Infomaniak comes out in support of controversial Swiss encryption law
tomsguide.com
tomsguide.com
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-would-...
For reference, Switzerland had to change their banking secrecy laws decades ago due to pressure from the US, Germany and France, so you can guess how well other weaker countries will fare against such pressure. And let's not forget the famous Crypto AG scandal in Switzerland, so I'm not buying the famous "Swiss privacy" marketing fluff at all anymore as much as I like the country. Just like Crypto AG, every tech company is, or will be, infiltrated by alphabet agencies by cooperation or by force. If you want real privacy you have to self host, that's the only way.
Plus, I feel like we're focusing at the wrong issue here. Do we really want lawless places on this planet to exist where companies and individuals can escape the courts and law enforcement of their own nations? Something that will be exploited mostly for nefarious purposes than protecting privacy of law abiding people.
The real solution is holding powerful governments accountable against invasions of privacy by their voters, not creating lawless zones where companies and powerful individuals can go and hide to avoid laws they dislike. If laws are bad, just change the laws, don't normalize law avoidance. If you normalize law avoidance about one thing, why not about other things as well like theft, taxation, human trafficking etc? The whole point of developed western nations is democratic representation, the strong rule of law and fairness of the court system. Write to your representative.
Yes. If the alternative is a worldwide police state.
Being held accountable for crimes is your definition of a "police state"? Interesting.
What you're trying to hint at is political persecution, and there is the possibility of asylum for that. But let's differentiate between persecution and running away from crimes, and not muddy the waters. Not all crimes are the result of persecution.
Otherwise what's stopping anyone form breaking into your house, murdering your family to rob you and then fleeing abroad on asylum to avoid legal repercussions? If that was the status quo, you probably wouldn't exist anymore right now.
The "police state" is the one ensuring your family's safety. In our modern societies, we have outsourced the monopoly on violence to the police state, so that we can focus on work and hobbies, and that comes at the expense of trusting the state and holding it accountable through democracy.
The state will always go through cycles of opinion, witch hunts, political interference, and other malfeasances of power. It will probably be corrected, only to temporarily careen off the rails again. This is -the best case scenario- for a healthy democracy.
The only way to limit the effect of this meandering pathfinding on individuals is to place some things intentionally out of reach of the state. To abuse their power, then they must break the law. This triggers the correction that brings democracy back towards the just path. Without limits to break, the state will careen so far off the path that it may have a hard time righting itself.
We must force the state to use open coercion when it wants to stretch the limits of its reach. This is a critical element for democracy to function… its reach must have well defined limits that stop well short of any legal activity, even if it means criminals and deviants will face less obstacles. This is the cost of freedom.
That's not what I said.
>We must force the state to use open coercion when it wants to stretch the limits of its reach.
That's exactly what I said.
>even if it means criminals and deviants will face less obstacles
Curios how liberal you'd be with the criminal who'd wronged you. Mercy towards criminals is a crime towards their victims.
Most societies that we would consider worth living in hold up the principle that matters of justice should be decided by the impartial and uninvolved. If the victim's feelings should determine the punishment, what would stop any petty theft and spicy insult (for the vast majority of countries where those are considered crimes) from being answered with the death penalty?
Please, don't twist my words, I never said the victim should be the judge. I asked how would the victim feel if criminality had safe spaces where they could avoid justice because they feel like the law is unfair with them.
>If the victim's feelings should determine the punishment
In "most societies that we would consider worth living" as per your words, the victim's feelings are always taken into account in court that determines sentencing. Case in point, men and women get disproportionate sentences in the west for the exact same crime, like sexual abuse for instance.
A lot of the kinds of crimes we're discussing here are things like being homosexual in the Middle East, where there is no victim, only a transgression imagined by religious nuts.
Yes, it's good that those people have a place to go. Happy Pride.
Not sure why you had to go make that parallel but it really isn't. You can control yourself from committing crimes, you can't control yourself from being born gay.
Of course, reality is that whether justice is forthcoming is dictated by economic interests, not law, and certainly not your idea of law. In other words, whether you criticize China's treatment of Uighur, or point out how gigantic the scale of pollution the CCP is responsible for, or which economic disaster they caused this week, will get you in hot water more than committing a (scammer) crime will. Whether you criticize India's rich, Thailand's or Saudi Arabia's royalty and actually get some attention (which, as has been demonstrated, will make them get diplomatically immune embassy staff kill you. Perhaps that's not legal, but they cannot legally be punished for that, not even financially). And if you either insult or otherwise pose a problem to western copyright interests (e.g. make a tutorial about LibreELEC) you'll get the hammer put down on you:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/tags/libreelec
Of course, it will remain trivial to sabotage judicial proceedings if you're outside of the jurisdiction of that court (and because second/third world courts simply side with scammers against victims), the stated reason of the argument is NOT something you can do in practice, and whether the law is on your side? It is already on your side if you go after scammers! It is impossible to use local laws to go after scammers. What protects scammers, as everybody knows, is less anonymity than it is third world states and attitudes, especially their total lack of respect for international treaties they signed, combined with the reach FANGs, incumbent Telco's and Banks give to scammers. Given that one of FANGs, TikTok (in practice even if not in theory) runs from within the third world even that option is fast disappearing. This law does nothing about that.
Even within the west, there's an expression from the legal profession: "you cannot get blood from a stone". It is meant to illustrate the problem that scams and most fraud are committed by people who are "on the margin" and have no money or options (almost all fraud is committed by tenants). On the margin means that while they aren't poor, even a 1000 euro judgement would make them destitute for 6 months or more. You will not get a judge to convict these people. It doesn't matter how much you legally are in the right, the justice system will refuse to destroy their lives, make them homeless, instead they will correctly point out that will achieve nothing, and leave you hanging. This is another thing you can't change. (yes, with the current attitudes if the criminal is an immigrant you may get them removed. But you still won't get your money back)
And to follow your accusatory style: is this what you want to achieve? Support scammers to advance the interests of extreme rich third-world autocrats? Because that's what you're doing.
Like Franklin said, he'd rather 100 guilty people go free rather than a single innocent person jailed. He was definitely willing to not hold some people accountable for their crimes because that was a requirement for a free state.
You said earlier that the solution was to change the laws, and this is what we're saying right now. Change the laws so that VPNs are allowed and cryptography is allowed so that we can avoid the police state.
What does this have to do with anything? All jails now have innocent people in them due to process failures. How does quoting Franklin make them feel better?
>He was definitely willing to not hold some people accountable for their crimes because that was a requirement for a free state.
If by "free sate" you mean a high crime rate state where toothpaste needs to be locked up in CVS due to criminals being let free, then yeah.
My family is approximately infinitely more likely to be considered a "perpetrator" of a crime internet deanonymization will be used to prosecute (piracy, bad opinions, dealing in the wrong kind of crypto coins, ordering the wrong kind of chemicals from India) than to be a "victim" in our own estimation, so at least in this particular domain the "police state" is only ensuring the interests of some others, at the expense of my family's safety (which they could and would directly compromise using the violence they have monopolised).
In the Infocom-produced Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the player must enter his/her own brain and navigate a maze, in search of the Common Sense Particle, finding where it is lodged in this brain, and get rid of the blasted thing.
Then the player may return to the Heart of Gold and, without hindrance of Common Sense, hold “No Tea” and “Tea” simultaneously in inventory.
But that is just a computer game!!!
going through a shift toward authoritarianism of various flavors
"EU Commission refuses to disclose authors behind its mass surveillance proposal" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44168134
The EU is authoritarian in many ways. How the laws get made is secondary to whether or not they are authoritarian.
One is populist strongman rule, usually but not always of a right wing bent. We have this rising in the US.
The other is technocratic corporatism, the model of China and it seems a faction of the EU.
Both endlessly malign democracy and liberalism as decadent, chaotic, and responsible for an endless parade of bogie men they will protect you against.
> For the first time, an EU expert group has explicitly mentioned VPN services as "key challenges" to the investigative work of law enforcement agencies, alongside encrypted devices, apps, and new communications operators.
"VPN services may soon become a new target of EU lawmakers after being deemed a "key challenge"" https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-servi...
> Popular instant messaging applications that remained blocked despite the removal of the ban on VoIP services included WhatsApp, FaceTime, and Skype. The selective relaxation of the ban narrowed down the user’s choice to premium (paid) services, owned by state-run telecommunication firms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_the_Unit...
If it is just a VPN, a "cybercompany" does not need to be incorporated somewhere. If is is just virtual, it does not have to follow any laws in a jurisdictions. Servers can come and go...
I'm a little bitter, but for what I need it, I'll let it pass this time.
edit: it is a business account, but I have never been asked for this anywhere else. you have all the company required data, all my required data, why do you need my id? maybe personal accounts are treated differently.
- https://thejollyteapot.com/uses - https://thejollyteapot.com/2024/11/05/website-updates/
Does anyone have recommendations for domain registrars that support .ch and .li domains and ideally also supported by lego (my current acme client of choice)?
German inwx.com is not bad for country TLDs
Besides the blaming of informaniak, their email hosing for 18 Euros a year is actually a pretty good deal. If you can live with US hosting for email, purelymail.com is worth a look.
I wanted to take back control over my emails so recently I started to look long and hard at ProtonMail, Infomaniak (kMail), Mailbox.org, and others. In the end, I chose mailbox.org. I could have been really annoyed right now given how painful updating accounts/credentials and account migration are!
And not only by the judicial system. Also I do believe the net can survive anonymity just fine due to empirical evidence.
Personally, I think that privacy is a losing game, like gambling. The best case is that we all work within the parameters. But in any case, the amount of time and effort that is dedicated to privacy is keeping humanity from more important things.
The main annoyance I have with companies and organizations that engage in working with our private data is that eventually they will lose control of the data, and if bad things come because of that, we are the victims. This may be our physical and mental health data, and we could lose our jobs or have to pay higher insurance. This may be our financial data, and we lose our savings for retirement. This may be our personal historical thoughts that we don’t wish to broadcast, and we lose relationships and our jobs.
Privacy at one level is a luxury but at other levels are not, unless society as a whole embraces that we’re all unhealthy and we’re all flawed, but at that point perhaps things become too flexible and very bad things happen.
unless society as a whole embraces that we’re all unhealthy and we’re all flawed, but at that point perhaps things become too flexible and very bad things happen.
East Germany, the KGB, modern China, and many others have tried the route of getting rid of citizen privacy “for the common good” in similar ways, and it results in bad things.
AIs with superhuman intelligence may have all the data, may lean utilitarian, and similarly could it not just restrict people, commit genocide, genetically modify, drug, neuter, manipulate, and euthanize like the worst of the them? I don’t know how we combat this- go offline?
I would like humans to not waste much effort on privacy though, beyond what makes sense.
If you're fine with a US-based provider, https://porkbun.com/ also has good pricing and a tech oriented mindset. They don't support many ccTLDs though.
In general, https://tld-list.com/ is the best place to research domain registrars in my opinion.
https://steigerlegal.ch/2025/03/29/proton-ueberwachung-keine... (German)
And understable from a business perspective. If you are one of the few hosting companies that host truly anonymous VPN and email providers, you are going get some troublesome customers that likely are going to end up being expensive.
Everything can be justified as a business interest. Even criminal behavior could. So that argument is NOT acceptable. This is about a Swiss company, not Russia. If Switzerland wants to go there, let's at least be honest about it.
I still have to dig the current law proposal (my shame).
The conclusion I came to a few years ago is that anonymity in Switzerland is not something useful. Switzerland is not a police state, it mainly copes up with trying to get its citizens to being responsible. Whenever you make something wrong IRL, you have to assume the consequences. Same with online. I concur that my words are messed up.
I don’t even know what to say.
Every police state claims it’s only “trying to get its citizens to be responsible”.
What "shared values"? Most of the values people hold as "important" has people on the other side with the opposite values, and both of those are "correct".
There are no "shared values" that all humans agreed upon.
It is much better to define acceptable boundaries on actions and let people believe what they want if their actions do not violate those agreed on boundaries.
People absolutely heed laws that they find personally inconvenient but are afraid of the penalties (parking restrictions, paying taxes, loud music and that is not even stepping into hot button topics).
The reason Swiss stayed democratic is likely not because they share universal, similarly understood values, but because they feel that their system that only defines acceptable norms is working okay as is.
Please do try this, I've tried it in the past, and always been able to come up with counter-examples to whatever I came up with. It's surprisingly hard.
"Always be kind" is one example that for me should obviously be shared with everyone, but it's almost disgustingly easily to come up with whole cultures or countries where this is actively seen as a "bad thing" because of reason X and Y, or has to have exceptions because of Z.
Kindness isn't really a value, though.
Shared values are simply things that people decide are important for a society to function as well as possible. Respect for human life and dignity, for example. Good thing right? How many mental gymnastics does somebody have to go through to find some exception to that?
Tell you what though, if I come across somebody who says that they don't respect human life and dignity, I am absolutely going to avoid that person and shun them from any kind of society that I am a part of.
Why not? I think everyone deserves kindness, and I'm not alone in thinking that.
So even something that for me is obvious, it isn't as obvious for everyone.
> Respect for human life and dignity, for example
It's very generic, and subjective, which again leads me to believe not everyone would agree on what it means.
For example, does "respect for human life" mean you should let people live where they currently live, if they and their family lived there for 100 years say? Lots of Israeli settlers would disagree with that, but for me that would be a sign that someone doesn't have "respect for human life".
> if I come across somebody who says that they don't respect human life and dignity
Of course everyone will say "Yeah, of course I do!", but where the rubber meets the dirt is how people define that. Not being kind to people who made mistakes for example, wouldn't be "respecting human life" for me, but you might disagree, as you think we shouldn't be kind to people who committed murders, but you would still claim you "respect human life".
Freedom, Human dignity, Equality, Democracy, Multilingualism and cultural diversity, Federalism, Solidarity. (that is not an exhaustive list).
Murder is bad?
Stealing is bad?
Sure, lots of countries agree with this. But bunch of countries still have "death penalty", even one that is usually heralded as the "Savior of the West" still has judicial murders.
Besides, if everyone agreed "murder is bad" we wouldn't have wars, so obviously not everyone agrees with that.
> Stealing is bad?
This I don't even agree with 100%, depends on the context. You're starving while someone else is hoarding food for themselves for no particular reason? Totally justifiable to steal food from them to survive.
War argument kind of fits with this one too, clearly not everyone agrees stealing is bad.
I don't understand this train of thought, what exactly are you saying?
I can interpret it as "it's wise to end online anonymity and feed all personal information (including biometrics) to AIs to enforce social rules" which is, frankly, an absurd proposal even if you are extremely naïve, not even considering one single negative aspect of the loss of all privacy, being managed by a machine in a societal level.
Or I can try to interpret it as feeding all of this into AIs create insurmountable threats, to democracy, to the individual, etc. which is somewhat what I'd expect to logically follow from feeding all this personal data into AI models.
But none of these interpretations are actually possible for me to land at based on what and how you wrote, I can't make sense of it.
What I was trying to say is that simply being on the internet today — using AIs, corporate networks, and so on — almost certainly exposes your most personal and unique information (the kind of data that reveals your very identity) to the entities operating those systems.
Sadly, I was implying that anonymity is becoming an obsolete concept. Then I tried to think of a law that could help the Swiss government track down malicious individuals, and I wondered whether that could actually serve as something beneficial — a way to protect people and their freedom.
I'm in complete agreement with you, I first got scared with the potential for profiling individuals through data collection over time some 15 years ago. I was working on a very small project from a startup, related to football/soccer, where we collected behavioural and sentiment data from football fans over time, in our service and around social media (mostly Twitter at the time), and had a first glimpse on what could be inferred about individuals just based on very public datapoints they'd produce.
That project opened my eyes, and the paranoia it created in me never really went away, it's a constant thought in my mind about how much data I'm generating for massive companies creating very accurate profiles of who I am: what I like and dislike, what I access, where I am, what I'm doing where I am, every single time I click on a link, a video, etc. I feel a little dread that I provided even more information about myself to machines programmed to crunch through all of this and materialise a view of who I am as a person. Right now it's mostly to serve me ads but the potential that absurd amount of information gathering has in the wrong hands truly terrify me.
The worst part is that there's almost no escape living a contemporary lifestyle, the only way is to engage with anything digital in very, very cautious ways, trying to cover every single trace and track you might leave behind while interacting with any digital product, and that is simply exhausting.
Unfortunately, it was already used to influence voters with specific psychological settings. And it worked so well that it gave me chills on how fragile we are.
Anyways, I need to dig out the law proposal because it surely is more aimed at protecting citizens than ripping their souls for the "government" (which almost doesn't make sense for a country like Switzerland).