F-Secure Launches A Dropbox For the Dark Web And A VPN

The article writes that "F Secure will not stop a proper investigation from the authorities. But it has done its level best to make sure your content cannot be combed and picked up by intelligence agencies or advertisers, without your knowledge or through illegal means, and promises that everything from the thumbnail to the content itself and the metadata is all encrypted."

I'm not entirely sure how to reconcile these two statements. Perhaps everything is encrypted, but they have access to your key (Similar to Lavabit) ?

Alternatively, they might only be referring to delivering metadata to 'authorities'.

I'm not sure where their niche is - People who sorta-kinda want things private, but not enough to use a serverless solution such as http://www.filetransporter.com/ ?

This is the opposite of "encrypted and impossible for authorities to access unless they get your key, which we don't have." Which is to say, the opposite of private. How does this service offer privacy?

They really, really look like they were written by an automated process. I can't imagine a humanoid writing this:

Quite simply, everything is encrypted, with the purpose of transferring the most basic data ownership and levels of privacy back to the control of the user, even when sharing through Facebook.

I mean, it sounds...sort-of kind-of human. But how do "quite simply" and "everything is encrypted" go together? There's nothing simple about encryption. A 14 year old writing a book report could put weird constructions like that together, but this whole thing had similar weirdness throughout, but with vocabulary I wouldn't expect from a bored teenager.

You know they are already writing sports articles with computers. Why not business articles?

The Dark Mail Alliance watch out.

How does:

"everything is encrypted"

work together with:

"The Younited service automatically scans all files for malware that you add to the cloud?"

... presumably that makes it server-side encryption in which they're reserving the right to perform some manipulation of files first (virus scanning, deduplication?)?

... but if so, how can they include the statement:

"we like what dropbox and skydrive do, but where is the privacy?"

Isn't this exactly what dropbox does? I presume they will use ssl to transfer the data, perhaps even encrypt it in storage after they've scanned the plaintext, but surely this is as as vulnerable to their own staff and their government as any other service?

As the last year proofs authorities are the ones that do the snooping. So if it doesn't protect us from them, what's the point of such a service. Also linking to Facebook and Skydrive that have government-backdoors seems not so private to me.

Does F-Secure really understand in which world we live in today? Oh well, neither do I, back to my coffee.

On the other hand:

> a virtual private network (VPN) smartphone app

"smartphone app": for iOS and/or Android, I suppose. Can we trust anything that does not run on an open-source OS? Absolutely not.

Just looked at its website and I can swear I saw it before, not long ago.