I'd still prefer tuta or fastmail. It doesn't matter so much about their privacy stance - competition is good. We don't want proton to become the new Gmail.
> Xennials, also called Xillenials, are a social cohort encompassing people born on the cusp of or during the later years of Generation X and the early years of the Millennials generation.
> Many researchers and popular media use birth years from 1977 to 1983, though some extend this further in either direction. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.
Depends a lot on your background. I was online in 1994 as a kid, but my peers weren’t until nearer 1999. Same age. We all got mobile phones when we went to university in sep 2000
> Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.
Pretty bang on description actually. As a 46 yo, sometimes I can't believe I have actual memories of using a rotary phone, or when my family first got a microwave or even VHS recorder. Yet I do. Feels like eons ago.
That's the rub, numerous times you can't cancel until the x is done (for gym memberships it used to be a whole year). Or alternatively look at prime cancelling is made difficult.
Another issue is they tend to get more unnoticed as time goes on and little additional fees start creating in.
Just avoid subscriptions when possible has served me well
If banks view and treat their customers like spammers and random callers, banking regulations are fundamentally broken. It's even worse to see people who don't see the problem with such policies.
[Vinge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge) was a professor of mathematics and computer science. I'd expect him to get things right. Funny enough I don't remember that bit at all from fire upon the deep.
"Our main cargo is a one-time cryptographic pad. The source is Commercial Security at Sjandra Kei; the destination is the certificants' High colony. It was the usual arrangement: We're carrying a one-third xor of the pad. Independent shippers are carrying the others. At the destination, the three parts would be xor'd together. The result could supply a dozen worlds' crypto needs on the Net for --"
Doesn’t mention anything about quantum there though. Symmetric keys are secure enough against a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, but OTP provides information theoretic security. As GGP mentioned AES should be fine as far as we know for the foreseeable future regardless, but for all we know some brilliant cryptographer will in fact find a flaw. With OTP one doesn’t have to worry about even the slightest chance that could happen. This excerpt also may be alluding to threshold cryptography (Shamir’s secret sharing) which got.. shared.. here recently as well, and also happens to be information theoretically secure.
Sure, but my overall point was meant to refute this:
> But that's a miss, it's like one of those Neal Stephenson moments where the creator is using the right language […snip…] but they don't understand what's actually going on.
And to support the commenter who expressed surprise about that given Vernor Vinge is a mathematician. Clearly he does know what’s going on. And I think the fact you just posted supports this even more.
Anyways I have no horse in this race, haven’t read the book, just another internet pedant who saw something on HN that could be corrected.
For some context, I am guessing that people lower than the Transcend are uncertain about whether P=NP in the Transcend, which would make OTPs relevant.
> for example, almost all of their predictions weren’t just wrong… in hindsight, given how the future played out, they were asking the wrong question
Do you have an example of this? My (poor) memory remembers "it's going to change how people buy things", was the big deal at the time, and it seems like it was a great prediction.
Well, yes, but as the other commenter says, that’s a very broad general statement akin to something like “AI will change knowledge work“. That’s certainly true, but how? What are the details? What kind of companies are going to be the winners and what kind will be losers, or end up with commodity margins, like the telcos did after the mobile revolution? What is the pricing structure going to look like?
I suppose a concrete example in 1997 would be that a lot of companies thought the future of e-commerce was setting up a store on AOL, that people would use while sitting down at a desktop PC. Obviously it didn’t turn out quite that way. Furthermore, the Internet enabled new kinds of ways to buy things that weren’t even envisioned in the pre-Internet pre-smartphone world: think Airbnb and Uber.
Predictions are hard, especially about the future. Most predictions reflect the worldview and biases of the time in which they are made: think about all the vintage sci-fi from the 60s 70s and 80s that actually reads or looks kind of retro now. Similarly, our predictions of the future will look kind of retro and strange to someone living in the 2030s or 2040s. If studying history has any lesson to teach us, it’s really just this: that the past is an alien world with alien moods of thinking, and that our moment in time will look similarly alien to people in the future who choose to look back and analyze it closely.
This isn’t an argument that we should stop trying to make predictions. We need to, but it is an argument for humility, and also for questioning all your assumptions that you might be importing.
That's a very vague prediction that took decades to bear fruit. The concrete predictions behind the investments into companies like Pets.com and Webvan failed. It took the survivors like Ebay/Paypal and Amazon to build the digital payment and shipping infrastructure over decades until cultural acceptance hit critical mass.
- https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/proton-mail-fbi-stop-co...
- http://thoughtportal.org/2025/02/26/proton-mail-says-its-pol...
these people seem more problem free so far https://mail.tutanota.com/login
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