Not to self-promote, but I have expressed my opinion on the topic.

Wait until you will need a team of people to optimize cloud costs.(finops) for peak irony.

In the video scheduled to be posted on YouTube apparently there were more elements (talked about their own dressing style and not feeling either a man or a woman - according to some articles which translated the pages in russian).

I think this is overall irrelevant anyway. In their manifesto they go all over the place ideologically, from holocaust praise to trans rights, apparently. It’s not like there was a consistent motivation behind, they were clearly unwell mentally - reporting depression and suicidal thoughts for years - and did the shooting to be killed.

In this case I am quite happy to be out of the loop, frankly. I can live in blissful ignorance of at least this stuff.

I feel completely out of the loop when stuff like this happens.

I went looking around and found an article that expanded a lot on this topic, https://maxread.substack.com/p/who-killed-jean-pormanove

Someone runs MongoDB unauthenticated, bound on 0.0.0.0 with production data, on a computer without a VPN, and the problem is the WiFi?

Like I get what you are saying, but this sounds like saying that we should ban speedbumps because imagine there is a guy with a loaded gun pointed at a kid with no safe, finger on the trigger, and high on coke, if the car hits the speedbump the toddler is gone. Yeah, but I would hardly say the speedump is the issue.

This is not really a common or easy attack, especially for any meaningful service (that is probably in preloaded HSTS lists).

It’s not like this is the only shared network. In airports millions of people everyday connect to the same network.

Email is almost always zero-access encryption (like live chats), considering the % of proton users and the amount of emails between them (or the even smaller % of PGP users). Drive is e2ee like chat history. Basically I see email : chats = drive : history.

Anyway, I agree it could be done better, but I don’t really see the big deal. Any user unable to understand this won’t get the difference between zero-access and e2e.

They compare it to proton mail and drive that are supposedly e2ee.

Only drive is. Email is not always e2ee, it uses zero-access encryption which I believe is the same exact mechanism used by this chatbot, so the comparison is quite fair tbh.

How would you explain it in a way that is both nontechnical, accurate and differentiates yourself from all the other companies that are not doing something even remotely similar? I am asking genuinely because from the perspective of a user that decided to trust the company, zero-access is functionally much closer to e2ee than it is to “regular services”, which is the alternative.

Scribe can be local, if that’s what you are referring to.

They also have a specific section on it at https://proton.me/support/proton-scribe-writing-assistant#local-or-server

Also emails for the most part are not e2ee, they can’t be because the other party is not using encryption. They use “zero-access” which is different. It means proton gets the email in clear text, encrypts it with your public PGP key, deletes the original, and sends it to you.

See https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

The email is encrypted in transit using TLS. It is then unencrypted and re-encrypted (by us) for storage on our servers using zero-access encryption. Once zero-access encryption has been applied, no-one except you can access emails stored on our servers (including us). It is not end-to-end encrypted, however, and might be accessible to the sender’s email service.

Over the years I’ve heard many people claim that proton’s servers being in Switzerland is more secure than other EU countries

Things change. They are doing it because Switzerland is proposing legislation that would definitely make that claim untrue. Europe is no paradise, especially certain countries, but it still makes sense.

From the lumo announcement:

Lumo represents one of many investments Proton will be making before the end of the decade to ensure that Europe stays strong, independent, and technologically sovereign. Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals(new window) to introduce mass surveillance — proposals that have been outlawed in the EU — Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move.

This shift represents an investment of over €100 million into the EU proper. While we do not give up the fight for privacy in Switzerland (and will continue to fight proposals that we believe will be extremely damaging to the Swiss economy), Proton is also embracing Europe and helping to develop a sovereign EuroStack(new window) for the future of our home continent. Lumo is European, and proudly so, and here to serve everybody who cares about privacy and security worldwide.

They actually don’t explain it in the article. The author doesn’t seem to understand why there is a claim of e2e chat history, and zero-access for chats. The point of zero access is trust. You need to trust the provider to do it, because it’s not cryptographically veritable. Upstream there is no encryption, and zero-access means providing the service (usually, unencrypted), then encrypting and discarding the plaintext.

Of course the model needs to have access to the context in plaintext, exactly like proton has access to emails sent to non-PGP addresses. What they can do is encrypt the chat histories, because these don’t need active processing, and encrypt on the fly the communication between the model (which needs plaintext access) and the client. The same is what happens with scribe.

I personally can’t stand LLMs, I am waiting eagerly for this bubble to collapse, but this article is essentially a nothing burger.

If I were in the security team of that company, I would never accept ACLs on the bucket as a sufficient compensating control for this risk. Here the best most reasonable would be encryption, which would make the bucket being public relatively unimportant.

When you are collecting so sensitive data (potentially including personal data of people not using your service), you simply can’t even imagine doing that by storing the data unencrypted.

Edit: grammar

Thanks. Absolutely my experience too. The ones where you can’t edit the email I noticed often used the email as username, and probably god knows how bad is the code on the backend.

Hey, I haven’t, but to be honest, the answers I got from most companies showed me that the processes were handled by people who barely understood the legal and technical aspects around data collection (e.g., often support agents were on the other side of privacy@), which means I wouldn’t trust them with their answer anyway AND I doubt many of these companies will have effective way to even check that.

From the data being sold point of view, I think unfortunately it’s way more effective reaching out to the few big data brokers to request cancelations or pay one of the companies who offer such service…

Thanks for the kind words!

I won’t take credits for the template, I have used the one found here: https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/

Eh, the thing is I made the formal request using data deletion module, but I just assumed that’s what the support person asked the development person (“team”), assuming it was not the same person for both!

Congratulations on completing this!

I have indeed moved most accounts to individual aliases. I used to use the same username and similar emails (perhaps grouped like shops@mydomain), but I got no benefit and the username allowed unnecessary correlations.

So alias + random username and I will have much much less trouble in the future. Hopefully!

Social/Political problems need social/political solutions, not technical solutions.

When they need, they’ll learn.

100% agree. But. If you are a principal engineer claiming to have experience hardening the thing, you would expect that learning to have already happened. Also, I would be absolutely fine with “I never had a chance to dig into this specifically, I just know it at a high level” answer. Why coming up with bs?

Maybe those engineers were like that too.

I mean, we are talking about people whose whole career was around Kubernetes, so I don’t think so?