It’s worse then you think. As a Australian citizen you are required to comply with any order which includes leaking code and introducing back doors. Failure to comply or notifying your employer about the request will result in federal charges with a sentence between 20 to 60 years in prison. The legislation that contains this was passed almost a year ago.
Recently there’s been a wave of mass disruptions and data theft in Australia including most of our ports halting operations for a day and one of our largest phone and internet service providers being compromised where millions of peoples personal information like driver licences and passports being leaked.
That’s a really fucking stupid law. Do we need to worry about Australia becoming fascist?
Too late. Already is.
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How does that even work? When you push code for a back door it’s going to still go through a code review so it’s not exactly going to be secret, right?
Yep and then you get fired but atleast you won’t go to jail
My point is that any dev team worth anything has it set up so that it isn’t possible to merge changes into master unless someone else approves. So it’s more like it isn’t possible in most cases, not “you should do the right thing”.
I recently switched my email from gmail to proton mail, because fuck google’s… well… everything. Glad to hear that Proton Mail keeps fighting for privacy!
I changed back when google got rid of the free “mail for your domain” and frankly its been a great thing for me. They keep announcing new things that replacing my existing apps.
They have a password manager now that I use. They are finally adding actual fuction to their online drive storage so I can sync files and backup photos.
Its been well worth the price for me. If only they had an office suite lol
I really wish their password manager used a serif font, though. That’s pretty unacceptable if you’re generating secure passwords.
Please don’t use serif fonts for UI elements. Imagine the buttons on your file manager being Times New Roman. (eww.) I think what you’re looking for is a monospaced font that’s designed to distinguish O/0, I/1/l, etc.
Plug for one of my favorite fonts: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
Could you explain why them not using a serif font is bad?
Generally speaking, serif fonts make it easier to distinguish between visually similar characters like o, O, and 0 or 1, I, and l.
Yeah that’s true, but I can’t see why distinguishing is required of a human. I use my password manager to generate and input passwords for me. I don’t even know any of them.
It’s not uncommon for the password manager to not be on the same system as where the password is being entered - hence a human needs to type. For example: consumer electronics with their own dinky little screens. Smart TVs/game systems and servers where remote access is not possible (or copy/paste does not work by design).
Oh yeah that makes perfect sense; I just hadn’t thought of it because those scenarios haven’t applied to me for a bit. One solution would be to generate readable passwords like discernible sentences. Longer in most cases so more entropy, and less chance to confuse characters.
Some password managers provide this as an option, though some authN systems require special characters because they think it improves security.
Or if you have to do business with a dinosaur company that won’t let you paste in the PW field.
The only thing I haven’t found a good replacement for was how G Drive also handles Office style documents. I make use of that a lot, especially from my phone. But I agree, Proton Mail hasn’t been painful one bit.
Seriously? My workplace uses google drive, and many documents are made with word. … A very common problem is that sometimes someone opens a word doc from the web interface of google drive - which automatically can conveniently opens it with google docs, which totally screws up the formatting and then autosaves it.
(I hate google, and I resent that even after I’ve removed all aspects of it from my home & personal usage, I still have to use it at work.)
I wish I could integrate it with like onlyoffice or something like that. Would be perfect.
For now I have to be happy with saving to my documents folder and knowing its backed up.
Dude, that email alias feature is the best thing about their password app! I’ve started using it all the time for services, new and old. Will make it easy as hell to find those selling my info.
Yeah the email alias rock. Especially when I was car shopping recently.
Want my email? Sure, here you go. SPAM? BEGONE, FOREVER BEGONE!
To everyone saying they’ve changed to protonmail, check out https://simplelogin.io/ , owned by proton and free for all paying proton members. Unlimited email aliases so you can have a unique email per service. The apps also on fdroid.
Why would I switch from Firefox relay that gives unlimited aliases at 1/4 of the price?
You dont have to switch but if someone is paying for Proton than they can utilize it for no extra charge
Ooh so if you are already a Proton Other Things subscriber you get the unlimited alias version for free? Because that’s an excellent reason.
They should make that more clear in the pricing page.
Thanks!
Yeah I wish they advertised that because it’s an excellent deal. I don’t know if the free Simplelogin Premium applies to all levels of subscription plans but Unlimited for sure has it. Been using it and it’s amazing, it allows you to add PGP encryption through protonmail and simplelogin.
I didn’t try Proton’s solution, but free Relay was blocked at some services I tried to use it. It was so weirdly specific since no one really knows about them, so I guess some web admins has enough time on their hands to create a whitelist of all mail services they support, and moz.com wasn’t there.
I just had a company refuse to send to mozmail.com, thought they managed to charge the credit card just fine and the email address didn’t throw an error on sign up. Figured it out on phone with support so they have a record of exactly why they lost that sale worth a few thousand dollars. I’d like to think they’ll learn but more likely the only lesson learned was me re: shopping there.
There are github repositories where people curate a list of domains providing temporary emails or email aliases and admins can just point to the maintained list to block.
In the ~20 I’ve created so far I’ve had 2 services that wouldn’t accept simple login. For those I’ve used proton mail’s built in email alias service where you get 15 aliases with their proper domain.
I’m just finishing up that transition myself and glad to hear I made a good choice!
Same, using Proton mail and I am now blissfully Google free. Something else I found the holidays good for is finding out all the old accounts I have floating out there from sites that I interacted with over the years so I can cancel them or change the email if i decide to keep them. But, no more Google! Next on my list is Amazon.
I’m in the (gradual) process of switching all my stuff from Gmail and Google to Proton mail. I really like the mail client and Proton Drive works better on my computers than Google Drive did, but Proton Drive doesn’t back up my phone yet and I wish they had an office suite like Google does. I don’t put anything important or private on Google docs, but it’s useful to be able to access my textbook notes from any of my computers. I haven’t used the password manager because I’m using Bitwarden, which I really like.
They just released photo backups on android
I missed that update! This is great news!
Protonmail isn’t great, their deliberately misleading about the encryption. Many consider protonmail to be a honeypot.
Do you have anymore background on that?
https://www.wired.com/story/protonmail-amends-policy-after-giving-up-activists-data/
https://cldc.org/does-protonmail-snitch/
In addition protonmail do not protect your metadata (from memory), it’s not encrypted in transit.
Protonmail also keep your public and private keys on their servers, it’s PGP however they don’t want the end users to have to manage their own keys. That to me isn’t ideal.
Receiving from another provider you’ll get TLS encryption until it hits protonmail servers but protonmail will then decrypt your email and again encrypt your email using your PGP stored on their servers.
Sending an email from proton to another provider will be encrypted on protonmail servers but that’s where it ends. TLS will take care of the in-transit and again may not be stored securely on the receiving end.
He wrote their instead of they’re, make your judgement.
Well god damn it! Did you have any links to articles about it? Also what would you view to be better then proton.me?
Tuta (in my eyes) is a step in the right direction, using a client like thunderbird or enigmail and managing PGP yourself would be more secure as the message is decrypted by the recipient and not a company owned server.
I appreciate the follow up! I’m looking into Tuta to learn more about it! It just sucks Tuta didn’t come up at all when I was researching solid alternatives to Gmail.
Yeah except I forgot how to login and now I’m burned
The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has proposed cloud and messaging service providers should detect and remove known child abuse material and pro-terror material “where technically feasible” – as well as disrupt and deter new material of that nature.
The eSafety regulator has stressed in an associated discussion paper it “does not advocate building in weaknesses or back doors to undermine privacy and security on end-to-end encrypted services”.
I so love these magic wand-waving legislators. “Spy on your users and control what they do on your encrypted platform, but in a way that doesn’t break encryption or violate privacy…”
The Australian government would have you believe that we’re in the middle of some kind of CP endemic and everyone needs to suffer for it.
This will catch precisely nobody, as the criminals will immediately move to a different platform, of which there are many.
I host my own mail. If the AFP want to inspect it, they’ll need a warrant.
As an Aussie, Australia has cp problem. Most boomers keep getting arrested here for these stuff. Keep you child away from anyone above the age of 60+ as most of these guys getting arrested are around the age and are registered pedo
Edit: going to leave this here for people downvoting. There’s many more cases. Keep your kids away from white 60+ year olds.-
https://news.yahoo.com/australia-worst-pedo-p-hile-194840872.html
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The state (i.e. a group of people that claims only they can legally use violence in a given geographic region) is a tool used by the psychopathic hoarder class – it’s purpose is to steal from us (our labor and resources that belong to us all) in relative safety (i.e. protected by state enforcement/police).
Our societal “advancement” can largely be understood in terms of this psychopathic hoarder class become more efficient and effective. Look at amazon.com, is that an advancement over stores or a more efficient way to exploit resources and people and effectively expedite the planet’s destruction?
We need a robust democracy with strong regulation, not a lack of structure in our society.
This. Anarchism is not the way, democratic control is.
Structurelessness only leads to tyranny of another kind. Read Jo Freeman’s thoughts on this concept:
Anarchism means people can protect themselves and their community without a state interfering. This means if you don’t protect yourself you pay consequences. Those that would become tyrannical don’t appear fully formed.
A functional anarchist society needs cultural mechanisms, i.e. tolerance of self defense at all levels, these should be able to prevent psychopaths from growing old. But I’m limited in what I can write here.
Democracy tends toward corruption as any concentration of power will.
Yeah so we have a robust system of checks and balances, strong regulation and systemic processes to discourage corruption. For example, if you are in your role due to a public election or representing a public body and you are found to have taken bribes you have to serve 20 years in prison and lose all entitlements associated with your office including pensions.
Except it mostly doesn’t work. For every corrupt official going to prison you have 10 getting away with it.
This isn’t a reality, I’m saying the system could work if.
Ah ok. I would’ve agreed with you not too long ago.
I’ve since become convinced that any concentration of power will attract exactly the type that should not wield it and therefore a society that wants to maximize things like freedom and minimize things like needless suffering should strive to build a society where power is not needed. I realize this would take time and could not come from violent revolution, but instead cultural change over a generation or two. In the meantime, democracy, imperfect as it is, with checks and balances can help keep things stable enough for cultural change to occur in this world.
What is power used for except to coerce people to do your bidding instead of their own? I want to clarify that capability for self-defense/community- defense I don’t consider power.
If a corporation won’t ruin a good thing, you leave it to government to get the job done.
Good. I fully support them. Fuck this shit
But didn’t proton give up some information to like the Finnish government or something like that a couple years back? Like I mean what they’re doing now is good, but what about that other thing that happened?
They follow Swiss law. The Swiss govt had a legal warrant and they only provided legally required informationafter that.
It’s not anarchic. They still have to abide by the law of their jurisdiction.
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