Math is pretty culturally neutral though, and 24 has a high number of divisors, which makes it convenient. I'd argue that hours and minutes being easy to divide up into equal blocks is more important and natural than having the same ratio as year:day.
Not really. If there are other maintainers who have ownership of the project they can just unarchive it themselves. If not, then he'd have to appoint a successor first, which would mean doing more work for free. So the best solution is just to archive it and let the community fork it if they're interested in continuing development.
Also your phrasing of "would be fine" implies that there are things that are not "fine" to do when doing work for free for the public benefit, which is exactly the sort of entitled attitude that makes many (myself included) uninterested in open sourcing their own projects.
Very strange attitude towards open source. One guy decides to stop working for free, leaving all of his work publicly accessible for anyone to continue to build upon, and the response is "well, I guess that's the end of that project".
I'm guessing the attitude of "users and supporters" of the project such as shushtain complaining and wanting clason to do all the work instead of just doing it themselves, was a factor in him deciding to step away from the project.
Getting free stuff is good for the user of the stuff, yes. Giving away stuff for free might not feel good if you don't like the people you're giving the stuff away to, yes.
People aren't "taking advantage" of you by benefiting from the free work that you voluntarily do. They may be rude towards you, but it's your choice to work for them or not.
If you release your work to the world, there's no license agreement in existence that will prevent "undesirables" from benefiting from your work. See: all of the AIs being trained on publicly accessible code (regardless of its license).
The answer is just, do write open source code if you think it's fun, and you're okay with the worst people you can imagine using your code. If you write a geodata library, it might be used in a targeting module for a bomb, which might in turn be launched towards civilians. That's just a consequence you'll have to accept.
Not to enter another OS ** measuring contest, but on linux systems you can both install and remove programs with a single command line. No need to search the web for the installer, no need to install the MSVC runtime (dependencies are handled automatically), no reboots needed pretty much ever, etc.
And no, on windows not "everything" is removed by most uninstallers. At least it wasn't back when I was using windows 7. Though I doubt it's really changed, unless you count those "windows store apps", but that's also equivalently available on mac. Both are a poor imitation of a proper linux package manager.
Well, Proton themselves say they will provide information about who has contacted a randsomware attacker to law enforcement. https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement
So that probably has happened. Whether they've even provided other private data I don't know, but
> how would it technically even be possible
Well, it's not possible if you trust their claims about E2EE, but that is just a claim. How's that any different from a non-encrypted email provider saying they won't provide your emails to others? It all comes down to trust in the end.
They don't claim email is E2EE. Of course they need to know email metadata to route messages. That's unavoidable if you are using email. It's not encapsulated like that.
Edit: A reply to your misunderstanding and accusation below:
What do you mean? By "provide your emails to others" I obviously mean the email *contents*, not the email *address*. (Which I also clarified with "the storage of your emails on their servers"). You know, the very thing that is almost the whole selling point of Proton: that they keep the contents of your emails encrypted so "only you" can access them.
> Proton Mail protects the contents of all your messages with zero-access encryption, meaning no one can read them except you and your recipients. Messages you send to other Proton Mail accounts are always end-to-end encrypted, as are emails sent to non-Proton Mail accounts when you use Password-protected Emails.
Also, what in the SMTP protocol requires Proton to *store* that metadata? Could they not simply delete it after using it (or, crazy idea, encrypt it in the same way the message contents are encrypted in storage), so they would be unable to respond to law enforcement requests the next week, say? They did also previously claim that they didn't log user's IP addresses. Why would they claim something like that, if it's "obvious to anyone who knows" that it's a false claim? Marketing aimed towards their not so technically savvy userbase?
Let me also remind you that I was replying to a question about "how would it technically even be possible" to "offer loads of your private data when ordered". My reply was, it's easily possible for them to offer your metadata, and you still need to trust their claims about heir implementation of E2EE to believe they won't offer your message contents.
You're very quick to accuse people of spreading misinformation. Let me hit back with an accusation of my own, which is that Proton's PR team have a habit of regularly trying to discredit any critique as "misinformation". Perhaps you've just read too many of their rebuttals?
> Account Activity: Due to limitations of the SMTP protocol, we have access to the following email metadata: sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, attachment name, message subject, and message sent and received times.
This would be obvious to anyone knows how email works. It would be very silly for them to claim otherwise.
"Controlled" is a bit hyperbolic, but there's a collaboration agreement between the USA government and the Swiss government, so Proton has to comply with requests from for example the FBI. Quoting a comment by Proton staff on Reddit
> First, let's correct the headline: Proton did not provide information to the FBI. What happened is that the FBI submitted a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) request, which was processed by the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police. Proton operates exclusively under Swiss law, and we only respond to legally binding orders from Swiss authorities, after all Swiss legal checks have been passed. This is an important distinction.
> [...]
> The only information Proton could provide was a payment identifier because the user chose to pay with a credit card. This is information the user themselves provided to us through their choice of payment method. Proton also accepts cryptocurrency and cash payments, which would not have been linkable to an identity.
So basically, don't trust Proton with information unless you want the FBI to know it.
Sorry, perhaps the takeaway is clearer when you see the full quote [0]. I omitted it for space, here's the relevant part
> Third, let's talk about what was actually disclosed. No emails were handed over. No message content. No metadata about who the user communicated with. The only information Proton could provide [...]
Yes, paying by crypto prevents Proton from disclosing your identity that way. Is there anything preventing Proton from disclosing the email content or metadata? Do they claim they won't disclose that? Clearly they do allow themselves to disclose metadata [1]
> For example, in ransomware cases, we can preserve information about which victims contacted the suspect, so that victims can be notified.
So, "just don't pay with a credit card" comes with the additional caveat of "don't email somebody you don't want the FBI to know you emailed". Whether you also need to "don't write anything you don't want the FBI to know", I haven't investigated further, but you could perhaps look that up yourself. I will just assume that to be the case based on what I've seen.
There are limits of what you can encrypt, in all of the cases of proton being critiqued for its compliance with law I haven't seen any instance of them being able to disclose email content, where metadata is "who we're sending email to", which is, I assume, not encryptable if you want an usable service. That being said, the quote does make your pov clearer, thank you for that.
Yeah, if you trust that they will never push a backdoor to your client on the request of Swiss law enforcement. It's a web app "fgs".
They also admit to scanning all mail to and from non-Proton accounts "for spam". So what's stopping them from one day adding a small if statement that just writes that data to disk, for specific "interesting" users?
Regarding metadata, I sure hope you have nothing to hide in the below emphasized:
> Account Activity: Due to limitations of the SMTP protocol, we have access to the following email metadata: *sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, attachment name, message subject, and message sent and received times*. We do NOT have access to encrypted message content, but unencrypted messages sent from external providers to your Account, or from Proton Mail to external unencrypted email services, are scanned for spam and viruses to pursue the legitimate interest of protecting the integrity of our Services and users. Such inbound messages are scanned for spam in memory, and then encrypted and written to disk. We do not possess the technical ability to scan the content of the messages after they have been encrypted. We also have access to the following records of Account activity: number of messages sent, amount of storage space used, total number of messages, last login time. User data is never used for advertising purposes.
Please quote where in that document the answer to my question is:
> Is there anything preventing Proton from disclosing the email content or metadata?
Also please link me to the source code of Proton's server-side code, so I can audit their scanning of all incoming and outgoing mail, to verify it's not logging them. What you linked above is just the clients.
I mean, is it really a conspiracy theory to want or believe that there are services (based in Europe) that don't hand over any and all user data to the USA government when asked? It's probably wrong to believe it to be the case, but just because it's wrong doesn't make it "conspiratorial".
It's quite hypocritical of Proton to claim that they protect against government surveillance when they do things like this though [0]. Their legal team has probably ensured they don't claim anything strictly false, but the implication and the reality are wildly different.
Proton's marketing definitely makes it sound like they are fully anonymous and wouldn't even have anything to hand over to law enforcement. Look at the wording they use to describe the product.
Proton has always-on end-to-end encryption and zero‑access encryption, meaning even we do not have access to your data.
[...]
Based in Europe, Proton ensures your data is protected by some of the world’s strongest privacy laws. Because Proton isn’t a US‑based company, we can’t be compelled by laws such as the US CLOUD Act to hand over your data to the US government or terminate your services. [1]
Obviously as we have seen, they 100% can and will hand over your data to the US government. Yes, it's in the privacy policy/ToS & they're compiling with local laws. But that's clearly not how that reads.
[In 2021, the Switzerland-based vendor provided local police with the IP address and device details of a netizen the cops were trying to identify. That individual – a French climate activist who was already known to police – was later arrested.
Shortly after that kerfuffle, Proton removed the claim that it didn't track user IP addresses from its website. Proton has also previously been accused of offering real-time surveillance of users to authorities.] [2]
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