https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/16/india-may-block-proton-mail/
Proton, the Swiss privacy-focused software maker, says it has received a notice of a "possible block" of Proton Mail in India after the service was used Proton, the maker of privacy-focused email service Proton Mail, has received a notice of "possible block" in India and condemned the action.
They probably sent the threats themselves to justify banning Proton Mail, because they want to destroy privacy and encryption.
Yes, privacy and encryption are always the enemy of authoritarians. They enable dissent
Hopefully that doesn't go through. This could be grounds for blocking something else like tutanota. Hell, if it works in India other might follow.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a statement, a Proton spokesperson told Indian daily Hindustan Times that the firm condemns the “potential block as a misguided measure that only serves to harm ordinary people.”
It will not prevent cybercriminals from sending threats with another email service and will not be effective if the perpetrators are located outside of India.”
Hindustan Times reported Thursday that the Indian IT Ministry had issued a notice to local internet service providers to block Proton Mail at the request of the Tamil Nadu police.
D. Ashok Kumar, a senior cyber crime wing police officer in Tamil Nadu, told Moneycontrol on Friday that he had sent the request to the IT Ministry to block access to Proton Mail.
Ashok Kumar, who is also the nodal officer for blocking orders in the state, said Proton Mail was “least responsive” in sharing details about the suspects who had sent the bomb threats.
Many lawmakers and privacy advocacy groups expressed concerns over the possible block of Proton Mail in India.
The original article contains 367 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 55%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I'm surprised that they didn't use the "think on the children!" red herring yet. They probably will in the future, given that governments (not just India's, but all of them) have a burning hate against anything privacy.
Can we get away from email?
It's not a secure form of communication anyway. I want my messages to be e2e encrypted so I know I am the only one that can read them
oh? i have friends that use protonmail and i've asked them to do it. no one has succeeded yet
Yep, it just has you set a password, confirm it, and even set a hint if you want. Works on web or mobile.
Yes, there's no other implementation I know of for provider-to-provider encrypted email. O365 is very similar. Recipients can then reply back too and the Proton user receives it directly.
What a stupid thing to say.
Whatever your favorite (and probably shitty) proprietary or open source messaging service - not everybody uses it. But hey, everyone has email, so let's kill that.
BTW since you said encryption is important to you: your walled-garden messaging service has a much easier time profiling you and your friends than they would in a heterogenous environment like email. They don't need the content anyway, just metadata.
They don't need the content anyway, just metadata.
ProtonMail uses PGP encryption to encrypt emails, which means your meta data, including subject line is vulnerable to data collection. Also there is no forward secrecy with current PGP standard. See quotes from below:
We have built Proton Mail with PGP fully integrated, ... All messages between Proton Mail users are automatically end-to-end encrypted.
https://proton.me/support/how-to-use-pgp
Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted.
https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained
PGP (especially for email) exposes much more info to outside party than any good communication protocol, like the signal protocol or OMEMO used by XMPP.
IDK, I think that's kind of flawed logic. E.g. "we should stop using gasoline for cars and switch to electric" - would you say "what a stupid thing to say. everyone uses gas so we shouldn't try to stop"?
And are you not aware of Signal? It's open source, and the default server is not, but it doesn't matter since it is E2E encrypted, just like Proton. The difference is that ProtonMail allows you to communicate unencrypted with non-ProtonMail accounts.
I think all they're saying is that, similar to gas users, there are many people who will not stop using it or just don't care unless we sunset gas cars / email for them.
I do agree with that, and in both cases it isn't something which can happen overnight, but it is a serious long term problem which IMO we should be pushing to solve.
No, they can't since I don't have a Google mail address. Even if I had, they'd have a harder time building a social graph when I communicate with others outside of Gmail.
Okay, but unless all of your communication is e2e encrypted, your provider can read all of your messages. They can even show you ads based on the contents. Oh, you bought vitamins on Amazon? How about some minerals?
If I send messages with matrix, the matrix server admin cannot read them. If I cared about them seeing who I'm talking to, I would run my own server
That's what s/mime does. If it were as easy to get personal certs as it is to get server certs through letsencrypt, everyone could easily sign and encrypt mail.
I can certainly do it anyway, but you'd have to trust my self signed cert.
That said, it's pretty rare to find relays these days that are not using tls for transport, so there's that.