> So is this just a VPN that's baked into the browser?
No, it's a secure connection to an HTTP/HTTPS proxy being run by Cloudflare. It isn't a general-purpose VPN.
I would love it if Mozilla offered an email service.
No, it's a secure connection to an HTTP/HTTPS proxy being run by Cloudflare. It isn't a general-purpose VPN.
I would love it if Mozilla offered an email service.
Is it right to say that the only reason Cloudflare is the forefront of this concern is because of their business model of offering the CDN for free, while the others have a much more limited free tier or service or none at all?
Scripts and other stuff from first party usually seem to me at least more trustworthy than something from a third party. It also saves me the mental step of thinking: "Hmmm, why are there scripts loaded from a third party? Is this some kind of ads stuff?"
If a website does not work without unblocking third party scripts, there is some chance, that I will simply abandon it. When a website's purpose is to inform me about something and I do not see the need for any interactivity, I might also abandon it, if it does not show content without unblocking scripts in general, including first party. Web frameworks, which do not take care of at least presenting something when scripts are not unblocked, thus make a website less trustworthy for me.
As I see it, "[i]f you don't know who you can trust to provide a trustworthy proxy service", you distribute trust among multiple providers, such that they must collaborate to pwn you. That's the basis of Tor. And you can do something similar, albeit far weaker, by using nested chains of VPN services.
There are now billions of people accessing the web, so sometimes a web site needs the resources of a company like Cloudflare to handle traffic spikes.
Decentralized email has been a victim of its own success: because there is no central email authority, spammers and bots can easily flood email boxes. If you don't mind the spam, it's actually not hard at all to set up an email server, but most people hate spam, so most people don't want to set up an email server. There is no pure technological solution to spam, so we fall back on companies to help manage it.
Thanks for the reminder about Sandstorm. I intend to try it out sometime. I hope it's not dying.
I think it’s a shame, it’s a lovely concept. The Capability-based security alone is game-changing.
Details here: https://sandstorm.io/news/2018-08-27-discontinuing-free-plan
Sadly, this is exactly what's being marketed as 'VPN' for about 5-10 years. Not sure who started this and whether we can ever correct this misuse of the term.
And a key point of VPN services is that they don't share the ISP-assigned IP addresses of their users with anyone else. And they don't retain any logs, which an adversary could obtain in one way or another. Indeed, the best ones run totally in RAM, and don't have writable storage.
Edit: Also, using "VPN" in that context is not at all deceptive. Enterprise VPNs not only provide secure access to private resources. They also provide secure (and yes, often controlled) access to the Internet generally. And that's just what VPN services do. Except, mostly, for the "controlled" aspect. Although some VPN services do feature blocking of malicious sites, malware downloads, etc. Some even block age-inappropriate content.
It should be called "proxy service" instead. Perhaps "proxy service using VPN technology".
Right now my only options are Gmail or running my own. I just don't trust other email providers.
And, yes, I've looked at Fastmail, Zoho, Protonmail and others.
Curious about the thought process that made you arrive to this conclusion.
Emails have a lot of information about my life.
I know what Google is doing with my emails, and as far as I can see Google is not going to die or be purchased by another entity.
With companies like Protonmail and others I just don't know. Even if I trust their current T&C, what happens if they are bought.
Also, while it is equally likely for Google to have rogue employees, I believe they will have more stringent safeguards then smaller companies.
Again, as I said, probably not a very good answer, but more gut driven. And, I say this as someone who is very conscious of privacy.
Not going to happen overnight and even then technically they cannot access your emails because only you hold the password to private keys (if you trust they encrypt your emails with your public key before storing). I prefer keeping my emails local so pop does the job.
Google can access your emails but something like protonmail can't (if you trust them to encrypt your emails).
https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient
It is main reason to use ProtonMail over Gmail.
Posteo is also running on green energy and free software, afaik, so that is a plus.
I like also that it is no problem to use in countries which block VPN, like China. I had no problems accessing Posteo, but no way of accessing Gmail. It also does not nag me every single time I change the VPN server I use, because I seem to be in a different location. I know this is supposed to be a security feature of Gmail, but man is it annoying not to be able to access your mail, because of that. In Posteo you can also activate 2FA afaik, if you like such thing.
It just works, and I am glad to be able to give support to free software, while at the same time I also gain from it, by having an e-mail service, which is ethically way more acceptable than Gmail and is working very well.
Yes, please
How does an HTTPS proxy work? will it be like how cloudflare does https with websites (mitm)?