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I stopped using Proton products last year when they gave a donation to Bellingcat, but hell, if you want a free VPN use Proton and let them cover the costs!
Proton Mail: Imperialist Stooge? - via Propaganda in Focus
Proton, known for its privacy-centric email service Proton Mail, announced at the end of 2023 that it would help raise money for controversial group Bellingcat, a documented proxy British intelligence operation, through its annual Lifetime Account Charity Fundraiser.
Donating to an intelligence agency should be the biggest red flag for everyone here.
I mean how could you get more sus than that?
If you read about how it was chosen it was elected by a community poll and they mentioned they didnt really verify anything. Yeah, ridiculous thing to do, but possible for a lib that doesnt know what bellingcat is, and they later apologized
take it as you want, theyre obviously libs and the other alternatives arent any better, and are probably worseyou could always host your own mail of course but that has its own issues too, you obviously cant host your own vpn so the only option is tor which can be very messy to use regularly
I didn't have time last year to move to another email service, so unfortunately I needed to renew my Proton Mail subscription. I plan to move to Forward Email. I am going to get the team plan so I can create email accounts for my family. I also plan to use IVPN.
Edit: Just learned IVPN disabled port forwarding. Damn, that was the reason I was going to use them. I may need a IVPN or MulladVPN account and a separate VPN for port forwarding for torrents. Perhaps AirVPN.
Edit 2: Wait, what do you mean you can't self-host your own VPN? I am going to use Wireguard and a VPS service to run a dedicated server from home available to the Internet and use the VPS service to hide my IP. It's often cheaper to run your own VPN (with some limitations and tradeoffs), plus certain ISPs allow Tor exit relays. There's also alternatives to Tor, such as I2P, which is good for torrents.
as to 2 i do use wireguard and so on on occasion but its not really a good way to obfuscate who you are to some random website or bypass a firewall (unless you own a server in china or something)
ive heard of i2p but afaik it has similar issues with slowness as tor, hosting your own exit relay from that list of isps is still going to result in excessive latency
im talking stuff like daily driver privacy, not 'organizing a revolution' privacy, which really shouldnt be done on the internet to begin with
The purpose of WireGuard in my instance is to hide my IP as I would be self-hosting a website with my home ISP. But yeah, VPNs are not really great for privacy and mostly just serve to hide your IP on peer-to-peer multiplayer gaming, bypass region locks, etc. You would need to take extra steps to maintain anonymity (VPN isn't really one of them), such as hardening your web browser to resist against fingerprinting. I2P is slow, yes, and the list of ISPs good for hosting Tor exit relays was to show ISPs that are lenient on people hosting various, risky things. I was just confused when you mentioned self-hosting a vpn wasn't viable, as it is, but with different costs and may or may not work for certain use cases. Having better security and privacy does tend to come at the cost of performance.
I also agree organizing a revolution should involve relying on as little of the internet as possible, especially when shit hits the fan.
Yup, another red flag. I think they're directly CIA controlled. https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/
Are there any other decent alternatives for mail that arent just 'store in plaintext on our server'. Of course it will never be perfect but my biggest concern is always weird sysadmins and ransoms, theyre always the most likely threat to an average person
edit: I also feel like proton is fairly 'normie' and most people wont flinch at the email address
This seems like it's just a TCP VPN protocol. What's the advantage over Shadowsocks here?
last time i used those it didnt circumvent cloudflare blocking properly so
guess they have some secret sauce here not sure
Yeah let's give all our traffic data to yet another company. No thanks
Free vpns are all data harvesting schemes and proton shouldn't be trusted with your traffic.
Proton is paid-for
The free tier is there to attract you to paid plans (tho also probably to give some lip service to human rights, freedom of expression and such which are expressed as the company' core values)
OP's pronouns are she/her. It seems even if we are careful to use gender neutral pronouns, we also need to keep in mind of lemmy users' pronouns when they explicitly state them in their profiles.
I had to read the sentence multiple times to see why it was removed, seems very odd.
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/grammar/singular-they
Using "they" seems correct as gender didn't matter in the context, and it seems odd that you'd have to read someone profile before referring to their post. If that's a rule it should be required to be in the part of the display name.
Theres a lot of reasons to use a vpn that arent just privacy related anyways, like I vpn into chinese servers to get around the firewall (it blocks outside requests or shows different results to westerners) so I can read specific chinese news articles. Proton is probably the most secure choice for that (vpn into hong kong seems to do this fine). Tor traffic seems to not yet be fully obfuscated a lot of sites block it its also slow as fuck
Fundamentally one company gets all your information whereas before it was all companies get all your info, its also been audited and shown to only store your ID in a visible way so
Of course if you're using an OS or browser that has a ton of telemetry that can be used to track you, I'm personally not a privacy absolutist, I'm more concerned about weird sysadmins stealing nudes and knowing my IP or something than a nation state cracking down on me (which they can do anyways)
Those other companies (your ISP, Cisco, the feds) are getting this data anyway whether or not you're using a vpn.
Region spoofing is really the only good reason to use any of these global corporate vpns.
The point of vpns is to prevent your ISP getting the data
If someone is running all their traffic through a VPN, how is their ISP still getting all their traffic data?
I never said all their data but definitely enough metadata to track your activities.
your ISP are getting this data anyway whether or not you're using a vpn.
Just demonstrated you do not know what you're talking about with this comment.
If you're using a giant ISP like spectrum or Verizon they can absolutely track vpn traffic as it passes through their networks and beyond as isps often share (sell) this data to third parties.
It's encrypted data ffs. They can see precisely nothing without the means to decrypt it.
Krolden is taking issue that they can see the vpn traffic at all, as in they can see that youre using a vpn (re: ISP knows who you are) and can sell that info to third parties who will now use your identity associated with that IP address (because ISP sold them info that the VPN connection came from you)
theres ways around this of course and its actually somewhat easy to measure how big your fingerprint is. most sites of course wont have access to this paid info so reducing fingerprint is only useful to hide from google or cloudflare, and even then they wont know specifically what data you have, just what IPs you accessed. also since so many people use the same VPN it makes it very difficult to track you, you need to have a large fingerprint which can be mitigated by using linux (or with piracy, having a separate server that doesnt fuck with anything but torrents and so on)
ISPs can also tell if youre using i2p or tor so ultimately its just a masturbatory argument, of course nothing is perfect, we all know that
the only way to be truly secure is to steal internet from someone else without them knowing who you are, and you also need to be sure they dont have cameras and you have a sophisticated setup with qubes + vpn + (maybe) tor depending on what you want to do. this is of course an absurd amount of security for looking at pig poop memes on hexbearIt's not that they can see you using a vpn, it's that it is basically useless (and possibly counter productive) if you're trying to keep your browsing habits unlogged.
this is of course an absurd amount of security for looking at pig poop memes on hexbear
yes entirely. im just kinda anal about such things and try to make sure people that whatever they do on a network of physical hardware they don't control can be got to at some level. even if it is encrypted they're still collecting it in hopes to crack it in the future.
If you wanna go real meta then if the people tracking you have a useful traffic fingerprint of you then they could technically track you through whatever network you connect.
And now we're getting back to the original point of this new secret protocol, it hides that its vpn traffic, at least to current systems. I've been able to visit sites that normally block me or limit me. From what I can tell it reduces speed by half or so but if your speed is already good its usable, whereas something like TOR drops it all to a crawl, like 300kb/s if youre lucky. Dial up shit. This new protocol implementation good for daily driver obfuscation
It just sounds like TLS tunnel obfuscation as a way to get around ISP blocks. While this can no doubt be a useful feature It's not going to do anything to keep your traffic safe from tracking, and if it does it probably wont work for long once they know what to look for in the netflow data.
Also this is apparently not an open source protocol so afaict it can't really be audited, It runs solely on protons services.
To be clear, when i talk about 'your data' I also mean the metadata you generate on every hop between you and the server you're trying to connect to.
Yeah I edited to say that, if you are an edward snowden or something you really need to just not have any computers and sneak into libraries with a usb with qubes on it or something if its absolutely necessary to get on the internet
Proton is CIA. https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/
Also they openly supported HK riots which is NOT something Taiwanese companies would do. In fact, they're the only Taiwanese company that did such a thing. They're just another in-q-tel project. Modern CryptoAG.
