Batu69 Posted January 19, 2017 Share Posted January 19, 2017 Known oppressive regimes including Egypt, and er... the UK? Oh, the IP Act is law... ProtonMail, the privacy-focused email business, has launched a Tor hidden service to combat the censorship and surveillance of its users. The move is designed to counter actions "by totalitarian governments around the world to cut off access to privacy tools" and the Swiss company specifically cited "recent events such as the Egyptian government's move to block encrypted chat app Signal, and the passage of the Investigatory Powers Act in the UK that mandates tracking all web browsing activity". Speaking to The Register, ProtonMail's CEO and co-founder Andy Yen said: "We do expect to see more censorship this year of ProtonMail and services like us." First launched in 2014 by scientists who met at CERN and had become concerned by the mass-surveillance suggested by the Edward Snowden revelations, ProtonMail is engineered to protect its users' communications by using client-side encryption through users' browsers, meaning ProtonMail's servers never have access to any plaintext content. Combined with Switzerland's strong privacy laws, the freemium service has increasingly been seen as a popular destination for spooked citizens. It has faced enormous DDoS attacks by assumed nation-state adversaries, and following the election of Donald Trump, sign-ups at the service doubled. Users can navigate to the Tor network through: https://protonirockerxow.onion Today, ProtonMail is announcing the introduction of a Tor hidden service, or onion site, which will allow users to directly connect to their encrypted email accounts through the Tor network at the URL https://protonirockerxow.onion, which ProtonMail said it expended "considerable CPU time" to generate for the sake of finding a hash that was more human readable and less prone to phishing. Additionally, the onion site also has a valid SSL certificate issued to Proton Technologies AG by DigiCert. This is a reasonably novel innovation as the classical Certificate Authority system isn't compatible with Tor, where onion addresses are self-generated rather than purchased from a registrar. Yen told The Register: "The problem is, if you act as your own CA, you run the issue of not trusting that certificate authority by default." As such, ProtonMail reached out to the Tor Project, which suggested it get in touch with DigiCert, who had previously provided the CA service for Facebook. "Given ProtonMail's recent growth, we realize that the censorship of ProtonMail in certain countries is inevitable and we are proactively working to prevent this." said Yen. "Tor provides a way to circumvent certain Internet blocks so improving our compatibility with Tor is a natural first step." In the coming months, the Tor Project stated it would be "making additional security and privacy enhancements to ProtonMail, including finishing some of the leftover items from our 2016 Security Roadmap". Article source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Israeli_Eagle Posted January 20, 2017 Share Posted January 20, 2017 Cute........... But also still useless for any real mailer, because: WebMail != E-Mail Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fallon Posted January 22, 2017 Share Posted January 22, 2017 My WebMail = My Email for a long time already. For everyday use Gmail can compete with programs like theBat!, unless you are into mass mailing. Desktop mail programs need maintenance which is just not worth the time. Protonmail IS nice for when you want the privacy. It also supports mailing with PGP Keys (of course). On 1/19/2017 at 1:23 PM, Batu69 said: following the election of Donald Trump, sign-ups at the service doubled. Quote the company found people apprehensive about the decisions that President Trump might take and what they would mean considering the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. "Given Trump's campaign rhetoric against journalists, political enemies, immigrants, and Muslims, there is concern that Trump could use the new tools at his disposal to target certain groups," Yen said. "As the NSA currently operates completely out of the public eye with very little legal oversight, all of this could be done in secret. I can save my own comments on the guy for now (although it is tempting). On his first day in Office Trump managed to attack both his own secret service and the US media. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Togijak Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 On 20.1.2017 at 1:12 PM, Israeli_Eagle said: Cute........... But also still useless for any real mailer, because: WebMail != E-Mail If you pay you can use POP and IMAP, WebMail ist only the free version. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Israeli_Eagle Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 1 hour ago, Togijak said: If you pay you can use POP and IMAP, WebMail ist only the free version. IMAP is the same trash (I only allow mails storage in my own machine!) and I not see here any POP3/SMTP connection. And my postal letters also only stay in my own home. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.