Russia blocks ProtonMail
reuters.com
reuters.com
And it's not like Russians, Chinese and generally people in countries whose governments are in the habit of censoring the internet aren't used to using Tor and/or VPNs to dodge censorship.
... if you live in Russia.
In context of 5/9/14+ eyes, the nomenclature of solid advertising might differ from your interpretation, where perceptions matter ─ ranging from honeypots, compromised Tor exit nodes to dubious VPN providers, absence of warrant canaries to flawed encryption products etc. It is probably best to exercise caution and remain sceptical, rather than start endorsing products, based solely on a single random event.
Of course there are flawed VPNs and honeypot Tor nodes out there. The fight to track people and censor information is ongoing 24/7 around the globe.
Random event or not, if a government feels that it has to plug a leak as opposed to pwning/backdooring it then to me this means they chose the lesser evil and they really cannot crack ProtonMail. If that's indeed the case then this sends the message to me that I'd like my email to be better protected and I might switch away from GMail.
Whether there is a bigger game involved though, I can't know. Can you?
The government does not need to tell you anything and when it says it can't 'break' something, try and remember ─ you can dance like nobody is watching, but make sure you encrypt like everybody is watching.
write something!
Telegram was just the right size — not so tiny that only a few nerds use it, but not so big that the majority of normies have adopted it. And there was sort of a personal conflict, government people don't like Pavel Durov..
Mobile version only. You have to use proxy or VPN for desktop or web app.
Remember Lavabit.
I don't think this is true. A hash of the password could be part of the key, but Protonmail already has that hash stored on its server (otherwise they would not be able to log you in when you send the password hash). If Protonmail would like to access your emails (or be asked to do so), I'm confident that they technically can. The only benefit is when a hacker get access to the email database, but not the password hash database, then in this case the hacker cannot read the emails.
Except when it's not (and the full password is used instead).
However, when you send an unencrypted email with Protonmail, they claim that they encrypt the email at rest, but the claim is not verifiable.
Unless your emails are encrypted for you on someone else's client before they're sent to your protonmail, in which case protonmail still has all of the metadata (time sent, where it was sent from, length of the message, etc.)
Do you believe proton mail can keep state level actors like Russia, China, and the United States out of their prod infra?
They may be "mostly" subpoena proof as in they can't disclose old emails, but do you trust them to not hand over your data before it's encrypted?
> Do you believe proton mail can keep state level actors like Russia, China, and the United States out of their prod infra?
No, I don't believe they'll be able to keep state actors out of their servers indefinitely. But it's more a matter of what the state actors find once they've gained access. As I understand it, the architecture of the service is what prevents protonmail themselves, as well as any intruder, from reading the encrypted mail files[0].
I don't know whether their mobile apps also trust the server in the same way--by loading content or js from the server. If not, then those could potentially offer a more secure alternative since the same attack would now require an update for all users, which would leave evidence behind. Of course, you still have to trust that any users you're sending email to also never submit their passwords to the web app.
There is no such issue if you use https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail desktop app as it comes with static resources built on the CI server from the official source code repositories and embedded in then installation packages, see https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail/issues/79 for details. See here https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail/blob/d974b43908e10... the "ProtonMail Version 4.0-beta Web UI" versions embedded in the most recent v4.2.1 release.
The way of verifying that the installation packages attached to the releases have been assembled from the source code is being provided, see https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail/issues/183.
And finally, the app is fully open-source creature, so anyone could assembly own package.
You don't have to believe him.
Google engineers have admitted in print that their inter-DC links were not encrypted.
Marissa Mayer admitted in print that she allowed the government to install a linux kernel module to sniff email traffic for keywords, among other things.
Didn't Google qua Google, not mere engineers, do that by publicly announcing that they were upgrading security by encrypting them in the wake of the Snowden leaks?
Also, mailboxes are encrypted client side.
I know ProtonMail is denying they got requests but hopefully this is a good advertisement for their willingness to protect individuals.
Patriot act which supposed to protect population from terrorists not only failed to accomplish it, it was used in war on drugs.
How is this any different from phone wiretaps or other surveillance orders outside of email?
There's no way to satisfy requests for historical data without capturing data from everyone.
That's not what GGGP suggested. He suggested that they give data for specific people that they already have. You are setting up a strawman here.
...how were they to know to capture data from those specific people before being asked?
That's what this is. Instead of getting a wire tap on phones, which nobody uses anymore, they're getting a wiretap on email.
It's not Protonmail who's to be blamed for the potential attack and deaths. There are series of events that lead to people deciding to be terrorists. I'd focus on those reasons rather than hotfixing stuff by exposing 99.9% of other Protonmail users.
I would never opt in to affect 99.9% of users because of 0.01% of users. We are all educated enough through events in recent history that clearly tell us how similar use cases lead to abuse, every single time without exception.
Given these constraints, Russia's decision to block Protonmail is perfectly fine and the only logical outcome.
Most individuals who hold a view based on logical principles tend to be consistent on that application while people who react more emotionally will tend to flutter in the wind more.
I’d be curious to hear your reasoning.
Exactly. And thats the only point which needs to be made here.
It's like if one person was drink driving and hit someone. saying : "Well now thats it, we need to ban driving".
Why don't we just strip prisoners naked and keep them in glass cages? We would certainly need fewer armed guards if that were the case.
Thank goodness we are not there yet.
there are so many steps in that process where someone can be busted.. also keep in mind that most terrorist organisation are already infiltrated, and the "agents" are just waiting for the right time to bust them (not too early so they have enough evidence/they learn more about the connections/ resources) and not so late that there is a chance for the attack to go through.
This is why London attacks wete effective, it was lone wolves.
Every time I see in the news that "a bomb failed to go off and X arrests were made" I feel that the 3-letter-agencies gave "them" playdoh instead of <insert explosive>.
There is a balance between privacy and catching bad guys, but I often get the sense that much of this community believes the police should never be able to invade somebody's privacy even if they have evidence that person committed a crime. That doesn't seem like a sensible balance to me, and it's an extreme position to take. Am I misunderstanding?
Second, a warrant for breaking into physical property in their jurisdiction is very different than digital property on servers in a different country. For one, Russia's judges have no authority there.
The only real way around that is to make it private, invite only, and vetted and only invite people with a large enough public presence to be able to have a chance at figuring out if they're the 'right kind of person' which means it can't be open to the average person.
I mean they could literally just use a physical mailbox, a burner phone, etc., and you'd have absolutely no idea who sent it either and the problem would be the same.
Let's not even start with the implications of governments being able to access communications such as journalists and their sources.
Now, for a second, imagine that it really happened. And you're the official who decided "no, we will not act on this". And this decision is in the records. Does this situation look good to you?
If you look at a similar case, in US. SWAT-ting can be anonymous and can destroy lives, the assymetry of the tips and the resources destroyed by a false tip is unacceptable.
The same way for a bomb threat, the officer should act by requiring identification and guaranteeing that it stays private as long as the bomb is real.
Those officials then have to get reelected.
That's usually easier when your opponents can't make legitimate-sounding claims that the policies you've instituted led to a bombing.
IDIOT ANCHORPERSON COVERED IN MAKEUP: Breaking News: We've just learned that the bombing that killed 152 people in the Podunk Shopping Mall today was known in advance to the police, but they did nothing to inform the public! Now to our reporter on the scene.
LOSER IN A SUIT: Hi, this is Rob Harasser, coming to you live from the Podunk Police Headquarters. This is Detective A. Buser Skeptic. Detective Skeptic, I understand you got a call this morning before the bombing?
WIFE-BEATER IN A MUSTACHE: Yeah, someone called me this morning. It was hard to hear them, but they said a lot of people would die in the mall today. I asked who was calling and they hung up.
LOSER: Did they say they were going to bomb it?
WIFE-BEATER: Yeah, they did say something about "a bomb", but I couldn't hear them clearly.
LOSER: Did you trace the line?
WIFE-BEATER: I did. You know, people think that if they hang up fast enough, we can't trace calls, but that's not true anymore. Even though they called the non-emergency number, I knew where they were calling from in ten minutes. It was a payphone outside the mall. Did you know there are still payphones outside the mall?
LOSER: Why didn't you warn people?
WIFE-BEATER (looking sad): I thought it was some kid playing a joke.
PANCAKE-THICK MAKEUP FACE: Well, there you have it, folks. The police knew, and they didn't tell us.
I don't know anything about the situation in Russia, but that definitely happened in Northern Ireland.
It's not the difference between anonymous tip and non-anonymous tip, but between anonymous tip and no tip at all, because no one wants to be punished for doing the right thing.
Remember Richard Jewell from the Atlanta Olympics?
They aren't wrong. Federal circuit judges and the Supreme Court have ruled that police have no duty to protect anyone in particular. They routinely suffer no meaningful negative consequences for serious failures in their work, including killing people who are unarmed, not resisting, and not suspected of committing any crime.
And after the Boston police screwed up the Mooninite promotion for Cartoon Network in 2007... well, it's enough to say that Turner had to pay for and publicly apologize for the police response to their fancy LED-illuminated handbills--absolutely Kafkaesque.
If I ever find a suspicious package, I'll certainly alert bystanders to retreat. I'll pull the firm alarm on my way out. I'll call the firefighters. I'll call the local newspaper and television station newsrooms. I might even call the triage nurse at the nearest ER. But someone else can be the one to call the cops.
But I have little confidence that surveillance requires warrants, or that warrants are only issued with valid probable cause of real crimes, and not against dissidents, journalists, political adversaries and business competitors.
Therefore, ProtonMail's only moral and ethical response is to refuse to cooperate with Russia's law enforcement.
The same would be true in China if ProtonMail was available there.
And given what we now know about the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, I'd have to say they've become more like Russia than most care to contemplate.
Do you think Proton are the only people who don't trust the Russian police, and provide them with less information as a result, reducing their ability to solve real crimes?
One of the predictable side effects of having a police force / legal system that is used by the powerful to crush dissent that people don't trust you, even when there really are real threats.
See also the HK protests regarding the extradition bill, which was prompted by a guy who genuinely did murder his girlfriend in Taiwan.
There exist principles, which are action guiding rules. We use principles to keep ourselves from being swayed away from certain behaviors which we believe hold value. For example, many martial institutions hold some variant of the "death before dishonor" principle; this rule basically implies that you will choose to die before fleeing battle. Even though there are many pressures to change behavior, which may be VERY great in the moment, holding to your principles will allow you to lead a structured life guided by rules that you care about.
Corporations and business entities can also implement principles (to greater or lesser effect); ProtonMail enacts a principle of not sharing customer data. Thousands of companies hold to this same principle, which keeps honest business able to occur. Imagine if every company on Earth decided that they could sell any and all customer data. Banks selling stats on your income to car salesmen, Walgreens selling embarrassing photos of you too the press, etc. The world would be a fucking madhouse, commerce would break down, and millions would die as societies collapsed. A few lives that may or may not expire due to ProtonMail holding to their principles is nothing, comparatively. It would happen one way or another, just with a different email service.
If users from Russia can't access ProtonMail - that's not that much of a deal. But if mail from ProtonMail stops reaching Russian email addresses - @mail.ru, @yandex.ru are as common in Russia as @gmail.com - that's a big problem for ProtonMail and its users.
If you want to actually own your email address, it should be on your own domain. Then you can change your mail provider without changing your primary email address.
There are other ways that a government can restrict access to a user (or group of users), of course.
Still, if I were worried about being censored, I would try to make it as difficult as possible.
Since the authorities have access to mail.ru emails, their wishes can be partially fulfilled only if mail.ru continues to receive mail from ProtonMail. So I'd bet it'll still work.
And if all else fails, it seems outright bans are being increasingly used.
The best way to pushback against this would be if all of us would choose to deliberately use anonymous services. No govt can afford to ban millions of people including businesses. But of course that won't happen, so everyone's privacy is suffering as a result. It is not inconceivable to think of a future where encryption and Internet access as a whole are regulated and licensed out. That'd be the death knell of online anonymity, which I suspect was always just a flash in the pan... it was never going to last when the masses and their govts got their hands on the technology.
It seems all evidence is based on the emails sent by the author of the bomb threats. I don't think it works as evidence against this being an inside job.
Hosting locations matter when you are buying network-delivered services. Even if it is trivial to bypass for the user, this one time, jurisdictional risk to the provider is something that you have to consider as a factor when comparing competitors and self-host options.
and when a lot of people are talking about 'self-hosting' they're mostly talking about a VPS they rent from some provider who could vanish just as easily as Proton can. I'd like to see the numbers on how many self-hosting evangelists (I don't mean that term pejoratively. I think self-hosting is great) are actually talking about metal they physically control.
If I don't "self-host", then neither does the corp I work for, with hundreds of machines in other people's DCs...
Everyone has different threat models and resources.
Additionally, if you're on a business plan then you can get a dedicated IP from your ISP or just host in a data center.
1. Inconvenience current users 2. Prevent new users so the service doesn’t gain traction
With the second reason being their true motive.
That said, Russia banning Proton Mail is one hell of an endorsement for Proton Mail, in my estimation. I want to believe in the dream of ubiquitous end-to-end encrypted email. I don’t know if Proton is the right manifestation of that, but it certainly doesn’t hurt in terms of keeping the dream alive. So, I wouldn’t want to wave anyone off Proton, even though Fastmail is a great service.
I think the major problem with any PGP Mail system is that nobody else uses it. I have a semi-technical friend who, for ideological reasons, decided to switch to Proton Mail. I dusted off a GPG-capable email client and provided him with my public key. After some technical headaches we exchanged a couple of emails and promptly went back to organizing the occasional happy hour or movie outing via Signal.
In your case deeper problem is that so much of you digital life depends on a single point of failure - your Gmail account and it can go in a blink of an eye.
Trick for a switch is to do one a time. Next time you visit a site, go to setting and set email to your new provider, like timpy+nytimes@protonmail.com or whatever.
Also can advise you password manager, like 1Password, that will make switch and maintenance much easier.
Been running gmail and proton side by side for over a year, slowly moving all accounts and redirecting contacts to my proton address. Really suggest getting a custom domain so moving providers is as easy as changing MX records in the future.
However - the local bridge has been crashing over the last several days for unknown reasons.
And, there are many sites which will not recognize @protonmail addresses as valid when signing up.
I am in the process of weaning off gmail completely - but expect it to take a lot longer than expected.
Ive already given up chrome completely on desktop - and run brave and ff.
I wish there were a way to just delete my entire online presence and start a new one.
I've emailed my contacts informing of the switch, and I'm passively migrating important accounts/services; in fact, this forced me to consider which services are actually important and worth receiving e-mail from. If I go a couple of months without getting e-mails from some service and nothing bad comes from it, then I probably won't ever read it anyway and it's not important.
As soon as their mobile app is better, I'll likely switch to their paid service, although a private calendar and a corresponding quality app would make the 5€/month seem like better value for money.
Protonmail bridge on linux has problem with attachments bigger than 2 MB and it disconnects a lot.
Android app is mediocre at best:
- feels really slow
- shows notifications for emails already read on web
- deleting or moving email to different folder waits for confirmation from backend which is really confusing (you can still see deleted emails but you can't delete them again)
I hope they will work on those UX issues otherwise I really like it.
definitely use a custom domain so you never have to do this again.
I'm at the point now where I only get see that label every one in a blue moon. I'll probably switch over for good soon enough but I'm not in a rush either
Register a domain (e.g. something23423.de for 15USD/year) and use that as your primary email address (e.g., name@something23423.de), then connect it to any provider you wish underneath via editing the MX records at the registrar. Many email providers support this and have instructions [1,2,3].
You can have Gmail then forward all emails to your new address, and then each email that arrives from Gmail, you know needs updating to the new address.
You do not need to change your email address when switching providers.
[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html
[2] https://kb.mailbox.org/display/BMBOKBEN/Using+e-mail+address...
[3] https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/set-up-a-custo...
After all this was done, I felt better, and still do after 2 years. Not sure of the other aftereffects regarding privacy and such. But I voted with my wallet, that's for sure.
[0] https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems [1] https://posteo.de/en/site/about_posteo
I had an experience changing email address in the past and it's not that difficult, it's just time consuming. What I did is said to myself "that's it, I'm using this new address from now on". Then over the course of a year I monitored old email and evaluated each message. If I needed it (online shopping account, banking, etc), I went to whatever service sent it and changed my email. Some services don't support changing emails, in that case I would accept the loss and create a new account.
> Can anybody using ProtonMail recommend it?
Privacy concerns aside, to me it's not better nor worse than any other email provider. There is a caveat though. On Android (and web app) you can't search through messages' bodies, only by subject/sender/etc. This is because they don't index them. You can do this on desktop if you're using Bridge app with, say, Thunderbird. Thunderbird then will do the indexing.
Bridge is for paid users only, and it's not open source thing. https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail enables full-text search support for free accounts if the "local store" enabled, described in https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail/wiki/FAQ.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-d...
Well, I certainly wouldn't consider that such a big achievement[1]:
> German security expert Thomas Roth published a video over the weekend showing how he exploited a trivial vulnerability found in ProtonMail's systems: using the Chrome web browser's developer mode, he was able to edit an outgoing message to embed arbitrary JavaScript code, which was executed in a would-be victim's browser when opened within the ProtonMail.ch site.
> Roth said he had released the video now because ProtonMail had fixed various flaws he reported back in May via email. However, the Swiss consortium hadn't credited or warned users of his discovery, he claimed, hence his open disclosure of the bugs.
> "The reason I posted the video was because they did not communicate the security problems to their users – and did not even notify me when the bugs were patched," Roth told The Register.
> The researcher said he had reported five vulnerabilities including a cross-site request forgery bug that apparently allowed an attacker to change victims' email signatures, further opening them to malicious cross-site scripts.
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/07/protonmail_fail_jav...
Usually, there is not enough information for a 3rd party observer to actually know the motivations of a large group, or know enough about the facts to know whether those groups were able to successfully pursue their incentives.
Not that I'm concerned that government agencies would want to "hunt me down" or anything. I'm more concerned of what hackers will be able to do when they steal that info from the government (i.e., very ellaborate and credible scams to close family impersonating me).
Yes, you could make a good argument about propaganda, freedom of the press, and the unfortunate things that happen to leaders of opposition to Putin. But that is all to make the the population doesn't want to throw the regime out, not that it can't.
Putin is a dictator.
Russia is a dictatorship.
Elections alone aren't the sole definition of a full democracy. Hell, even Iraq under Saddam had elections...
Source: I'm Russian.
I'm a happy Premium user.
PS It's funny to hear some accusations about terrorism from our state, officially supporting terrorism. Yes, I'm Russian if any.