• Proton VPN has hit back at Canada’s proposed Bill C-22
• The proposed legislation could require VPNs to log user metadata
• NordVPN and Windscribe have also slammed the bill
JFC were losing the internet everywhere… we’re just slaves to nation-states and corporations…
Turns out voting for conservatives has consequences.
Joke’s on you, in the UK we have a “left wing” government and they’re doing the best they can to fight against privacy!
Oh wait… I guess the joke’s on us nvm.
Yeah… I pay attention to UK politics mostly to avoid hyper focusing on depressing domestic politics, and it’s devastating to see Labor shit the bed the way they have.
Like, you guys are supposed to be better than us (it’s a low bar)! But they squandered their mandate in the most perverse and infuriating way. I’m sorry. Shit sucks.
Anyway, that’s my half-assed perspective from listening to Pod Save the UK, the Bugle, and reading the occasional article.
the UK has it rough. They have a dogshit conservative government for a decade and then get pissed when the left cant clean it up in a single term. Also most of the voters are still falling for conservative outrage bait drumming up a ton of distraction issues like migrant crime and rape gangs.
Labour isn’t the left. Keir Starmer lied about everything to become the leader of the Labour Party as the face of Morgan McSweeney, Steve Reed and Peter Mandelson’s “Labour Together” right wing project because they knew the membership, which is generally centre left, would never vote for them if they were honest about their intentions. They hid 75% of their donations until after the contest was over, violating electoral law.
Lo and behold, they’re doing disability cuts, trans moral panic, privacy violations, outsourcing to American tech barons and clamping down on protest rights. Starmer suspended several MPs early on for voting against the government’s policy of keeping the two child cap on benefits.
However, you are partially right that the right wing press still doesn’t approve of them and are manufacturing dissent, despite Labour’s cruel anti-migrant and pro-capital policies.
To be fair, the issue (or at least my point) here is not that they didn’t magically fix everything. It’s that they actively introduced things (like the online safety act) and are continuing to pursue things (like extending it to vpns) which didn’t exist before and are hostile towards online privacy.
I do agree about the general mentality being outrage based which benefits the right.
It’s actually quite interesting to look at the party manifestos in England Vs Scotland for the same parties. Reform UK has seen some success in the recent Scottish election and I believe part of it is that their “Scottish” manifesto reads closer to a regular conservative party (so only medium insane), whereas it’s batshit insane in England. I don’t think a lot of people compare those, despite it being the same party.
Yes I understand being pissed off at some horrible legislation but focusing on single events and painting an entire picture will destroy any politician. Focusing on his worst legislation ignores all the good stuff he has passed and makes people think the left is just as bad when objectively that is not the case.
Like even looking at the online safety act. Thats popular legislation with majority support. Think of all the things that wouldnt have happened under a conservative government, rail nationalization, strengthen labour laws, green energy expansion and reform, prison reform.
All his biggest controversy kind of pales in comparison to the good done. So to throw all that out just seems very stupid to me.
I see your point and also agree with you, but at the same time it seems like you’re implying it’s a binary choice. Either we support labour or we support the right. The way I see it, they’re a centrist party now at best. I want to support a more leftist/libertarian party. I don’t have to run to vote for reform just because labour didn’t do as well as I hoped, but I also don’t need to vote for labour if they do things I hate (which the war on privacy is).
And of course the online safety act passed with a majority. They’re using the easiest manipulation tactic to describe all of these type of bills that exists. “It’s for the children”. It takes a lot to oppose it while making sure you don’t give ammunition to be smeared with “oh they hate kids/don’t care about children’s wellbeing” while defending it is as simple as repeating it’s to protect kids. Doesn’t even matter what the bill does as long as it can loosely be related it’s a guaranteed “moral high ground”.
Lastly, I don’t think it’s good to excuse bad policies by saying they also did other good things.
As much as this chart is misused, it shows that left and right can be both authoritarian - thus pushing anti-privacy nightmare like this.
There is a war going on against online freedom, and we are losing.
I’m sure liberals would pass on the opportunity to have more power and control and would totally thrash the whole thing.
/s, but should be obvious
Liberals have a much better track record with this sort of thing.
are you aware of which party has a majority in canada’s parliament right now
The party that all the Conservative MPs are joining, because it aligns with their conservative policies more than the extremists party they are currently in.
🌍🧑🏻🚀🔫👨🏼🚀
Also Proton: “metadata logging does not count as logging, and handing our logs, I mean non existent logs that only contains totally useless metadata, over to the Swiss government is fine because its the Swiss law”
I kinda want to see what they handed over. They cannot get around the fact that they need to be able to handover data when legally asked with a warrant.
But I do kinda want to see if it is actually useless metadata or it is just our entire history.
Most likely, the logs consist of what IPs are leased to what users, when the connections start and end, and what IPs those users are connecting from. A VPN company may keep the logs for something like 2 days.
Let’s say you torrent something while connected to a VPN and one of the peers in the torrent pool is actually a DMCA agent associated with IP-Echelon. The DMCA agent will record the IP address you have at the time and generate a DMCA notice. It will then look up who owns the IP address to determine where to send the DMCA notice. When the VPN company receives the DMCA notice, it will use the logs to determine who was leasing the IP address at the time in question. If the logs no longer exist, the notice effectively gets tossed because the VPN company has no way of knowing what account was downloading the torrent. But if the notice was sent quickly enough for the logs to still exist, the VPN company will forward the DMCA notice to the user that was using the IP at the time. In that case, it will work the same way as a normal ISP. You’ll probably get a warning with something like a 3 strike policy. In such a case, the VPN will cut your VPN service on the third strike.
Presumably, it could work the same way for anything. I used to work for a VPN company a decade ago, and this was pretty much the industry standard. It, like all VPN companies, advertised itself as having no logging.
The best way to prove you don’t hold any logs is by doing on audit on it.
In the story you explained it would be better to not use a VPN since Dutch providers don’t share your name when somebody comes to them with a list of IP’s.
Thank you for the response though!
Mullvad got the best advertising ever in this regard: they literally got the police at the door and the police didn’t found a shit, hillarious
I worked for a VPN company a decade ago that advertised no logging. It was all BS. They absolutely logged. Maybe they only kept the logs for something like 48 hours, but I’m pretty sure all VPNs have some kind of logging going on. Anyway, a VPN by itself does not give you any privacy. Websites have a billion ways to fingerprint you, and they don’t even need cookies to do it.
privacy implies vpn (or some mix-net), but not the opposite… so if you want privacy, you need a vpn, but a vpn by itself doesn’t give you privacy
It’s a small step out of many. And there’s enough steps now that an average person is pretty much never going to have it, unfortunately. But there is more and less exposed. There’s untraceable, and there’s traceable with more effort than anyone will likely bother. Considering countries like russia have tried and failed to block VPNs, they’re certainly worth something.
I’d argue that VPNs remain one of the highest return-on-investment (time and money) steps towards online security, as many gaps as they do have in the big picture.
It’s not going to make you untraceable. But it’ll make you difficult enough to trace that nobody’s gonna put forth the effort to target you specifically unless you’ve attracted like, nation-state attention. (Targeting you as a member of some demographic a la advertisers, yeah not much effect).
Why is our liberal government a fuckass conservative government?
Obvious answer is because they are not liberal, calling yourself liberal just works better in elections. After the elections they do what they were paid for.
Both sides are equally authoritarian once in control.
If you’re a Canadian, please contact your MP about bill C-22, and do it now. They’re voting on this in the next few days.
Salt Typhoon, a hacking group connected to the Chinese government, used the backdoors put in place by CALEA in the US to spend months buried deep in US telecoms providers surveilling citizens. The Liberals are proposing to put in place a worse version of those exact same backdoors. Bring this up to your MP, remind them that when the Chinese (or North Koreans, Iranians, Russians, or even Americans) inevitably exploit these backdoors to do the same thing to us, it’s going to blow up in their faces.
Read the link above for more salient points about why this is bad law. Read Open Media’s articles on it (https://openmedia.org/press/item/ottawa-repackages-its-surveillance-backdoor-in-bill-c-22). Bring up these points to your MP. Email them. Phone and demand to speak to them. Make a stink about this.
If nothing else, send the form letter from Open Media (the other options are better, but something is better than nothing); https://action.openmedia.org/page/188754/action/1#main-content
They already tried to pass this law once and it failed. Yes, they have a majority now, but it is a very slim majority. If a few MPs defect this bill will die.
Pretty sure my MP blocked me because their office never respond to my inquiries.
Phone their office, demand to know why you haven’t heard back from them. Make them search through their emails and pull up every message you ever sent. Make them uncomfortable. Be a problem.
so proton is now a movement.
Based on what happened with their e-mail, I imagine if the courts mandated IP logging for VPNs, Proton would still advertise their no-logs policy until they get caught out in a scandal and then silently update their marketing material & privacy policy afterwards. lol
ProtonMail 2018:
Now, Swiss courts have never tried to force us to log IPs, and the law is not completely clearly if we have to comply or not. If we got such a request, we would probably fight it just to test this out.
Did they ever end up fighting anything out? lol
I doubt they did - they only speak up for the fictional customer, meanwhile silently complying to whatever government requests user data from them.
They still don‘t log your IP and advocate to not even give them your data, though. If you give them your credit card number and then use their services to sell illegal substances and if authorities of your country then find your e-mail address and contact Proton about it then their hands are pretty much tied. If you use one of their offered anonymous ways to pay for their services then there is nothing they can give authorities. Ultimately it‘s your job to take care of your identity and Proton offers ways to protect it.
Proton is not a trustworthy company.
Noone is 100% trust worthy. I’ll still appreciate when they fight for the right things.
I just paid $80 for one year of proton. 2 years ago I paid $40 for 2 years.
Use information however you will.
I’m guessing you had a one time deal 2 years ago?
Perhaps. It was two years ago. I honestly don’t remember.
Oh look Proton is trying to score some PR bullshit when they will comply with the law just like they comply with the laws in their country. They are a greedy corporation who sells security theatre.
Firstly Proton is a non-profit.
Secondly security and privacy are two different things (albeit their connected).
Thirdly no company, for-profit or otherwise, is going to break the law for you.
You produmb defenders can’t even get basic facts correct.
“Proton uses a unique hybrid model. The services are provided by a for-profit Swiss corporation called Proton AG with a primary shareholder that is non-profit.”
So dumb it hurts, but by all means keep giving them your money. I heard they just doubled their price. Twice the price for the same stupidity.
Importantly, not to be confused with their email service’s IP logging
This AGAIN? They were ordered by a Swiss court to log the IP accessing the mailbox, (which the court granted because the French authorities cited terrorism as a reason, completely overblown charges). They do NOT log IPs by default, and if you do not comply with court orders of the country you are based in, you can close up shop.
if you do not comply with court orders of the country you are based in, you can close up shop
This is exactly the case for every VPN and network operator. Some take steps to remediate issues around anonymity, and some even offer ways to pay anonymously, but no company is going to break the law for you.
I have issues with Proton’s head being far too conciliatory to Trump, but the email thing wasn’t something they could do anything about, because it’s an inherent flaw with how email works; it was a court order to which they were compelled to comply, whether they wanted to or not.
honestly if they have to move countries due to the bill its like the best advertisement ever.
They sure try to advertise on that but they are a Swiss company so Canadian laws have little to do with them.
This is incredibly naive. They might not be based out of Canada, but they do business in Canada. They have customers and infrastructure in Canada. Canadian laws are very relevant to their business.
I think their biggest impact will be they’ll have to pull their Canadian servers and stop selling to Canadians.
