Comment by tptacek
2 months ago
Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals(new window) to introduce mass surveillance — proposals that have been outlawed in the EU — Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move.
This is the funniest thing ever.
Jurisdictional safeguards have always been snake oil. Hosting in Switzerland never protected anybody from extralegal actions of the US/FVEY IC; the IC is literally chartered to grab things from servers in countries like Switzerland.
Interested to see where they move. Switzerland has been considered the standard base of operations for privacy companies. Many companies including Proton used it as part of their branding.
> Jurisdictional safeguards have always been snake oil.
The lore persists from thepiratebay's stand against copyright enforcers (basing themselves from countries like Sweden)?
> the IC is literally chartered to grab things from servers in countries like Switzerland
tbf, even if Switzerland might not be it, just like tax havens, there has to be colo havens? Before the AI hype, VCs (I mean, engs) did try to ram down web3 / decentralised tech (like helium, golem, storj/filecoin), but I guess those didn't catch on with these mainstream VPN/privacy types.
The best colo haven if you're worried about US IC interference is the US. As tptacek noted above, things like due process apply to the US government's interactions with US entities. There are entire slices of the US IC apparatus whose lens is pointed internationally and where far fewer protections apply.
Is there due process for people being accused of terrorism, treason, etc.?
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I love Bitcoin and Monero, I love VPNs and tor and i2p and e2ee and FDE and plausible deniability and kill switches and all other manner of privacy tech.
None of this needed or benefitted from shitcoin integration.
Is sealand still a thing?
Could be, but getting a fiber drop and 100kw of power would be ... something else
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Probably a pretty good indication that the law will pass. Sad.
I've always said,"if you have to say something about yourself, it's probably not true" this applies here I believe.
Even more ironic is how few actual legal protections are afforded to foreign nationals: the majority of Switzerland-based service users such as PM. They actually do not deserve respect due to blatant abuse of this tired and wrong motif to sell ineffectual products.
What's ineffectual in Proton products? Could you please elaborate, as I'm considering moving to their suite?
Personally, and I have no relation to OP, there was no compelling security advantage for me. Email has no security guarantees unless you use PGP and I don’t know anyone who uses PGP. If someone wants to read my at rest mail they are going to compel me to hand over my keys anyway. And I think the best security policy when it comes to file services is: don’t.
And on top of that I need to back up my email to my offline storage and doing that with their proprietary stuff is a pain.
In the end I just moved to Fastmail and use it as a simple IMAP/SMTP service. Emails I don’t need any more are archived to offline folders in TB.
My entire public cloud exposure is literally one imap mailbox (with 11 emails in it) and 1 static html file in fastmail’s public web service infra. Oh and separate DNS/domain provider.
Not OP, but think twice. They make it extremely difficult to downgrade/withdraw once you chose a plan. Their hardware is actually not in the Switzerland either.
Last time I was looking for a preferably european mail host for a new project I looked at Proton but they did not seem to have support for transactional mail.
In the end I settled on Zoho, not European , but not US either.
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