• 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
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.
I just paid $80 for one year of proton. 2 years ago I paid $40 for 2 years.
Use information however you will.
so proton is now a movement.
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 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).
Pretty sure even a VPN does nothing if you’re on a cellphone as well isn’t it?
Like all cellphones carry a unique identifier, that’s how, say, reddit can keep you banned even if you start a new account under new email and a vpn.
I don’t think Reddit would have that. They likely just use your browser fingerprint. Check this out: https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
Between just my uncommon device, my languages spoken, and rough location (timezone), I’m actually crazy identifiable, yikes.
Why is our liberal government a fuckass conservative government?
Neoliberals want that the entity controlled by voters - the elected government/president/whatever (depending on country) - to not watch over or control the things which are important for Money (in their parlance, to “not interfere with the Free Market”, which in turn justifies privatising everything).
In other words, to make the Power which is controlled by voters be below the Power Of Money.
They’re against Democracy and in favor of Oligarch with “democracy” as a theatrical façade focused only on Moral subjects and not doing anything at all for other things which constrain the Freedom of most people.
Notice how the more hard-core Neoliberal the mainstream “center”-“left” parties in a country are (and the one Canada is pretty hard-core compared to most of Europe, tough even then not quite at the level of the Democrats in the US) the more their entire public political fight with the (Fascist) “center”-right is in the Moral space (Identity Politics) and the less it is in terms of freedoms which are limited by the control of Money over everything required for survival (with productive and shelter assets being owned mainly by a handful of people, so the rest are forced to toil within conditions controled the former group merely to have food and shelter).
In summary, they shrink “Democracy” down to a system that represents voters in the Moral sphere only where they loudly “battle” the “right” and everything else important to voters is controller not by a system where every person has one and only one vote and all votes count the same, but by a system where each dollar is a “vote” and some people have billions more “votes” than others - in other words, it’s not Democracy anymore because in most domains the vote which is equal for all individuals controls nothing at all.
I’m not fully familiar with the politics in Canada (though what I’ve seen of the Liberals is basically what I describe above), but all of this shit is painfully obvious in both the US and Britain, plus it has already infiltrated the rest of Europe to quite an extent (especially the EU, since Neoliberals use its supranational powers which are supposedly to facilitate Trade Integration, to force Neoliberal policies on countries, especially those in the Eurozone).
Anyways, all this to say that the increasing Authoritarianism you see in the more Neoliberal countries is the mainstream “center” parties which control power making sure they can detect and subvert early any civil society movements which might wrestly power away from them - in other words, the final destruction of whatever is left of Democracy and the path which is still left through the vote to undo the Oligarchic system (which would require the mainstream parties to lose most of their vote to alternatives naturally born from the civil society which weren’t just puppets created by wealthy individuals, something which already is very difficult in countries with First Past The Post systems and which total civil society surveilance is meant to make impossible)
Higher-stakes, less-entertaining professional wrestling.
Personally I’m more of a believer in the saying “Politics is Acting for ugly people”.
I always heard “D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people,” which is very true, having worked a decade in D.C.
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.
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.
The part of me that is pessimistic (that part seems to be growing these days…) thinks they would just hang up on you and if you call them back enough times they’ll call the police on you to report you for harassment.
Not to discourage people, but it’s just frustrating.
You’re assuming a bad outcome and then acting as if it’s a guaranteed outcome. This is maladaptive behavior under any circumstances.
Please actually talk to a therapist about this if you can. I guarantee this behaviour pattern is occurring in other places in your life, and it’s not healthy.
Is it okay to assume a bad outcome after it has happened? What about while it’s happening?
Please psychoanalyze me using only a couple sentences, that will definitely help.
The truth is, we obviously don’t know for sure what will happen, but it’s also not likely to be surprising if it doesn’t go our way. It’s the most likely outcome and pretending otherwise is disingenuous. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight, though.
I’m certainly not surprised anymore with all the shit I’ve seen over the years and how the enshitification seems to be unavoidable these days. People, companies, etc are not held accountable and it shows. It’d be nearly impossible to not become jaded after enough things go wrong.
So, you’re saying that an MP has filed a police report against you for harassment?
My MP told me to fuck off and that it was a good thing.
I’m not sure what you feel like you’re adding with this reply.
Well done for making the effort. Thank you, and we all appreciate it.
But what do you want other people to take from this? Are you trying to discourage other people from taking action? Because you encountered resistance other people shouldn’t try at all, even though they might end up speaking to someone more receptive?
Even your MP may end up changing their mind if enough people speak up. The goal is not to single-handedly sway their opinion, it’s to add your voice to a growing chorus. You’re joining a movement, not fighting a solo battle.
I live in Quebec, my MP masturbates to videos of Donald Trump and times his nut for when Trump makes fun of the handicapped journalist.
I like how you throw in ‘even the Americans’ with the spying groups. We definitely spy in all our allies. And in return we encourage our allies to spy on us. It is a very calculated political game where we (all the allied countries) pass legislation and safeguards in our respective home countries and declare our citizens free of authoritarian government surveillance, but then work with the other countries spy agencies to do it for us. We intentionally put in the backdoors in our peoples networks and hand the keys to our partners just so we can say ‘well I wasn’t spying on you. That would be illegal!’ But in the end it is effectively the same. If the allied government finds anything of interest they just send a notification over. We each have boundaries that we respect in spying on each other’s people too. It is almost a formallity by this point.
And all of that would be fine if they were still acting like an ally.
JFC were losing the internet everywhere… we’re just slaves to nation-states and corporations…
Turns out voting for conservatives has consequences.
I don’t understand your comment, I thought liberals had a majority government…?
They did, this guy is just being edgy and predictable.
Blame all problems on conservatives, even when they’re not in power. Libdippers can do no wrong. /s
Mark Carney is 3 Conservatives in a trench coat.
Now, he is an actual Conservative, which is a hell of a lot better than a reactionary extremist that are calling themselves Conservative these days, but there’s a reason Conservative MPs have crossed the floor to join his party.
I mean, the Libs are doing everything I’d expect from Stephen Harper’s Bank of Canada guy and the Tory’s Bank of England guy.
Not being able to tell if the Libs or Cons are in charge just feels like more evidence of how far we’ve ratcheted to the right.
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
🌍🧑🏻🚀🔫👨🏼🚀
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.
Also they scammed their way (liberals) to a majority by absorbing resigning NDP members and THEN they pushed this bullshit. They’re anti democratic and aligned with the pedo elite in reducing our lives to nothing since 2020. Cant wait for the revolution to start and ill be among those hanging these bastards by the neck. Idgaf about a list, hi SCRS agent.
