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They were legally compelled to add IP logging for that specific user. After this incidence, they went on to obtain a court ruling in Switzerland, where they operate, so that this specific attack cannot happen again. In their blog post about it [1], they instruct concerned users to access their account over Tor.

Of course when Proton say they don't log, we just have to take their word for it. People who don't want that element of trust can use Tor. Personally I believe their story in this case.

[1] https://proton.me/blog/climate-activist-arrest


Is it possible now to sign up using TOR? It didn’t work a few years ago when I tried and never visited this website ever again.


We've worked on improving it in the meantime, so we recommend that you try again. If you come across any issues, please contact our support team at: https://proton.me/support/troubleshooting?product=account


It works sometimes. Usually, it requires phone number or email verification. This is important for protonmail to maintain a revenue stream as they don't allow multiple free accounts for the same person.


Note that even in those cases when additional verification is requested, the email addresses are not tied to your account - we only save a cryptographic hash of your email. Due to the hash functions being one-way, we cannot derive it back from the hash: https://proton.me/support/human-verification


If I'm a targeted journalist and I could be killed if you're lying about that, I won't believe that.


Yes please report back if it works


I still do it, and have been for over a decade, and I'm rarely bothered by it. I think I get a few more captchas because of it, and I can't load https://www.investopedia.com, which I would frequently like to, but that's it.


Generated CSAM is equally illegal as "real" CSAM in many countries, such as Norway. Here, even fictional descriptions of such material in written form is illegal.


this is possibly because generated CSAM may look like no real human child nor resemble any human child in particular today. give it 5 years and physical distinction from real children and even a specific child is likely to happen. so a photo perfect likeness of your kid ends up in some disgusting video and the creators get off the hook because it's 'not real' by say a narrow color gradiation or kinematic similarity standard undetectable to human eyes? no thanks.


That isn't really much of an issue, some places count material intended to resemble a real child or derived from CSAM (etc a drawing referenced from real CSAM) as still being illegal. That would handily cover the situation you've mentioned.

In those cases, for fictional CSAM to be legal, it has to be completely fictional such that any resemblances can be shown to be completely coincidence.


Even Lolita from Nabokov? Because that book depicted that as joking about the reader and on male society in general, as there was no actual erotism on anything but the narrator's "mind"/protagonist.

Similar on how people got Starship Troopers wrong. Is not about cheering fascism, but to ridicule it.


> Similar on how people got Starship Troopers wrong. Is not about cheering fascism, but to ridicule it.

Well - the film also had a disconnect with the book on the topic of fascism. The book was more on the pro-fascism side.


I still can't decide if it was just a bad movie or satire by someone that didn't quite get how satire works.


It was satire by someone who absolutely understands how satire works. Starship Troopers, the film, is brilliant.

The same director did Robocop, and if you don't get the genius satire of that, then I can't help you.


In fairness, those films can be enjoyed both superficially and as satire.


The film intentionally satirized the book.


The film is a satire of fascists propaganda, and as good satire often it, it is also an good example of fascist propaganda, just like Snow Crash is satire of Cyberpunk while being a good Cyberpunk.

The book isn't exactly fascist though. Verhoeven said he didn't read the book and does not plan to, so he is satirising somewhat superficially.

Heinlein did explore a lot of various political systems in his books, and I think Starship Troopers is focusing most on voter engagement - how people who vote should know something about what they vote on, and that is why only those who served (which includes military but also other "national service" like being a worker colonising planets or postman or whatever) get vote.

Is that fascist? I don't think so. Is it a good political system? I don't think so either but it is a good enough idea for a book.


In both the book and the film Starship Troopers:

* persons can choose whether or not to do government service

* Rico's parents are quite rich even though neither are citizens

* the Moral Philosophy class tries to _discourage_ individuals from government service

* the instructor for Moral Philosophy explicitly tries to get the students to think for themselves

In the book but not the film:

* the only benefit of government service is the right to vote

* only veterans (i.e. no active service members) can vote

All of these (and more) are contrary to fascism. The book is not fascist. Verhoeven never read the book and didn't satirize fascism -- he satirized a _caricature_ of fascism.


Fascism is ill defined so people call the Terran Federation fascist due to being jingoistic and undemocratic, despite it being quite different from historical fascism as you say.

Also minor detail but in the book there's a few jobs that are reserved for veterans, like IIRC the police.


Lolita is covered by an exception for art. I doubt such a book could be written in Norway today, but you can't really ban historical literature.


>but you can't really ban historical literature.

I know what you mean. But at the same time society bans historical literature constantly.


Have you actually read Starship Troopers? It isn’t exactly ridiculing facism.


I believe he is referring to the more widely known movie.


Domain names can also be taken from you if your adversaries are powerful enough. It happens regularly to controversial websites.


As someone who worked in e-commerce with high value brands, this is entirely true. If you even slightly infringe on a brand name, they will throw lawyers at you and the simple threat of bankruptcy will have you handing over the domain. I’ve seen it happen too many times to count.


Not half as easily as social media handles though...


It wasn't early; v2 desperately needed to be phased out. The crypto was obsolete and the protocol had known flaws. Over a year's lead time was given (see timeline: https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline/).

However, links live on in a million places, and it's hard to motivate hobbyist webmasters of niche onion sites to migrate. On /r/Tor, we regularly get people asking why some onion site doesn't work, and it's a v2 site. That's two years after they stopped working. (I wish Tor Browser would detect a v2 attempt and give a nice explanation instead of an opaque error message, though)

The truth is that whatever schedule they could choose would cause allegations of it being too early.


Technically there are still plenty of tor v2 infrastructure software running out there. It's only the people using the modern Tor Project releases that cannot visit these sites. The rest of us still can.

I still host a couple v2 onions on brute forced vanity tor domain names. Because that's what I wanted to use tor for, the name system, not to be anonymous or secure or anything. I just didn't like having to "rent" a ~.com domain that's not mine. On tor I thought I owned my domains because I held the private keys. But the tor project relieved me of that delusion when they simply dropped support for v2 name resolution and (mostly) everyone stopped being able to get to my sites.

But that's tangential. Regardless of weather tor v2 removal was early or not, the switch to secluded, account requiring, forums instead of comments was bad. Self hosting the bad system doesn't make it better.


> Because that's what I wanted to use tor for, the name system, not to be anonymous or secure or anything. I just didn't like having to "rent" a ~.com domain that's not mine.

The Tor project doesn't exist for whatever usecase you were using it for.

> On tor I thought I owned my domains because I held the private keys. But the tor project relieved me of that delusion when they simply dropped support for v2 name resolution

Not routing to v2 domains isn't the same as not owning your .onion addresses? The latter is cryptographically guaranteed, is it not?


They've made it very clear they don't care now. But I still remember when it was part of what they advertised about tor. A lot has changed since 2010 in the tor project.


You still haven't made any clear case against them. Why even stick with v2 onions in the first place?


probably something something Debian. I don't even get it, there's no reason not to just adopt v3. There was one reason, for a short while, that certain hosts might have wanted to stick with v2, but that hasn't been the case for 2+ years now. There are v3 vanity generators, v2 urls are still too long to memorize anyway. Sorry, but this just feels like another user being stubborn about change, ignoring that that change happened for a reason. See also: Wayland.


Communities are namespaced. You'd have news@foo.com and news@bar.com. The local server is an implicit namespace for its own communities, so for local users of foo.com, news@foo.com is presented as simply "news".


Snowden became a Russian citizen last September: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63036991


Yes you are correct my apologies.


> The "cryptocurrency" concept seems to be based on a mistrust of government-issued currency and a mistrust of government more generally.

This is the classic notion of cryptocurrency, but the field has grown and changed a lot. People don't mint NFT collections and dabble in metaverse tokens as a middle-finger to the state. The VC-funded cryptocurrencies of the last cycle are obviously centralized and are far removed from any cypherpunk notion.


> This is the classic notion of cryptocurrency, but the field has grown and changed a lot

Maybe?

It's pretty hard to tell, though, because 90% of the cryptocurrency advocates I hear are from the "government is evil" crowd.


Are you telling me Lindsay Lohan is not a cypherpunk.


They do it to make money without having to pay tax. Which is not quite a middle finger to the state, but it's certainly middle-finger-to-the-state adjacent.


If FBI really has compromised Tor, there's no reason to believe they would be helpless against a VPN service.


> This isn't the case anymore for Onion v2 addresses

You're right, except you meant v3.


Oh yeah, ofc. Thank you for the correction! :)


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