this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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we appear to be the first to write up the outrage coherently too. much thanks to the illustrious @self

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[–] uhmbah@lemmy.ca 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Well, I was contemplating Protonmail...

I'm in the process of degoogling and dewindowing. I'll be dammed if I'm going towards ANYthing even related to"artificial intelligence" if I can help it.

Feckin bullshit.

[–] alansuspect@aussie.zone 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'll mention I went to Fastmail (mainly because they're an Aus company as well as the privacy stuff), so far so good.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)
[–] alansuspect@aussie.zone 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah I saw that, pretty shitty. I also didn't even realise they had a US division, given how they tout themselves as an Australian company.

[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm pretty happy with Tutanota all things considered. There are some tradeoffs back and forth between the two, but I think it's neat they run on renewable energy. And they're very focussed on being open source which I also appreciate.

Maybe an option worth looking into. They're also encrypted (though I wish either them or proton had an option not to be) and have a free tier)

Hope you find what you're looking for!

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I’ve been using Mailbox.org. I tried Tutanota but the domain name was just awful.

[–] radivojevic@discuss.online 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I recommend you get your own domain, then you can’t ever lose your email.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

sure. because domains can be bought, not only temporarily leased.

[–] radivojevic@discuss.online -1 points 11 months ago

I don’t know anyone who has “lost” a domain (besides incompetence). You can be pedantic if you like, but domain ownership allows you to transfer everything to wherever and no one in a realistic example can take it away from you.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Eamonn Maguire, author of the Proton Scribe announcement post, responded to my tweet with this: https://x.com/EamonnMagu14645/status/1814062340863651965

We built this as an opt-in alternative to the non-privacy centric options on the market.

Our goal is always privacy by default, we want to make that possible in the GenAI world too given the number of businesses already using it, and the privacy risks other options pose.

We built this as an opt-in alternative to the non-privacy centric options on the market. Our goal is always privacy by default, we want to make that possible in the GenAI world too given the number of businesses already using it, and the privacy risks other options pose.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

not sure how legit that account is, actually. It's not the one I @'ed - this one was created in Jan 2024 - either it's his low-key alt or a bot

perhaps his plausible deniability account.

[–] self@awful.systems 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

do you get banned from twitter if you call him a fucking asshole?

I’m working on a more detailed reply on mastodon but to be honest, I’m pretty sure he didn’t read the original post

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

it all stinks so much. He calls it "opt-in" but the official description of that opt-in is:

If you try to use Proton Scribe, you will be prompted to chose between local and server-side. So, technically, it's not active until you decide how, and if, you want to use it.

as you can see here: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/112807462045101580

there is opt-in and then there is dangling an expired hotdog

[–] self@awful.systems 1 points 11 months ago

holy fuck that’s worse than I thought

so going back to not being able to recommend Proton to anyone again: there’s now a button (and associated “tutorial” advertising modals trying to get the user to click the button, don’t pretend there won’t be) that when clicked gives the user a confusing choice between an option that might not work and one that exfiltrates their data and claims it doesn’t (if they even get this choice on a computer that doesn’t support the local LLM), and if they interact with that it just opts them into the feature in a state that may or may not (but by default does) expose the plaintext of their messages to Proton’s servers

and I’m supposed to recommend this horseshit to non-technical users? what’s that sound like, I wonder? “oh it’s a great privacy-oriented mail service you should pay for — but not for your business because you might fuck up and exfiltrate your data, and also there’s a chance they’ll enable the same feature for regular users at some unspecified time in the future so look out for that. oh and don’t get visionary either.” yeah fuck that