This law change died in the "Vernehmlassung" which is early in the process. It's dead with opposition from all sides of the political spectrum. It had no chance.
This is what constitutions are for. When you have the support, you install a constitutional protection that says the government can't do this. Repealing the protection requires the same super-majority needed to pass it, so changing the law isn't just a matter of the tyrants needing to get back to 51% from 49%, they have to get from 33% to 67%.
Then you layer these protections against multiple levels of government so they'd all have to be repealed together by separate legislatures before the government is allowed to do it, discouraging the attempt.
Hah, I was going to say that sounded needlessly heavy handed.
Then I checked what the Netherlands does and found that changing the constitution doesn’t merely require you to get a majority, it also requires you to survive at least one election and keep that (super)majority before you can even begin.
You’re arguing for massive changes to a very unique country with the oldest democracy in Europe. Unless you’re Swiss, or have credentials related to Swiss law, I don’t think you’re arguing anything realistic.
Countries can be as unique as they want to be, but they still need a system for preventing authoritarianism. The existing system is fine if it's effective and not fine if it isn't.
Switzerland has been preventing authoritarianism since before it was cool. Like, for 700 years. (With a brief interruption when they were invaded and overthrown by Napoleon.) So their system for the first 600 of those 700 years was the best system for preventing authoritarianism; a lot of it survives today.
Switzerland also has amassed hundreds of constitutional amendments over that time. So perhaps the ability to frequently pass amendments has been instrumental to their success, and they should be on the lookout for new opportunities to bolster their democracy, such as constitutional safeguards against certain forms of state surveillance.
Requiring 50% in a referendum is different from and safer than requiring 50% in a parliament vote. A parliament can go against the people that elected them.
Countries that don't regularly have popular votes face the challenge that any vote is considered as a vote of confidence in their current government. It basically only reflects the popularity of the government and people do not evaluate the face value, the core of the issue. Having a real democracy takes a lot of training and effort.
I'd argue that this is unnecessary in Switzerland due to the existing referendum system.
After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.
The way authoritarianism work is they pick some enemy to rally against and convince people that the ends of stopping that evil justify the means of becoming evil. The problem with this is that it can garner 51% support within the population for temporary periods of time, so you need a system that can prevent it even in that environment. This typically means that violations of fundamental rights should require significantly more than 51% popular support or require changes in public sentiment to stick for a period of time before they can make foundational changes (e.g. only a third of the US Senate being up for election every two years).
Or if there was a law clarifying not to tread on privacy if that’s what the population has latest indicated, this kind of effort wouldn’t always need yo be wasted.
Asking the unpaid population to put in free labour all the time seems like a deterrent.
And then you make it so when the tyrants do get back to 51% that they can just ignore the constitution instead. And might as well make sure there are only two major political parties so even though the tyrants ignore the constitution, that the other 49% will stay busy stuffing their pockets with foreign donations.
To prevent the government from ignoring the constitution, create remedies in each of the other branches of government. The US doesn't make this as strong as it should be. Constitutional challenges in the judiciary get shut down as a result of standing or sovereign immunity when that ought not to happen, and there should be a better mechanism for states to challenge federal constitutional violations.
The two-party system in the US is caused by first past the post voting. Use score voting instead. Not IRV, not some other nonsense, a rated voting system that removes the structural incentive to avoid spoilers by limiting the number of parties.
"The existing system isn't perfect" is why you improve it, not why you give up.
The Indian Supreme Court introduced the Basic Structure Doctrine in 1970, allowing the judiciary to overrule constitutional amendments if they are found to contradict the "basic structure" of the constitution.
It's original purpose, if I understand correctly, was to guarantee that fundamental rights were an essential part of the constitution and couldn't be amended away.
Wikipedia says that multiple countries appear to have adopted the principle: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Uganda.
No it's not. Constitutions are the bones of a republic. They are the framework that gives the government power and that checks that power. Letting it mess with that too much or too often is bad.
Constitutions should be simple. They should delegate very little power to governments and focus mostly on constraining those governments. They should be changed very rarely.
Adaptable government with changing scopes belongs at lower levels of governance (mostly very local) or nowhere.
Either the people living in the country at the time rule (directly or through representatives), or its not a democracy, but (if they are ruled by the people, or their representatives, of the past) a thanatocracy.
Proton being about as brave as putting an apple on one's head and a blindfold on....in front of an infant with the parts of a Glock in front of them and no ammunition
What a bunch of performative nonsense on their behalf.
> Threema and Proton
In the daily news of 'SRF', Jean-Louis Biberstein, the deputy head of the federal postal and telecommunications service, said that the requirements for service providers are not tightened, but merely specified. A company like Threema would have the same obligations as before after the revision.
Threema contradicts this in a statement from the end of April. The Vüpf revision would force the company to abandon the principle of "only collecting as few data as technically required".
(From auto translation of report about this already failing to proceed.)
Is Federal Post the entity or is it a person, or a group in Swiss government seeking to take authority over information?
Seems like the translation failed to translate the job title properly...
This government page https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss says that dude is in charge of the "Legal Affairs and Controlling" division of the "Post and Telecommunications Surveillance Service", and it continues to describe what that division does.
The contents of the emails are encrypted so you have a normal login plus a key to unencrypt your email locally. They save your encrypted email conyents and your login but not the key and they also don't log your access (I'm assuming here from reading the article).
> 2.5 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our Terms of Service (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against non-compliant or fraudulent activities. If you enable authentication logging for your Account or voluntarily participate in Proton's advanced security program, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account. The authentication logs feature records login attempts to your Account and does not track product-specific activity, such as VPN activity.
See also section 3, "Network traffic that may go through third-parties."
To me the value prospect of Proton falls down even before that - how can e-mail ever be a secure medium of communication if only one side of the conversation is secure, given how ubiquitous Google and Outlook are in the space?
This is a valid point, but emails between Proton users (or other users of PGP) will not be accessible. And, presumably, it will be harder to see your email if you use Proton, than if you used Google/Outlook if your adversary had to look through everyone else's email to find who corresponded with you.
And they will go where? To the Netherlands or Sweden? EU regulation applies there. They would have to go to Seychelles or Panama, but their servers would obviously still have to be elsewhere.
Switzerland would be useless if it can't remain a safe haven.
Hot take but it makes sense to get rid of privacy under certain circumstances. What if we created a political system where you can trust the government to do a good, honest job. Privacy is needed because goals of the government aren't always aligned with goals of the society, but what if that wasn't the case.
The population may trust the government now, but totalitarian regimes are returning to fashion and love when they can skip the data collecting bureaucracy and go straight into building or offshoring their gulags.
> "This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia," said Yen.
They can go anywhere in Europe, since that type of surveillance seems to be illegal
The issue is that countries may not care. The Danish government famously refuses to comply with EU verdicts that makes logging all phone calls and spying on text messages illegal. The Danish supreme court and the European Court of Human Rights have agreed with the government that "it's fine" in a "please think of the children"-moment.
That seems to be a contradiction. If the courts (the body tasked with deciding what is and isn't illegal) agree with the government than by definition its not illegal.
There was a whole special interest group set up to handle the law suites: https://ulovliglogning.dk/ all the law suites are on their page, but in Danish. One of the previous ministers of justice flat said he didn't care, as long as it help catch "the bad guys". This a guy who was the leader of the Conservatives. A party that brands itself as the party of law and justice, except when they don't like the verdicts apparently.
You can also read about the reaction to the verdict in 2017 (again in Danish): https://www.version2.dk/artikel/bombe-under-ti-aars-dansk-te... where the EU deems the Danish logging unlawful, and the police and the government reacts by ignoring the verdict and wanting even more logging. There is a bunch of followup and related links at the bottom. The site is a tech news site owned by the Danish Engineers Union.
It's somewhere between an over-interpretation of EU rules and a misunderstand of the usefulness of the collected data, but the end result is that every single person in Denmark is basically logged and tracked 24/7, unless they go completely offline.
> Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than putting it up?
Probably not for Starlink. You’ve got mass-manufactured satellites in a constellation launched on a reüsable, profitable platform on one hand. And on the other hand you have experimental expendable ASAT weapons.
As a Norwegian I would not feel safe hosting such here.
Of the ~10 parties with a chance of a seat at the parlament, absolutely none have any clue what so ever when it comes to IT security matters.
The major parties have multiple times attemted to push egregious laws like collecting all internet metadata in our country, and storing it for years. They argued it wouldn't be a risk because only authorized personel would have access...
Denmark is a little under 6 million people, there are currently 12 parties eligible for election. That not really uncommon, the Netherlands also have a fairly large number of parties.
It seems more crazy to believe that two, three or four parties can represent 80 million or more people. The truth is that many of the parties in countries like Norway and Denmark are all fairly similar. They mostly agree on the basics. Six of the twelve parties in Denmark are, in my mind, variations on Social Democrats. I'm sure many would disagree, but they vary on issues, that in countries like the US, would be considered implementation details or narrow topics.
Norwegians seem to me, an outsider, quite cohesive as a society. Much more so than just about any place i’ve spent time in. But they also seem to allow for a fair bit of diversity in certain things, politics being one — but only within certain parameters, so I suspect the differences between the parties are more around specific issues up for debate than big ideological / identity concerns, as they are in the US, for example.
I somehow missed them. Thanks for the information. I’m afraid that the lack of public prices and an invitation to contact their salesman means it’s as expensive as it could be, but I’m sure Proton can afford.
Having worked in the hosting and colo business in Scandinavia, it's normally not cheap. It's been a few years, but you're starting around €500 per month (in 2016 I think we could get you started at €350) and frequently you'll need to take at least a quarter of a rack.
Most hosting companies doesn't even really want colocation anymore, it's sort a niche product.
That's normal for colocation. It's not a jellybean service. It's something you have to individually negotiate with your supplier. We've been spoiled by being able to rent virtual servers that are all the same within one provider. Colocation is not all the same. ("Jellybean" is what electronics people call basic parts that are commodities, as opposed to, say, highly specialized integrated circuits. Some say it comes from when electronic part stores would have them in jellybean jars. You could just grab one out of the jar because the individual differences didn't really matter.)
There are some places that have jellybean colocation offers (e.g. Hetzner does - notice their normal business is jellybean servers and they run their own data centers, so it looks like a no-brainer to fit colocation into that business model), but it only covers a small portion of colocation possibilities.
But typically colocation is just one of those products where every deal is fully custom. That's just how it is. So you have to buy enough of the product to make it worth the salesman's and engineer's time, meaning at least a couple hundred dollars a month worth.
By the way, the same is true for business internet access. If you pay the cheapest price for internet (as every residential user does), you get the same basic service as everyone else. But if you're willing to spedn enough money, your ISP will negotiate with you. Though I hear it sometimes takes some prodding to get past the "residential area == ordinary residential connection" assumption (and in many cases their network may not support certain upgrades). And it's true for business transactions in general. You want five screws, grab the best match off the shelf. You want five million screws, we'll make them to your exact specifications boss. (Also related: If you owe the bank a hundred billion dollars, the bank has a problem.)
There's several that don't have immediate exposure to the US, like Bulk, Telenor, Blix, Orange Business Service (former Basefarm). Most of these are in or around Oslo.
It's a country where if the Prince decides he doesn't like you, well, he can bring the entire administrative arm of the state down upon you. It's basically a European version of the UAE – not a great place to be.
They had a popular vote to decide if the prince could overrule the democratic government, and the people voted that they prince could. seems to work for them, they hare rich and happy
I feel like you need to complete this thought. Australia has an independent judiciary, and look what they did to tech privacy. So I'm not seeing how it follows that an absolute monarchy is a hindrance.
This is very specious reasoning. At least in Australia if you have a legal problem there is a full court system set up that can help you – Liechstenstein is basically just a state owned by a single man attached to a bank (LGT) owned by the same man.
Australia's "full court system" completely failed to stop "Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018", where by people can be compelled to install security backdoors at the behest of law enforcement.
It looks like Prince Hans-Adams is much more able to protect peoples civil liberties than Australias westminster system.
Mullvad operates out of Sweden. Unlike proton, mullvad doesnt have to respond to court orders. proton gives up user info thousands a year its right on their transparency page.
Mullvad stores account (kyc) + payment information in line with Swedish tax laws for (I think) 7 years.
What Mullvad apparently don't have are data-plane logs. But then, surveillance laws mandate forceful & secret compliance in certain cases (Mullvad may be exempt but who knows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018290)
All entities with known physical addresses have to respond to court orders, or men with guns will break into those addresses and kidnap whoever is supposed to have responded.
Then why do they need to spy on people? I mean, I agree with you. The center parties typically aren't persecuting massive amounts of people for their beliefs and "thought crimes", but they do still seem a little to happy to spy on people.
Probably more relevant in multi-party parliamentary systems, but someone pointed out that: if the left wing parties and the liberales agree on a policy, you should probably just implement it immediately. (Said about the Danish Red–Green Alliance and the Liberal Alliance, an eco-socialist party and a right-wing liberal party respectably).
Politics isn’t a line. Center in most countries is “fine with whatever the government tells me” from forced medical experimentation to genocide.
You’re right tho in that it does seem like people who reject the lies their government tells them may be slightly more likely to say things that upset you on the internet (since I’m guessing that’s what you mean by persicution)
I was using persecution as a response to the parent post, which I took to mean that the far left and right are more likely to persecute political opponents and expect persecution themselves, so they are reluctant to approve of government surveillance out of fear that they are on the receiving.
> Center in most countries is “fine with whatever the government tells me” from forced medical experimentation to genocide.
This is a strawman, plain and simple. Calling the political center of any country "fine with genocide" isn't an argument, it's a smear. I'm a centrist democrat, I'm not fine with either of those things and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who is. You can disagree with moderates like me, but painting them as compliant with atrocities is dishonest and lazy.
> Politics isn’t a line
No disagreement here, sometimes it's a horseshoe and you're proving the theory true.
Their CEO seems to like trump, they are definitely not "the good guys".
The way they market their services as "at rest encrypted" is also kind of only half true, since their emails are only partially encrypted, message bodies are, but subject line and senders are not stored in an encrypted fashion and have been shared with the authorities before.
Using percentages is illegitimate. It's frog boiling.
Governments lean on large providers like Microsoft to not implement strong technological privacy protections because they want to invade everyone's privacy, and those companies go along because they want to get government contracts or curry favor with government regulators, or because they want to invade your privacy themselves.
Then anyone privacy-conscious abandons them before any abuses are revealed because they've seen this movie before and know what's coming next. But that includes criminal organizations, so now for a transient period of time the competing services that still protect privacy have a disproportionate number of criminals. This is then used as an excuse to shut them down or force them to stop protecting anyone's privacy.
That's when the real abuses start, because the privacy-protecting services have been suppressed as "only used by criminals" and once the general public has lost the ability to switch, there is no longer competitive pressure on the incumbents to not betray their now-captive user base.
You can try to prevent this by getting people to switch to the privacy-protecting services ahead of time, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable to accept the consent-manufacturing tactic as legitimate either.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. Kennedy.
Yet we cant even endure tariffs meant to stop war.
essentially USA needs Taiwan to not be invaded by china, with taiwan in chinese hands, even korea will have to do very hard thinking about western direction. which will be disastrous for USA, EU.
Taiwan ramped up production of shells. Czech republic is buying shells from them to send to ukraine ( "czech ammunitions initiative" ) so taiwan is able sustain expanded manufacturing capability needed for china taiwan conflict.
so czechs are praised for this by other NATO members because essentially, chinese proxy war is making taiwan more secure against china...
EDIT:
look up that part of russia between two inland seas, where georgia and azerbaijan are connecting russia with iran.
that part is so important that russia had to invade crimea, wage russo-georgian war just to be able to secure that part / land connection with iran.
ukrainian territories currently occupied by russia are "just" AA/AD zone for protection of rostov-on-don which is main railroad, seashipping hub for that iran russia connection land part.
Switzerland paid restitutions and changed it's laws which can't be said for crimes committed by many others. While the past should not be white washed it's been 80 years now.
A better question is how many banks does Switzerland still have? UBS is threatening to leave if they need to meet the new capitalization requirements the government wants.
I'm sure UBS will try to claim that they didn't aquire the liabilities of CS just like Bayer and Dow try too with their acquisitions. However since this acquisition was basically forced upon UBS they would probably have a much better chance in court...
Bringing up Nazis, terrorists, and “the children” is always relevant to privacy detractors who think it’s suspicious for regular people to not want to be spied on.
Not to be pedantic, but Donald Trump received around 77 million votes in the 2024 presidential election, which would be around 23% of the then population, I think.
This law change died in the "Vernehmlassung" which is early in the process. It's dead with opposition from all sides of the political spectrum. It had no chance.
https://www.inside-it.ch/vupf-revision-faellt-in-der-vernehm...
It’s odd people don’t push for laws to prevent for these kinds of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.
The law can't bind future lawmakers. That's a common feature of every legal system.
Any legal system can pass a law saying "we revoke this previous law".
This is what constitutions are for. When you have the support, you install a constitutional protection that says the government can't do this. Repealing the protection requires the same super-majority needed to pass it, so changing the law isn't just a matter of the tyrants needing to get back to 51% from 49%, they have to get from 33% to 67%.
Then you layer these protections against multiple levels of government so they'd all have to be repealed together by separate legislatures before the government is allowed to do it, discouraging the attempt.
Hah, I was going to say that sounded needlessly heavy handed.
Then I checked what the Netherlands does and found that changing the constitution doesn’t merely require you to get a majority, it also requires you to survive at least one election and keep that (super)majority before you can even begin.
In Switzerland you can change the constitution with popular votes. That only requires for 50% of the voters to agree and half of the cantons.
Then get half the voters to agree to make it two thirds. After you put the other protections in, naturally.
You’re arguing for massive changes to a very unique country with the oldest democracy in Europe. Unless you’re Swiss, or have credentials related to Swiss law, I don’t think you’re arguing anything realistic.
Countries can be as unique as they want to be, but they still need a system for preventing authoritarianism. The existing system is fine if it's effective and not fine if it isn't.
Switzerland has been preventing authoritarianism since before it was cool. Like, for 700 years. (With a brief interruption when they were invaded and overthrown by Napoleon.) So their system for the first 600 of those 700 years was the best system for preventing authoritarianism; a lot of it survives today.
Switzerland also has amassed hundreds of constitutional amendments over that time. So perhaps the ability to frequently pass amendments has been instrumental to their success, and they should be on the lookout for new opportunities to bolster their democracy, such as constitutional safeguards against certain forms of state surveillance.
Requiring 50% in a referendum is different from and safer than requiring 50% in a parliament vote. A parliament can go against the people that elected them.
It's an additional check. That's good, but it isn't always sufficient, because sometimes you can convince 51% of people to do something wrong.
If you can convince 51% of the population to do something wrong than you're already screwed and have much bigger issues to worry about.
Brexit?
Countries that don't regularly have popular votes face the challenge that any vote is considered as a vote of confidence in their current government. It basically only reflects the popularity of the government and people do not evaluate the face value, the core of the issue. Having a real democracy takes a lot of training and effort.
It sounds so easy to do
I'd argue that this is unnecessary in Switzerland due to the existing referendum system.
After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.
The way authoritarianism work is they pick some enemy to rally against and convince people that the ends of stopping that evil justify the means of becoming evil. The problem with this is that it can garner 51% support within the population for temporary periods of time, so you need a system that can prevent it even in that environment. This typically means that violations of fundamental rights should require significantly more than 51% popular support or require changes in public sentiment to stick for a period of time before they can make foundational changes (e.g. only a third of the US Senate being up for election every two years).
Or if there was a law clarifying not to tread on privacy if that’s what the population has latest indicated, this kind of effort wouldn’t always need yo be wasted.
Asking the unpaid population to put in free labour all the time seems like a deterrent.
And then you make it so when the tyrants do get back to 51% that they can just ignore the constitution instead. And might as well make sure there are only two major political parties so even though the tyrants ignore the constitution, that the other 49% will stay busy stuffing their pockets with foreign donations.
These are independent problems.
To prevent the government from ignoring the constitution, create remedies in each of the other branches of government. The US doesn't make this as strong as it should be. Constitutional challenges in the judiciary get shut down as a result of standing or sovereign immunity when that ought not to happen, and there should be a better mechanism for states to challenge federal constitutional violations.
The two-party system in the US is caused by first past the post voting. Use score voting instead. Not IRV, not some other nonsense, a rated voting system that removes the structural incentive to avoid spoilers by limiting the number of parties.
"The existing system isn't perfect" is why you improve it, not why you give up.
That's how you ossify.
If preventing the government from abusing the population is ossification then the government should be made entirely out of bones.
Constitutions are amended all the time. The French even have a proces for reboots of the Republic.
These are goods things.
The Indian Supreme Court introduced the Basic Structure Doctrine in 1970, allowing the judiciary to overrule constitutional amendments if they are found to contradict the "basic structure" of the constitution.
It's original purpose, if I understand correctly, was to guarantee that fundamental rights were an essential part of the constitution and couldn't be amended away.
Wikipedia says that multiple countries appear to have adopted the principle: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Uganda.
No it's not. Constitutions are the bones of a republic. They are the framework that gives the government power and that checks that power. Letting it mess with that too much or too often is bad.
Constitutions should be simple. They should delegate very little power to governments and focus mostly on constraining those governments. They should be changed very rarely.
Adaptable government with changing scopes belongs at lower levels of governance (mostly very local) or nowhere.
Constitutions that are easy to amend are basically universally a piece of toilet paper.
An existing law can be different to change, than where non exists and its greenfield for something half baked to roll in.
Either the people living in the country at the time rule (directly or through representatives), or its not a democracy, but (if they are ruled by the people, or their representatives, of the past) a thanatocracy.
every law is temporal, until it gets re-written or killed outright
Think of the children
Thanks, I LOLed!
Proton being about as brave as putting an apple on one's head and a blindfold on....in front of an infant with the parts of a Glock in front of them and no ammunition
What a bunch of performative nonsense on their behalf.
Who sponsored this??
Best I could find as a non Swiss:
> Threema and Proton In the daily news of 'SRF', Jean-Louis Biberstein, the deputy head of the federal postal and telecommunications service, said that the requirements for service providers are not tightened, but merely specified. A company like Threema would have the same obligations as before after the revision. Threema contradicts this in a statement from the end of April. The Vüpf revision would force the company to abandon the principle of "only collecting as few data as technically required".
(From auto translation of report about this already failing to proceed.)
Is Federal Post the entity or is it a person, or a group in Swiss government seeking to take authority over information?
Seems like the translation failed to translate the job title properly...
This government page https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss says that dude is in charge of the "Legal Affairs and Controlling" division of the "Post and Telecommunications Surveillance Service", and it continues to describe what that division does.
Small logical question - How can proton deliver mail to you if it does not save anything ?
The contents of the emails are encrypted so you have a normal login plus a key to unencrypt your email locally. They save your encrypted email conyents and your login but not the key and they also don't log your access (I'm assuming here from reading the article).
They might log access in some circumstances, according to their privacy policy (https://proton.me/legal/privacy)
> 2.5 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our Terms of Service (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against non-compliant or fraudulent activities. If you enable authentication logging for your Account or voluntarily participate in Proton's advanced security program, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account. The authentication logs feature records login attempts to your Account and does not track product-specific activity, such as VPN activity.
See also section 3, "Network traffic that may go through third-parties."
To me the value prospect of Proton falls down even before that - how can e-mail ever be a secure medium of communication if only one side of the conversation is secure, given how ubiquitous Google and Outlook are in the space?
This is a valid point, but emails between Proton users (or other users of PGP) will not be accessible. And, presumably, it will be harder to see your email if you use Proton, than if you used Google/Outlook if your adversary had to look through everyone else's email to find who corresponded with you.
proton account to proton account.
> how can e-mail ever be a secure medium
Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.
I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.
And they will go where? To the Netherlands or Sweden? EU regulation applies there. They would have to go to Seychelles or Panama, but their servers would obviously still have to be elsewhere.
Switzerland would be useless if it can't remain a safe haven.
Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/a-dangero...
It was also Swedish EU commissioner who wants to ban end-to-end encrypted chats and brought various proposals to the EU for this.
> Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy
Generally, this is because Swedes trust the state.
Hot take but it makes sense to get rid of privacy under certain circumstances. What if we created a political system where you can trust the government to do a good, honest job. Privacy is needed because goals of the government aren't always aligned with goals of the society, but what if that wasn't the case.
Once you lose privacy, you can never get it back.
The population may trust the government now, but totalitarian regimes are returning to fashion and love when they can skip the data collecting bureaucracy and go straight into building or offshoring their gulags.
What does social democracy have to do with hating privacy?
The UK, US, Australia, and other capitalist flagships are all trying to do the same. Not to mention the Patriot Act.
"Crony capitalist", it's not actual capitalism when the government has its fingers and regulatioms in everyone's finances.
> "This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia," said Yen.
They can go anywhere in Europe, since that type of surveillance seems to be illegal
The issue is that countries may not care. The Danish government famously refuses to comply with EU verdicts that makes logging all phone calls and spying on text messages illegal. The Danish supreme court and the European Court of Human Rights have agreed with the government that "it's fine" in a "please think of the children"-moment.
That seems to be a contradiction. If the courts (the body tasked with deciding what is and isn't illegal) agree with the government than by definition its not illegal.
That's outrageous. Would you have a source for this?
There was a whole special interest group set up to handle the law suites: https://ulovliglogning.dk/ all the law suites are on their page, but in Danish. One of the previous ministers of justice flat said he didn't care, as long as it help catch "the bad guys". This a guy who was the leader of the Conservatives. A party that brands itself as the party of law and justice, except when they don't like the verdicts apparently.
You can also read about the reaction to the verdict in 2017 (again in Danish): https://www.version2.dk/artikel/bombe-under-ti-aars-dansk-te... where the EU deems the Danish logging unlawful, and the police and the government reacts by ignoring the verdict and wanting even more logging. There is a bunch of followup and related links at the bottom. The site is a tech news site owned by the Danish Engineers Union.
There's a Wikipedia page on what is being logged and retained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention#Denmark
It's somewhere between an over-interpretation of EU rules and a misunderstand of the usefulness of the collected data, but the end result is that every single person in Denmark is basically logged and tracked 24/7, unless they go completely offline.
What happened to the ideas of offshore data centers and seasteading and pirate radio? Is it time to bring those back (again)?
It was always stupid, because that is not how laws work.
only musk can save datacenters from reaches of earths governments.
by transporting every cargo to USA for thorough inspection before flight.
Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than putting it up?
The problem would be all the debris up there. Maybe destroying one satellite would destroy them all.
> Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than putting it up?
Probably not for Starlink. You’ve got mass-manufactured satellites in a constellation launched on a reüsable, profitable platform on one hand. And on the other hand you have experimental expendable ASAT weapons.
Is not changing BGP route cheaper than taking down a satanlite ? Sorry, satellite.
Norway has also been a popular destination for these types of services.
As a Norwegian I would not feel safe hosting such here.
Of the ~10 parties with a chance of a seat at the parlament, absolutely none have any clue what so ever when it comes to IT security matters.
The major parties have multiple times attemted to push egregious laws like collecting all internet metadata in our country, and storing it for years. They argued it wouldn't be a risk because only authorized personel would have access...
Sheer luck has twarted those attempts.
There are 5 million people living in Norway and you have 10 parties in the parliament? Talk about divided country.
Denmark is a little under 6 million people, there are currently 12 parties eligible for election. That not really uncommon, the Netherlands also have a fairly large number of parties.
It seems more crazy to believe that two, three or four parties can represent 80 million or more people. The truth is that many of the parties in countries like Norway and Denmark are all fairly similar. They mostly agree on the basics. Six of the twelve parties in Denmark are, in my mind, variations on Social Democrats. I'm sure many would disagree, but they vary on issues, that in countries like the US, would be considered implementation details or narrow topics.
A continuous spectrum is only divided if it has too few bins.
I assure you forcing everyone into one of two options results in way more division. You can probably imagine why.
This is quite normal in Europe.
E.g. there are currently 14 political parties with at least one seat in the UK Parliament - but most of them only have a very small number of seats.
This is fairly common for smaller parliamentary systems; you can think of it as a side effect of proportional representation.
Norwegians seem to me, an outsider, quite cohesive as a society. Much more so than just about any place i’ve spent time in. But they also seem to allow for a fair bit of diversity in certain things, politics being one — but only within certain parameters, so I suspect the differences between the parties are more around specific issues up for debate than big ideological / identity concerns, as they are in the US, for example.
If someone knows a Norwegian datacentre offering colocation, that has no connection to USA, please let me know.
I have no experience with them, so not a recommendation, but perhaps https://greenmountain.no?
They're owned by an israeli company nowadays fwiw
Oh, I missed that.
They deploy Pegasus from there or what would Israeli company need in there ?
Seems mostly to be a real-estate investment but the ownership structure is a bit opaque. Their DCs host some critical infrastructure for banks.
I somehow missed them. Thanks for the information. I’m afraid that the lack of public prices and an invitation to contact their salesman means it’s as expensive as it could be, but I’m sure Proton can afford.
Having worked in the hosting and colo business in Scandinavia, it's normally not cheap. It's been a few years, but you're starting around €500 per month (in 2016 I think we could get you started at €350) and frequently you'll need to take at least a quarter of a rack.
Most hosting companies doesn't even really want colocation anymore, it's sort a niche product.
That's normal for colocation. It's not a jellybean service. It's something you have to individually negotiate with your supplier. We've been spoiled by being able to rent virtual servers that are all the same within one provider. Colocation is not all the same. ("Jellybean" is what electronics people call basic parts that are commodities, as opposed to, say, highly specialized integrated circuits. Some say it comes from when electronic part stores would have them in jellybean jars. You could just grab one out of the jar because the individual differences didn't really matter.)
There are some places that have jellybean colocation offers (e.g. Hetzner does - notice their normal business is jellybean servers and they run their own data centers, so it looks like a no-brainer to fit colocation into that business model), but it only covers a small portion of colocation possibilities.
But typically colocation is just one of those products where every deal is fully custom. That's just how it is. So you have to buy enough of the product to make it worth the salesman's and engineer's time, meaning at least a couple hundred dollars a month worth.
By the way, the same is true for business internet access. If you pay the cheapest price for internet (as every residential user does), you get the same basic service as everyone else. But if you're willing to spedn enough money, your ISP will negotiate with you. Though I hear it sometimes takes some prodding to get past the "residential area == ordinary residential connection" assumption (and in many cases their network may not support certain upgrades). And it's true for business transactions in general. You want five screws, grab the best match off the shelf. You want five million screws, we'll make them to your exact specifications boss. (Also related: If you owe the bank a hundred billion dollars, the bank has a problem.)
There's several that don't have immediate exposure to the US, like Bulk, Telenor, Blix, Orange Business Service (former Basefarm). Most of these are in or around Oslo.
Lichtenstein is closer and uses the CHF.
But is an absolute monarchy (e.g. non-independent judiciary).
But it isn't.
To quote wikipedia: "Liechtenstein is a semi-constitutional monarchy".
It is probably as close as you get though in modern europe.
It's a country where if the Prince decides he doesn't like you, well, he can bring the entire administrative arm of the state down upon you. It's basically a European version of the UAE – not a great place to be.
They had a popular vote to decide if the prince could overrule the democratic government, and the people voted that they prince could. seems to work for them, they hare rich and happy
I feel like you need to complete this thought. Australia has an independent judiciary, and look what they did to tech privacy. So I'm not seeing how it follows that an absolute monarchy is a hindrance.
This is very specious reasoning. At least in Australia if you have a legal problem there is a full court system set up that can help you – Liechstenstein is basically just a state owned by a single man attached to a bank (LGT) owned by the same man.
Australia's "full court system" completely failed to stop "Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018", where by people can be compelled to install security backdoors at the behest of law enforcement.
It looks like Prince Hans-Adams is much more able to protect peoples civil liberties than Australias westminster system.
And their military defense is outsourced to Switzerland.
Mullvad operates out of Sweden. Unlike proton, mullvad doesnt have to respond to court orders. proton gives up user info thousands a year its right on their transparency page.
Correction:they do in fact have to respond to court orders, but they can't give any info as they simply do not have it.
Mullvad stores account (kyc) + payment information in line with Swedish tax laws for (I think) 7 years.
What Mullvad apparently don't have are data-plane logs. But then, surveillance laws mandate forceful & secret compliance in certain cases (Mullvad may be exempt but who knows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018290)
Proton isn’t giving up VPN users. It’s giving up mail users. There’s a huge legal difference.
All entities with known physical addresses have to respond to court orders, or men with guns will break into those addresses and kidnap whoever is supposed to have responded.
No more "Swiss-Privacy" then.
Title needs a dash after Google, otherwise it reads weirdly
Another day, another digital illiterate politician trying to regulate the digital world
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It seems to me that security and surveillance conscious folks tend to sit on either extreme of the spectrum
Because governments aren't persecuting people in the middle of the spectrum.
Being docile could be the definition of being in the middle of the spectrum
Being in the center of the political spectrum doesn't make you "docile." What a ridiculous notion.
Extremists love to make themselves as victims, and those on both sides hate moderates.
It's all bullshit of course.
I agree with you in that what I said might not be true for US politics
Then why do they need to spy on people? I mean, I agree with you. The center parties typically aren't persecuting massive amounts of people for their beliefs and "thought crimes", but they do still seem a little to happy to spy on people.
Probably more relevant in multi-party parliamentary systems, but someone pointed out that: if the left wing parties and the liberales agree on a policy, you should probably just implement it immediately. (Said about the Danish Red–Green Alliance and the Liberal Alliance, an eco-socialist party and a right-wing liberal party respectably).
Politics isn’t a line. Center in most countries is “fine with whatever the government tells me” from forced medical experimentation to genocide.
You’re right tho in that it does seem like people who reject the lies their government tells them may be slightly more likely to say things that upset you on the internet (since I’m guessing that’s what you mean by persicution)
I was using persecution as a response to the parent post, which I took to mean that the far left and right are more likely to persecute political opponents and expect persecution themselves, so they are reluctant to approve of government surveillance out of fear that they are on the receiving.
> Center in most countries is “fine with whatever the government tells me” from forced medical experimentation to genocide.
This is a strawman, plain and simple. Calling the political center of any country "fine with genocide" isn't an argument, it's a smear. I'm a centrist democrat, I'm not fine with either of those things and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who is. You can disagree with moderates like me, but painting them as compliant with atrocities is dishonest and lazy.
> Politics isn’t a line
No disagreement here, sometimes it's a horseshoe and you're proving the theory true.
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Why do you say so? Genuinely asking.
I'm not into Proton, as their offer is both too costly for me and overkill for my needs. Still, in which way do you think they're scamming people?
Their CEO seems to like trump, they are definitely not "the good guys". The way they market their services as "at rest encrypted" is also kind of only half true, since their emails are only partially encrypted, message bodies are, but subject line and senders are not stored in an encrypted fashion and have been shared with the authorities before.
> Their CEO seems to like trump
As far as I know this is a "rumour" that stems from him mentioning his approval over one of Trump's cabinet pick. Saying he likes Trump is a stretch.
Someone dug deeper into this topic: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...
TL;DR: probably not a Trump supporter
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>seems to like trump
THROW HIM IN JAIL!
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Using percentages is illegitimate. It's frog boiling.
Governments lean on large providers like Microsoft to not implement strong technological privacy protections because they want to invade everyone's privacy, and those companies go along because they want to get government contracts or curry favor with government regulators, or because they want to invade your privacy themselves.
Then anyone privacy-conscious abandons them before any abuses are revealed because they've seen this movie before and know what's coming next. But that includes criminal organizations, so now for a transient period of time the competing services that still protect privacy have a disproportionate number of criminals. This is then used as an excuse to shut them down or force them to stop protecting anyone's privacy.
That's when the real abuses start, because the privacy-protecting services have been suppressed as "only used by criminals" and once the general public has lost the ability to switch, there is no longer competitive pressure on the incumbents to not betray their now-captive user base.
You can try to prevent this by getting people to switch to the privacy-protecting services ahead of time, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable to accept the consent-manufacturing tactic as legitimate either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uQLvakPXOA
12 milion per day - iraqi mafia tasking 14 year olds with arson, robbery, murder in australia...
12 year old selling drugs in russia enabled by technology : https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/russia-drug-trade-orga...
EDIT: state backed use of proton : https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/lawless-cyberspace-why...
Criminals use general purpose tools. It isn't the role of cutlery manufacturers to address muggings.
also criminals are part of warfare inside of USA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yECBOAfhRWg
Sounds wise.
EDIT: not be toxic vs toxic - your car can be used for illegal purposes. that is why it has license plate, vin,...
so you are saying make every car same model, blackened windows, same color, no license plate.
yet it has nothing to do with Proton and everything to do with encryption and the reason why you hear the name Proton is because they open their mouth
> in current situation where more than 1 200 000 accounts there are
Both evidence and a basis for comparison (total number of accounts) are necessary before this claim is worth considering.
please, sun raises on east.
Maintaining democracy during peace time is easy. During war time it’s hard.
It’s also exactly the time where we should do work our hardest to maintain democracy.
I would recommend reading the Lincoln letter to William H. Herndon dated Feb. 15. 1848
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. Kennedy.
Yet we cant even endure tariffs meant to stop war.
> to assure the survival and the success of liberty. Kennedy.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Benjamin Franklin.
What war are tariffs meant to stop?
also criminals are part of warfare inside of USA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yECBOAfhRWg
china vs north america AND europe
+
chinese proxy war in ukraine, russia is just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-access/area_denial
essentially USA needs Taiwan to not be invaded by china, with taiwan in chinese hands, even korea will have to do very hard thinking about western direction. which will be disastrous for USA, EU.
Taiwan ramped up production of shells. Czech republic is buying shells from them to send to ukraine ( "czech ammunitions initiative" ) so taiwan is able sustain expanded manufacturing capability needed for china taiwan conflict.
so czechs are praised for this by other NATO members because essentially, chinese proxy war is making taiwan more secure against china...
china wanted to invade taiwan in 2027 that is why biden, trump are relocating chip manufacturing to US for last 7 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzhuXY9LBR8
EDIT: look up that part of russia between two inland seas, where georgia and azerbaijan are connecting russia with iran.
that part is so important that russia had to invade crimea, wage russo-georgian war just to be able to secure that part / land connection with iran.
ukrainian territories currently occupied by russia are "just" AA/AD zone for protection of rostov-on-don which is main railroad, seashipping hub for that iran russia connection land part.
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Switzerland paid restitutions and changed it's laws which can't be said for crimes committed by many others. While the past should not be white washed it's been 80 years now.
A better question is how many banks does Switzerland still have? UBS is threatening to leave if they need to meet the new capitalization requirements the government wants.
It’s still somewhat of a current topic though.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/nazi-ties-to-credit-suis...
Interesting
I'm sure UBS will try to claim that they didn't aquire the liabilities of CS just like Bayer and Dow try too with their acquisitions. However since this acquisition was basically forced upon UBS they would probably have a much better chance in court...
Private banks are very different from consumer banks in Switzerland. You might as well consider them as different kinds of things.
> A better question is how many banks does Switzerland still have?
Something like 9% of Swiss GDP comes from banking and insurance.
A lot but that's irrelevant.
Bringing up Nazis, terrorists, and “the children” is always relevant to privacy detractors who think it’s suspicious for regular people to not want to be spied on.
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> Long story short, the CEO has publicly backed Trump, Vance, and other officials in this new regime
This claim is not supported by your source. Do you have anything stronger than a Reddit thread?
It’s “batshit crazy” to support a politician the majority of the country voted for?
Not to be pedantic, but Donald Trump received around 77 million votes in the 2024 presidential election, which would be around 23% of the then population, I think.
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