A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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For those who think it is an AD, it isn’t. I just like Skiff so I made a post about it to see what people from the privacy sub think of it, clearly and without much explanation most of you don’t like it. I genuinely thought it was a good company, now I am not sure anymore without knowing why. I would have loved more explainations about why is it so bad.
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I just made an account to check, it seems to be a bit “too good to be true” in terms of features, and raises a few red flags otherwise.
They give you a free tier where you can use your own domain, they have apps for all major platforms, and the web app is quite pushy (that’s the red flags): you have a list of tasks to do in order to get $10 credit for each task, like importing emails from gmail, downloading the app, etc (all those tasks carry a risk, privacy wise, depending on their code).
Given this behavior and the fact that the platform is from California, it reeks of investor and VC money, and I really wonder what’s their business plan, if they really do what they advertise. There’s a reason every platform that has solid encryption and respects privacy is either a donation based platform, pushing for donations (e.g. signal), or a paid platform with a pretty restricted free tier (or no free tier at all).
Personally I’m gonna close the account and not come back, I’m a bit weirded out, but I wouldn’t bet my bottom dollar that they are ill intended either…
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We don’t know what it is, but there is history on Lemmy of them listing out every feature, asking I’d anyone used it as they didn’t. Why woupd anyone do that? More blatant in the past, but worth being on guard against them.
Plus advertising e2e encrypted emaill which is impossible unless recipient is same service.
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Oh I know. It is your call. I’ve not seen much evidence of tutanova/proton Lemmy adverts. This service is quite new in comparison and there is clearly some astroturfing on lemmy. We don’t know how good or bad they are tbh. The fact they are pushing it rather than relying on word of mouth is a little sketchy.
Whether it is deleted or not, I’ll at least call out advertising so people are aware rather than being led to believe it is recommended.
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yet another fake privacy initiative. this post is clearly an ad
I consider marketing something as “for free thinkers” as a huge red flag.
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Looks interesting. The first glance it looks like “Yet another company trying to make Email what it isn’t”, which means breaking all compatibility with existing mechanisms (e.g. IMAP) at cost of getting locked-in into their own ecosystem (unless you pay premium and enable IMAP back like Proton does).
This is why while I want companies like Proton and Tutanota succeed, I don’t use their email products for business purposes.
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the day I don’t find a provider with IMAP support is the day I’ll leave email for good. You won’t force me to use your absurdly bloated and full of telemetry web clients or your incompatible encryption.
OpenPGP + NeoMutt has been my email workflow for 10 years now.
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I didn’t mean this specific one. I don’t know anything about Skiff other than this post is a sketchy camouflaged ad for them.
If they supported IMAP maybe I would look further, but that’s my very first requisite that they didn’t meet.
Probably an ad, but much more subtle if so. The old ones were so blatant. :)
What makes you do it with a smile? What does it give you that proton or tutanota doesn’t?
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What does a whitepaper have to do with cryptocurrency?
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Whitepaper is just a different term for a technical documentation[1] and has literally nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Your reasoning in your initial post doesn’t make any sense what so ever. I guarantee most of the companies you mentioned, if not all, published white papers for various topics in their past. I can only repeat myself, white papers have absolutely nothing to do with crypto currency. Just as one example. Check the Signal protocol[2] Wikipedia page and search for whitepaper.
It’s ok to not know what a white paper is but then don’t start your posts with “Looked pretty interesting, until I saw the “read whitepaper” button.”.
That being said, where in the skiff white paper did you find crypto currency? Admittedly I didn’t read all or even most of it but a simple search for “currency”, “blockchain” or even “chain” doesn’t return any results. I really hope you don’t talk about the word “crypto”, cause that has an entirely different meaning in that context.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol
*edit: Removed some unnecessary inflammatory language.
Thank you, soldier, for sparing me wasting time on crypto bullshit.
I wanted to try this but saw crypto crap. Nope, can’t trust them
Where?
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@whale I wonder if their drive still hosts on IPFS. While most crypto is a crock of shit, IPFS actually seems like a legitimate use case for building out distributed encrypted data storage, kind of like TOR for storage. Kind of a shame they were shooting themselves in the foot for many users by mentioning the buzz words.
Eh, anyway, I’m not trying it.
@visnudeva @MayonnaiseArch @Lojcs
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Apparently people dont know that whitepapers were not invented by Satoshi 😂
bitcoin.pdf was the first time many people first heard the term whitepaper, I’m afraid.
Never heard of it, am suspicious.
Also, those icons in the preview image look like an abstracted Peter Griffin.
“Lois, look: I’m icons now! Hehehehehehehehe!”
Lol
I want the drugs you are on
Talk to your doctor to see if Imagination™ is right for you!
Is that it’s name? Awesome
IDK, I’ve overdosed on Imagination™ and the lines separating reality from fantasy are just gone now: Maybe it was all just some crazy fever dream.
Fun unrelated fact: It’s is just a contraction of it and is, its would be what you’d use to show ownership (no apostrophe) because English is wacky like that.
Oh no the radom dude online who speaks another language made a quick mistake. Better make sure to correct him! Why do people always get a boner from grammatics? Its ridiculous! (hehe)
Ok fine, don’t learn anything.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t even know English was your second language: You write better than many native speakers, don’t get discouraged it wasn’t my intent to offend.
Oh, that’s what it’s! I’ve been wondering for a while.
“No, not like that!”
-English
Switched a while back from proton to skiff and loving it. Also the send emails later feature is great.
What are big differences between the 2
I also think it is great, there isn’t so many companies to choose from and after trying many of them I chose this one and I noticed they are continually improvit their product.
Would you mind telling me why you switched?
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You shouldn’t be using email if you need to encrypt it. The only reason to use these kind of services is to escape corporate spying.
Exactly
Also, registrar is Cloudflare and it’s hosted from the US.
Signals registrar is Markmonitor and is hosted from the US. Should everyone stop using signal?
yeah, phone number and centralization makes it no good. XMPP it is.
Not everyone, but lots.
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I think it allows syncing without requiring a central node, that’s how AnyType seems to use it.
I think it’s mostly about the fact that the mail is encrypted after being received by the Skiff mail server.
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You can choose between Skiff storage or IPFS, IPFS is a decentralized file storage system, which means that there is no central authority controlling the system, making it more secure than traditional centralized file storage systems. IPFS uses a number of security features, such as encryption and hashing, to protect files, making it a secure way to store sensitive information.
I don’t know about email encryption except for what they say.
They call copy and paste are called move and duplicate.
As I said their app are not perfect yet but they are improving very fast, what is missing is being fixed as we speak.
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Not really. Maybe more available but almost certainly less secure compared to files just sitting on a single server somewhere in terms of data being accessible to attackers.
People need to stop trying to make email as a medium private outside of choosing providers that don’t scan or snoop or offer unauthorized (by which I mean YOU do not consent to them sharing with ANYBODY or ORGANIZATION) externalized access or monetize on that which you send/receive/retain.
Don’t send an email unless you are aware and consent to it being preserved and shared endlessly with zero input or consideration for your view of that.
Mails being encrypted end-to-end would obviously be ideal, but yeah. How many people outside of our privacy bubble use a private service, and/or have PGP set up? How many even know what PGP is?
The messages that sit in my inbox being encrypted and not being accessed by the provider I’m using is realistically the best I can hope for.
I’ve been told multiple times that having a @protonmail email makes me look like a conspiracy theorist, once in an interview. Privacy is way more niche than I’d hope for.
In an interview?
Glad they let you know their ignorance on security up front.
Seriously, do they leave their doors open for anyone to walk in, or do they use badge readers like everyone else?
Some companies don’t see privacy as security. They want to know your background, when you punch in/ punch out, if you’re the type of person to leak secrets over the “dark web”.
Some also don’t believe in privacy at all, they believe in contract. When choosing a platform they want to know if they can sue them for breaching an NDA.
I did not receive an offer from that specific interview but yeah, I admit it was odd and didn’t inspire trust so I wouldn’t have accepted anyway.
Heh that’s why you use less popular privacy emails so they can’t make the connection ;)
“Why don’t you use Gmail like a normal person”
Or simply being flagged as spam because of all the phishing training that goes on in big companies.
PGP to me is literally only of any interest as a quick way to encrypt anything/files/documents (in a preferable format to zip or archives etc) in a keyfile type fashion where you need the credential and password for any given decryption and it can be done so quickly if you have a good app.
I would never use it for like email stuff, if we’re talking about messaging its gotta be Signal or Threema or Matrix(Element, Session) etc. Maybe Olvid or SimpleX is interesting too but I’m open to a larger discussion of messaging and the available platforms and discussion of the nitpickier deets.