Pretty funny because a few weeks ago some dude felt compelled to virtue signal about how he was moving off American-controlled services like Gmail, as some ostensible protest against Trump and the Iran War. I pointed out that Proton Mail, one of the services he moved to, is ultimately controlled by the US Gov, and my comment got flagged lol.
Proton being at the behest of Uncle Sam has been old news for a while.
"Controlled" is a bit hyperbolic, but there's a collaboration agreement between the USA government and the Swiss government, so Proton has to comply with requests from for example the FBI. Quoting a comment by Proton staff on Reddit
> First, let's correct the headline: Proton did not provide information to the FBI. What happened is that the FBI submitted a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) request, which was processed by the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police. Proton operates exclusively under Swiss law, and we only respond to legally binding orders from Swiss authorities, after all Swiss legal checks have been passed. This is an important distinction.
> [...]
> The only information Proton could provide was a payment identifier because the user chose to pay with a credit card. This is information the user themselves provided to us through their choice of payment method. Proton also accepts cryptocurrency and cash payments, which would not have been linkable to an identity.
So basically, don't trust Proton with information unless you want the FBI to know it.
Sorry, perhaps the takeaway is clearer when you see the full quote [0]. I omitted it for space, here's the relevant part
> Third, let's talk about what was actually disclosed. No emails were handed over. No message content. No metadata about who the user communicated with. The only information Proton could provide [...]
Yes, paying by crypto prevents Proton from disclosing your identity that way. Is there anything preventing Proton from disclosing the email content or metadata? Do they claim they won't disclose that? Clearly they do allow themselves to disclose metadata [1]
> For example, in ransomware cases, we can preserve information about which victims contacted the suspect, so that victims can be notified.
So, "just don't pay with a credit card" comes with the additional caveat of "don't email somebody you don't want the FBI to know you emailed". Whether you also need to "don't write anything you don't want the FBI to know", I haven't investigated further, but you could perhaps look that up yourself. I will just assume that to be the case based on what I've seen.
There are limits of what you can encrypt, in all of the cases of proton being critiqued for its compliance with law I haven't seen any instance of them being able to disclose email content, where metadata is "who we're sending email to", which is, I assume, not encryptable if you want an usable service. That being said, the quote does make your pov clearer, thank you for that.
Yeah, if you trust that they will never push a backdoor to your client on the request of Swiss law enforcement. It's a web app "fgs".
They also admit to scanning all mail to and from non-Proton accounts "for spam". So what's stopping them from one day adding a small if statement that just writes that data to disk, for specific "interesting" users?
Regarding metadata, I sure hope you have nothing to hide in the below emphasized:
> Account Activity: Due to limitations of the SMTP protocol, we have access to the following email metadata: *sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, attachment name, message subject, and message sent and received times*. We do NOT have access to encrypted message content, but unencrypted messages sent from external providers to your Account, or from Proton Mail to external unencrypted email services, are scanned for spam and viruses to pursue the legitimate interest of protecting the integrity of our Services and users. Such inbound messages are scanned for spam in memory, and then encrypted and written to disk. We do not possess the technical ability to scan the content of the messages after they have been encrypted. We also have access to the following records of Account activity: number of messages sent, amount of storage space used, total number of messages, last login time. User data is never used for advertising purposes.
Please quote where in that document the answer to my question is:
> Is there anything preventing Proton from disclosing the email content or metadata?
Also please link me to the source code of Proton's server-side code, so I can audit their scanning of all incoming and outgoing mail, to verify it's not logging them. What you linked above is just the clients.
I think Newt had the right idea, albeit in a more targeted fashion instead of just ‘nuking the Strait’. Given that Iran has now taken to directly threatening non-military US commercial and civilian enterprises and assets I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult to justify using them in this instance.
I can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek, but if it is not, the escalation of nuclear weapons at this point is an insane idea to accomolish the stated goals of the administracion.
I'm not a Trump fan, but this isn't just the Trump admin, is it. Every administration since Carter has had to deal with Iran, whose stated raison d'être is to eradicate both Israel and the US. That's been their position for 40 years.
My own view is that if you have the power to delete your enemy while he's weak, you do it. Why the fuck would you wait until he gets the nukes he promises to get, or uses them on you like he also promises to do? At least the Israelis seem to understand this.
The US has already alienated their allies anyway, and as we've seen with this fiasco, it isn't like those allies are particularly useful anyway, so if the US did use nukes to very quickly solve what has been an intergenerational problem, so what? Oh no, condemnation from the international community. Nobody cares.
If you build a primary school on or directly adjacent to a military base or headquarters or primary military infrastructure, don’t be surprised if it gets bombed during a war. That applies to any country. Surely it’s just common sense.
Qwen's MoE models are god awful when they are only running 2B parameters or whatever they downscale to while active. It isn't a 400B model if there's only several orders of magnitude less parameters active when you're actually inferencing...
The entire article reads like a ChatGPT output. Just tired of seeing it and yeah, if somebody is gonna print AI-slop under his name then I feel like (for a number of reasons), he ought to clarify that it's AI-generated.
I wouldn't care about it being a German or American or Chinese national any more than I care about it being a family of Palestinians, and more importantly it wouldn't belong on HN in any of those cases.
This has nothing to do with tech, isn't something hackers would find interesting, and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity, end of story. It's generic run of the mill nightly news slop that I could get from literally anywhere else if I wanted to waste my time reading/watching uninteresting news that doesn't affect me.
Proton being at the behest of Uncle Sam has been old news for a while.
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