Notices by Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)

@mluisbrown @a @ethanz

Oh for absolute fuck’s sake

Since this thread gain a little traction, I should clarify:

Proton Mail has done some good technical work AFAICT. I appreciate the effort to make E2EE more usable and more broadly accessible. I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to blur the boundary between “E2EE” and “not E2EE” as their product does, but respect for the heavy lifting they’ve done.

I’m not saying their product is a total hoax or anything! I’m just saying that •in practice•, the actual benefits aren’t as large as you might assume.

@nazokiyoubinbou
Yeesh. I’ve seen plenty of instances of police flaunting their impunity by engaging in gratuitously awful driving, but your story is next-level.

They do break every rule, and I think even “they just don’t care” is being too kind to them. They •do• care, it’s on purpose, and they want you to see it and know that you can do nothing. Police officers think their job is first and foremost about asserting their own power.

@PaulDavisTheFirst
Good point. Even in those situations where it’s just •obvious• that the driver is at fault — pulling out suddenly into traffic from a parking lot, say — the design of the vehicle can play a non-obvious role in encouraging or preventing the driver error.

@a @mluisbrown @ethanz
Exactly so. And furthermore, if you swap out “CCP” for a fill-in-the-blank, then what you said is undoubtedly true of FaceBook and X as well. But somehow congress isn’t moving to ban them.

The threat is real. The legislative play has nothing to do with the threat.

@henno @pixelfed

Yeah, that bit isn’t factual history; it’s A-level Zuck trolling

This letter from @pixelfed is petty and snide and gratuitously insulting to Mark Zuckerberg and I 100% endorse it
https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/113849098386232034

@nazokiyoubinbou

If police •actually• were what our society pretends they are, they’d be some of the best drivers on the road, models of safety and diligence about the law. Instead, they’re frequently the worst.

That thing where a driver does something dangerous, and you notice their car is •already• damaged in exactly the way that the accident they nearly caused would have damaged it

@CStamp @StillIRise1963 @mfennvt
I’m still hoping for a biblically time lightning strike during some public appearance.

@jennyjenjen @schwa
Ugh, what a headache. Glad I could give you a chuckle, at least!

Never mind that that cuts against the whole narrative that's being used to sell AI: that people can, irrespective of skill, access immense amounts of knowledge in a conversational and context-aware fashion.

When that pipe dream fails to materialize, they just invent a new buzzword to explain away the abject failure of AI to do anything bloody useful.

@jennyjenjen @schwa
There is one I really like: the off switch.

@tobinbaker
The Proton CEO made posts about how Dems were too corporate, praised JD Vance and said Republicans are the best hope to rein in big tech or some crap along those lines. Deleted posts but not before torches and pitchforks were out.

@lispi314
CEO made posts about how Dems were too corporate, praised JD Vance and said Republicans are the best hope to rein in big tech or some crap along those lines. Deleted posts but not before torches and pitchforks were out.

@helge @fluchtkapsel
Larger point stands, but:

> This is like saying Signal is bolted on IPv4

That’s a bit of a strawman. IPv4 isn’t a text messaging protocol. There’s not a default version of Signal-like functionality on IPv4.

The problem with email is that there •is• a de facto default, and it’s insecure. Thus the change friction.

I mean, this was the case with https, and it took how long for https to become the new de facto default?? And that was (I think) an easier problem.

@Tutanota @heymarkreeves @inthehands I have one: what protections do you offer to your users against "Five Eyes"?

@fluchtkapsel
As other replies point out, there’s already S/MIME and GPG.

The thing is:

- Any E2EE is a pain, wrecks UX, and most people don’t care enough to put up with it
- Overcoming the UX challenges is a massive tech + design + org lift
- Users don’t care enough and large players have strong incentives against

So, as usual, it’s not just smart people and the right tech; it’s social systems too.

@misc
It really, really does.

One difference here maybe is that if Proton was previously trustworthy and had stored incoming emails encrypted, then a later compromise only exposes messages received from that point forward and not for all time. That’s not nothing. But again, seems like kind of weak sauce to me. If you need that kind of security, use something like Signal or just keep it offline altogether.

@misc
It’s not just that Google and MS and Apple has them — it’s that •Proton• has them if they came from outside. Their E2EE is opt-in for both sender and received; if a sender doesn’t initiate it encrypted (which no other provider will do by default) then Proton gets it in plaintext too.