1y ago

India may block Proton Mail

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India may block Proton Mail | TechCrunch

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30 comments

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
- Congrats, you just invented ProtonMail
  
  Its not encrypted when 99% of your contacts aren't on Proton.
  
  You can encrypt it for non-Proton users very easily.
  
  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.
  
  you're talking about sending a link to a password protected message?
  
  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.
  
  pgp is true end-to-end
  
  Ah yes, forgot about PGP. Haven't used it in a long time myself, but Proton automatically creates a PGP signature for you. You can just attach your public key that's already on your account and it'll encrypt your mail. It natively supports PGP/MIME.
  
  you say it like it's simple, but i don't have any friends who have accomplished it
- Then use Proton Mail
- 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.
  
  Oh no, profiling. Google can read your emails directly
  
  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
- you can e2e encrypt emails though?
  
  And then just go PGP if you want even more security.
  
  Yet everyone sends me one time passwords in plain text
- 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.
- autocrypt has been around a while. get your contacts to use it.

30 comments