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"As you probably know since you're reading this thread, often such inquiries are confidential and the recipients may be prohibited from disclosing their existence."

Yes, that is exactly the kind of thing you're supposed to be taking a stand against and resisting.

In fact, warrants like this are not "often" confidential - that is an aberration and an abomination - and a relatively recent one.

We - all of us - should publicly oppose these measures and work to resist them.

EDIT:

I think I have misunderstood - the HN title is incorrect/misleading.

Storj did not remove their warrant canary, they failed to update it.

Interesting ...

I don't understand how this kind of resistance is supposed to work practically. Should they just go to jail then?

Yes, if you actually believe in freedom and your countries core values.

That's great for those who want to do so, however I'm not going to spend my limited time in this universe dealing with political squabbles.

Ok, so the hosting company’s management goes to jail, the service goes down, the general public are aware “a warrant was served”, the person hosting illegal content goes to host it somewhere else… who has benefitted from this situation, and how?

The customers who value their data not getting intercepted or modified by the state. (Including corrupt actors therein.)

This hypothetical customer has not paid enough money for the people/owners of the storage company to go to jail for.

And doing this does not change the law, so nothing changes.

I'm usually a strong advocate for holding citizens of democratic nations morally accountable for their nation's actions. Asking software authors to martyr and incriminate themselves on behalf of a minuscule fraction of the public, even though they are part of the few doing anything at all, seems exactly backwards. Law reform should start and end with the electorate and their chosen representatives.

As if you were prepared to go to jail for that?

I think there are more well spent time ways to improve freedom etc around the world and where you live

Encryption is all well and good, but only when paired with anonymization. It’s worth comparing the Storj privacy stance linked above, which describes numerous ways in which IP addresses might be logged and associated with accounts by their analytics providers, as opposed to e.g. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/vpn-features/no-logs-v... .

Of course it’s a different business model, and I can’t vouch for PIA actually standing by those commitments. And I empathize with wanting to use best in class tooling to optimize your site experience. But prioritization of privacy, and commitments to minimizing log retention, are things you should consider revising to the extent you are legally able to do so. Don’t feel you need to respond here, of course, to that point!

Glad to see you're still doing the right thing, JT!

Ha thanks!

Nice political response, well done. However you didn't address the issue of canaries and canaries being removed by you directly.

Because by law it is forbidden to say if they are forced to give access by law. The removal of the canary together with that message without addressing that directly can be seen as strong hint that the where forced to give access.

You must blow out the candles of other people's birthday cakes

I am working in security and subjected to audits and do audits on others. This is the way we talk. Painstakingly explicit That this rubs some the wrong way, I can see. Charm is not a currency in this domain.

I of course understand what you mean, but I don't feel like excusing my self for pointing out logical or factual flaws.

I can say that while this is essentially a security discussion and not a dinner party conversation, I am nice to talk to :).

I think what the replier meant is that you don't seem to understand the concept of a warrant canary

I see. That is totally possible.

Canaries exist, because you cannot talk about the reasons for their removal. You just remove them.

I think his response actually DID address the canary disappearing. By law he cannot say “Yes we have been issues a secret warrant” if they had been served, but if they had NOT been served he could legal say so.

He directly acknowledges that this post is about the canary disappearing and doesn’t immediately explain why. If the canary vanished due to a script failing or a person forgetting to update it he would have loudly and clearly stated that they have not been served and the reason why the canary was not updated.

Those facts, imo, HIGHLY suggest they have been served with a secret warrant.

Your bravery is much appreciated

So if law enforcement gives you a subpoena for a user’s content, you give them the encrypted data?