing the government. Prisons in Turkey currently have the highest literacy rates in the country. People outside of Turkey who oppose Erdogan are threatened by either turkish accounts or even locals (I've seen this happening in a private whatsapp group from a school class I graduate a while ago where someone was threatened bodily harm if they did not retract statements about Erdogan)

It is an authoritarian, Orwellian government out of the book.

This is why the rest of Turkey calls İzmir "kâfir". They are the most secular bunch. They are also very pro-ataturk. AKP's projects for that region include bringing migrants to dilute the voter population.

This is nothing to do with the current issue at hand. Istanbul was just as liberal and nice of a city as anywhere else, but then the last decade happened.

Maybe if as a people we stopped thinking in terms of funny plots like "they are trying to dilute the peeps" and opened our eyes to the facts before our eyes, we'd be in a better shape.

Yes, I am sure everything you have to say is going to save the country. Maybe we should meet over a drink?

Wrong! Only erdogan supporters would call izmir that way. And they are not rest of Turkey! They are between %40-%50 maximum.

Forgive me for this n00b question, but what do you get with ProtonMail (with respect to security) that you don't get with, say, gmail?

ProtonMail team here. Here is our assessment about how ProtonMail compares to Gmail from the security/privacy perspective: https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-vs-gmail-security/

>"No tracking and logging Google records literally every action done by its users. This includes your IP address, every search that you do, which emails you open, which websites you visit, and much more. ProtonMail takes the opposite approach and by default, does not monitor or record user activity, not even IP addresses."

Has this been verified by an independent third party?

Also how do you determine there's an issue with with IP prefixes in AS 15897 Vodaphone Turkey[1], if you don't log IP addresses?

[1] https://bgpview.io/asn/15897

Not a user but I would guess follow up on user complaints

They might be using some service that tries to access an endpoint of theirs from multiple AS across the world. Not sure if Catchpoint has a Vodafone TR endpoint.

> Has this been verified by an independent third party?

For one thing, it seems to have been verified by the Turkish government, seing how gmail is not blocked, and protonmail is ;)

> Has this been verified by an independent third party?

Which would that be? ;-)

I use ProtonMail myself. I kind of doubt that all their promises are true. But at least it's an entity separate from Google. A few years ago my whole Internet life somehow went through Google, from Search over Mail up to News, Discussions, Drive, YouTube... I find it creepy that when I click an article in an online shop, not even buying it, a stupid ad of it might appear for a week. Even if you agree that ads have a purpose, there is no purpose for showing me an ad for a thing that I looked at myself already!

I have no indication of ProtonMail doing anything in this direction (I see their ads only on protonmail.com), that's reason enough for me already. Also I trust them that their servers are not going to be hacked so that those contents will land on troyhunt.com.

ProtonMail isn’t run by a data mining ad agency that works on military drones.

Not but its been around now for 17 years without a major security breach.

Well, my server runs for 19 years now without a major secuirty breach... so do I know.

But to answer OP: you cannot ever delete gmail message. Even spam is kept forever to comply with LE, since some of your real messages could by accodent go to junk. With Proton once I delete a message, its gone forever since it was part of my internal encrypted blob of messages. once I logged off deleted message is gone.

>"Well, my server runs for 19 years now without a major secuirty breach... so do I know"

Do you really believe Gmail and your personal server possess the same value as targets?

>"you cannot ever delete gmail message. Even spam is kept forever to comply with LE"

Do you have a citation for this?

> Do you really believe Gmail and your personal server possess the same value as targets?

That's also the point. :) Why put your data into a service that has higher chance of being targetted (and you may never know if it was). Also if you're in control of the device, you'll be the one receiving the subpoena/search warrant (or a swat team), so you'll know if it was targetted.

Except for that time when Google's data centers were completely owned by the NSA.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

Except they didn't "own" Google's data centers at all. They tapped a fiber optic cable outside any data centers. Every other wavelength and individual strand in that cable would have also been susceptible. Fiber optic cables aren't some secret, they're quite visible(orange) and accessible in public rightaways. So yeah Protonmail is not much safer from that level of hostility is it?

Lastly for all Protonmail's righteous talk about governments. They're own /24 is announced by an Israeli company that does defense contracting[1] and has their own hardware division - the RAD Bynet Group who makes lots of network hardware including hardware that does deep packet and SSL inspection[2]. Proton mails seems to like to brush this off but for a company that wants to position itself as a player in the fight against government intrusion into privacy, it has a pretty bad smell.

https://bgpview.io/prefix/185.70.40.0/24

http://www.bynet.co.il/en/defense/

https://cryptome.org/2015/11/protonmail-ddos.htm

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bynet-data-communica...

[2] https://www.radware.com/solutions/ssl-sniffing/

Why don't you link their response while you are at it?

https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/protonmail-isr...

Because I acknowledged that they've responded to it with:

"Proton mails seems to like to brush this off ..."

And I don't find they're explanation particularly cogent. And for a company that makes such a big deal about their Swiss affiliation this seems to big a particularly glaring detail.

From your link:

>"Recently, malicious rumors have surfaced that our partnership with Radware means Israel has compromised ProtonMail email privacy (since Radware’s international headquarters is in Israel). These rumors have mostly been spread by conspiracy theorists who don’t at all understand ProtonMail’s technology."

Do you think that Protonamil is privy to what goes on in the hardware of either Binat-Rad Group Ltd's Radware DPI asics or the network topology in Binat-Rad Group's data centers?

And Binat-Rad does have a relationship with the Israeli government:

"In our opinion, the Company’s working capital is sufficient for the Company’s present requirements. Since our inception, we have financed our operations through a combination of issuing debt and/or equity securities, including two public offerings, research and development and/or marketing grants from the Government of Israel and cash generated by operations."[1]

And if you think that Binat-Rad is not involved in politics, see:

https://www.haaretz.com/1.5204589

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/filing/458350

Kind of difficult to have a “breach” when the back door is wide open.

Encryption between protonmail accounts and when sending to non proton mail accounts:

When you send an encrypted message to a non-ProtonMail user, they receive a link which loads the encrypted message onto their browser, which they can decrypt using a passphrase that you have shared with them. You can also send unencrypted messages to Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and others, just like regular email.

I am neither a ProtonMail nor a Gmail user so this might be completely wrong, but as far as I understand it, the short answer to your question is:

ProtonMail offers an easy access to a client which supports End-To-End encryption for your emails.

So nobody besides the sender and the receiver can read the content of the email. Traditional emails are more or less plain text files which (usually) get encrypted for transfers between mail servers, but every mail server involved in the transmission can read the content.

They couldn't have paid for better advertising than this.

Seemingly this is nothing to do with the government, as controlling through the website of the insitution where there's a form to check if a given domain is blocked [1], it tells me that there are "no blocks on this domain", i.e. protonmail.com. You can try instead wikipedia.org to see what it looks like when a domain is blocked.

[1] http://internet.btk.gov.tr/sitesorgu/

Another public DNS is available from the IPredator.se guys as well. Forgot what page on their site they had it under though. They also run some tor nodes. They're one of my favorite VPN services. The staff is very welcoming on their IRC server too.

>"Our support team first became aware of connectivity problems for Turkish ProtonMail users starting on Tuesday. After further investigation, we determined that protonmail.com was unreachable for both Vodafone Turkey mobile and fixed line users. Since then, we have also received some sporadic reports from users of other Turkish ISPs. At one point, the issue was prevalent in every single major city in Turkey. After investigating the issue along with members of the ProtonMail community in Turkey, we have confirmed this is a government-ordered block rather than a technical glitch. Internet censorship in Turkey tends to be fluid so the situation is constantly evolving"

Vodaphone like every major ISP has a NOC. Did Prontomail reach out to the ISP to see if it was a routing issue?

I don't see that mentioned above anywhere in the investigation methodology. How did you confirm that it was a "government-ordered block" if you only worked with "members of the ProtonMail community'?

ProtonMail is quite prevalent in Turkey and there are actually ProtonMail users who work within Vodafone Turkey, and that is how we got the confirmation.

So did you also contact their NOC via the handle listed for them in their RIPE routing registry entry? That's the normal protocol.

Just because there's "ProtonMail users who work within Vodafone Turkey" doesn't mean they have enable level access on Vodaphone's routers.

Things are getting worse in Turkey, but I don't think it's worth to block this service: Most of Protonmail users are familiar with VPN, TOR...

I disagree. I’ve recommended ProtonMail to many novice users and helped them get setup. It is so simple that I suspect many less technical users are using it in countries with oppressive regimes.

Aren't you actually agreeing?

He's saying they'll use tunneling to get around the block so they can carry on using it.

No, he's saying that some (possibly many) users know how to use the service, but not VPNs or TOR. Therefore, they are easily blocked, compared to advanced users.

First time I agree with somebody in internet without saying the same things

It’s easy to bypass the block, even for non savvy users. They just need some help.

Oh OK, they were disagreeing with the last part, not the main point. They both at least agree it shouldn't be blocked...

It's time. Browser should integrate hardened-DNS features. TLS 1.3 is just a stepping stone. Local DNS resolver, DNSSEC, DNS over DTLS/HTTPS/QUIC (pick one) and of course, Tor.

The picture of the monitor displaying traceroute with dirt clinging to the screen and some finger smudges and the reflection of the photographer is pretty hilarious.

To get the Tor Browser try to download it from the official Github repository: https://github.com/thetorproject/gettorbrowser Then use meek-amazon as a pluggable transport which should work.

AFAIK the fact of TOR usage is rather easy to detect. AFAIK (from some news here on HN) you can get SWATed and arrested for a mere suspicion (e.g a false positive by an automated traffic analysis system) of using an end-to-end encrypting messenger or even Twitter in Turkey. I doubt it is legal and safe to use TOR in such countries. We need something that is harder to detect on the client ISP side.

it is by no means foolproof and won't get around a deep packet inspection/flow analysis system, but this is why obfsproxy exists:

https://www.google.com/search?q=obfsproxy+tor&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...

But be sure not to use the default bundled obfs4 bridges, they're known.

> AFAIK the fact of TOR usage is rater easy to detect.

That's why I said: "Then use meek-amazon as a pluggable transport which should work." meek-amazon makes your traffic look like you're talking to:

> url=https://d2cly7j4zqgua7.cloudfront.net/ front=a0.awsstatic.com

With the snowflake pluggable transport (only available with Linux and Mac alphas for now) the traffic looks like WebRTC.

You can read more about them here:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake

> "We need something that is harder to detect on the client ISP side."

That's what Telex[1][2] is designed to do. Too bad the project seems to have stalled.

[1] https://telex.cc

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex_(anti-censorship_system)

> ... should work

If it doesn't, people could get arrested and worse. Is this advice reliable enough for that level of risk?

By "should work" I meant that the Tor client would bootstrap and you would be able to use it.

When I visited Egypt a three years ago I was using Vodafone to connect to my mail server. They performed a MITM attack and stripped the STARTTLS from the SMTP dialogue.

I had to switch to the legacy SSL port 465 for SMTP to use encryption.

TBH vodafone blocks just about anything in italy. i have to click thre warnings to download binaries from bitbucket for example. Their secure browsing "service" is half a scam.

Why use protonmail instead of actual PGP that would never be blocked?

Because they would have to maintain their own key pair which could easily be taken by chance, unlike a trusted third party who is in another country's jurisdiction and is unwilling to just hand them over. Not everything is software.

Protonmail makes it easy. Even today using PGP Email is not something I would trust the average computer user to pull off and pull it off safely

> Even today using PGP Email is not something I would trust the average computer user to pull off and pull it off safely

I'd argue it is not that complicated once you take the time to explain how it works.

If I have to explain it, it's already a lost cause. If you want any hope of PGP being widespread, or any cryptosystem for that matter, you need to have it being self-explanatory.

Someone at the age of 90 should be able to download the software, click a "yes" button and secure their mail.

Secure E-Mail must be as DAU-proof as possible.

Just a note to anybody who wants to try their free tier, they add a tapatalk-like message in every e-mail you send ('this email was sent via protonmail' or something in that nature), unless you pay.

It's not like the e-mail receivers couldn't already see the host, but I was unaware of that when I was registering an account, so I'm calling that a dark pattern.

At least it was easy to self-delete it afterwards.

It is just a default email signature that you can see in your compose window and delete manually if you do not wish to pay.

No, it is not. It is not related to the signature settings anymore.

It is. They add it automatically on mobile but you can delete it. And it's never on desktop. Just tried to send from both clients and didn't have any extra added to the message.

When was your account created? Mine was created in the previous 30 days.

I even had brought up the browser's dev tools and tried to disable that setting but with no luck. It might had been a A/B test, or specific only to my country, but the point remains that it was a separate setting than the signature and it was impossible to disable it without paying. On desktop.

Are you still able to manually delete the added line from your email messages at compose time?

Thank you for sticking with me, I'll try to create a new account in a few days. I don't rule out the possibility I am wrong about this.

Turkey is the largest prison for journalists they recently started a genocide on Kurdish population in Syria in city of afrin and they are hugely cracking down on anyone who is criticisizing their war on kurdish civilians. Unfortunately they have extended their censorship outside turkey and even in United States to get Kurdish accounts banned for criticizing erdogan's government

Probably impossible to tell, but I'm willing to bet this is related to the fact that the YPG uses ProtonMail for communications.

Is there actually a public source for this? We were not aware of this (but then again, we know almost nothing about users)

They YPG International communications page: http://ypg-international.org/contact/

For the love of everything, I can`t remember the name and can`t find/google it, of a private mail service also from Switzerland. It had simpler marketing and UX, maybe not even web clients and had some affiliate program and I think the name started with "m". Help?

Found it! Migadu.

If we're starting a list of possible alternatives then Tutanota is good (Germany IIRC).

What I don't understand is if it is a "government-ordered block", which wouldn't be surprising, why is it limited to Vodafone users? I would expect half-government hold TTNet and even Turkcell to block as well.

It isn't limited to Vodafone. The original headline is "ProtonMail is being blocked in Turkey. Here’s how to bypass Turkey’s online censorship."

I read the article not only the title. i would also recommend you to read the article.

I did read the article before answering you. I referred you to the original headline because it better fits the article's contents, not because I stopped reading there.

In the article they are stating that Vodafone users can not access to proton services. They have written they have seen some complaints from other ISP users as well but there is neither a statement nor a clue that it is blocked by other ISPs as well. After all, the fact is that it is not blocked by other ISPs only by Vodafone.

the suggestions that are proposed are: - use a vpn >> when protonmail is unreachable, protonvpn is unreachable, too. so not so useful. - switch dns >> till when? till it`s not only a dns problem anymore. by the looks of it, it`s not gonna take much time. - use tor >> tor is blocked, too. so... yeah.

i guess when people in the us or europe think about censorship, then think of this romantic blocking of some services, and if you`re tech-savvy enough, you can bypass anything.

no you can`t (at least i can`t). it`s turkey now, it`s gonna be universal tomorrow.

It should be blocked by all public mailing lists too, quite frankly. Its users cannot be bothered configure the webmail properly and often send atrociously formatted replies to threads.

Anyone know why they have this weird onion url „protonirockerxow.onion“? Kinda hard to remember.

You can't just choose your onion url, since it's directly derived from your key, and that's probably the best they found (if you want to have any choice at all, you have to bruteforce try keys until you find one matching the pattern, so everything more than choosing a few letters gets difficult/expensive)

thanks so much for taking the time to explain!

So I wonder - does that have any negative impact on vodafone brand in other countries?

Actually, I am not sure if it wise to circumvent that block. I mean its probably as easy as typing

  echo "8.8.8.8" > /etc/hosts

to a root shell, but since we know that in the past people have been send to prison, just because some app on their phone requested an URL from the wrong domain, I suspect that something similarly can happen to the people who try to use Proton mail.

On the other hand, if everybody stops using those services, the surveillance tyrants have won...

> but since we know that in the past people have been send to prison, just because some app on their phone requested an URL from the wrong domain

Do you have a citation? When did that happen?

It wasn't one big event that someone got arrested for using the app. It was, civil polices were arresting anyone who uses crypto-message apps like ByLock.

We've seen cases where people sent to prison because they are wearing certain T-short. Really.

edit links:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/turks-detained...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mahir-zeynalov/turkish-police...

Here in Lithuania (EU) you can also get in trouble for wearing the wrong t-shirt.

Nazi and Soviet symbols are banned from being shown in public, and you will end up with a fine if caught with a t-shirt or bumper sticker. I believe it’s the case in a few other post-Soviet countries as well.

Here in Turkey, you can get arrested for wearing the wrong t-shirt. https://www.google.com/search?q=hero+t+shirt+antalya+arreste...

https://boingboing.net/2018/01/28/30000-accused.html

I had the Bylock story in mind:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16203989

There were other apps using tracking pixels with the Bylock domain and their users got arrested too.

Presumably, you mean:

  echo 8.8.8.8 > /etc/resolv.conf

I'm guessing you want to append instead of overwriting, too? :)

Usually you need "nameserver 8.8.8.8", not just the IP. Or is a plain IP accepted as well?

:D its funny how many mistakes you can do in a single command:

- yes, I wanted to write to /etc/resolv.conf

- yes, I wanted to write "nameserver 8.8.8.8"

- overwriting the file was intentional as otherwise the old nameserver would still be first.

  echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf

Too bad, I can't edit my initial post and correct the complete nonsense.

I sometimes wonder, wether paranoid dictatorships could not be fooled, by automatically creating fake users in fake relationships, sending each other conspiring comments and information. That way all those secret service snoops could be kept busy chasing wild gooses, leaving the normal people they usually harass into oppossition, to go on about there lives.

So long as you're covering your tracks when creating these and using these fake accounts. Covering your tracks by using all the tools that are outlawed and detectable, thus putting a bigger target on your back.

If you're going to tickle the toes of dictatorially-run law enforcement, your security had better be watertight.

It sounds like a lot of work but if you performed it from outside of the jurisdiction you'd be safe. Not your friends and family inside, though, so still better not to be identified.

Governments, armies, and interested parties, have been doing this for millenia.

I think they have not been blocked, rather they had an outage.

https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/974167124892700673

There was a brief outage, but the block in Turkey is something entirely different.

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