I stopped using Proton products last year when they gave a donation to Bellingcat, but hell, if you want a free VPN use Proton and let them cover the costs!
Proton, known for its privacy-centric email service Proton Mail, announced at the end of 2023 that it would help raise money for controversial group Bellingcat, a documented proxy British intelligence operation, through its annual Lifetime Account Charity Fundraiser.
If you read about how it was chosen it was elected by a community poll and they mentioned they didnt really verify anything. Yeah, ridiculous thing to do, but possible for a lib that doesnt know what bellingcat is, and they later apologized take it as you want, theyre obviously libs and the other alternatives arent any better, and are probably worse
you could always host your own mail of course but that has its own issues too, you obviously cant host your own vpn so the only option is tor which can be very messy to use regularly
I didn't have time last year to move to another email service, so unfortunately I needed to renew my Proton Mail subscription. I plan to move to Forward Email. I am going to get the team plan so I can create email accounts for my family. I also plan to use IVPN.
Edit: Just learned IVPN disabled port forwarding. Damn, that was the reason I was going to use them. I may need a IVPN or MulladVPN account and a separate VPN for port forwarding for torrents. Perhaps AirVPN.
Edit 2: Wait, what do you mean you can't self-host your own VPN? I am going to use Wireguard and a VPS service to run a dedicated server from home available to the Internet and use the VPS service to hide my IP. It's often cheaper to run your own VPN (with some limitations and tradeoffs), plus certain ISPs allow Tor exit relays. There's also alternatives to Tor, such as I2P, which is good for torrents.
as to 2 i do use wireguard and so on on occasion but its not really a good way to obfuscate who you are to some random website or bypass a firewall (unless you own a server in china or something)
ive heard of i2p but afaik it has similar issues with slowness as tor, hosting your own exit relay from that list of isps is still going to result in excessive latency
im talking stuff like daily driver privacy, not 'organizing a revolution' privacy, which really shouldnt be done on the internet to begin with
The purpose of WireGuard in my instance is to hide my IP as I would be self-hosting a website with my home ISP. But yeah, VPNs are not really great for privacy and mostly just serve to hide your IP on peer-to-peer multiplayer gaming, bypass region locks, etc. You would need to take extra steps to maintain anonymity (VPN isn't really one of them), such as hardening your web browser to resist against fingerprinting. I2P is slow, yes, and the list of ISPs good for hosting Tor exit relays was to show ISPs that are lenient on people hosting various, risky things. I was just confused when you mentioned self-hosting a vpn wasn't viable, as it is, but with different costs and may or may not work for certain use cases. Having better security and privacy does tend to come at the cost of performance.
I also agree organizing a revolution should involve relying on as little of the internet as possible, especially when shit hits the fan.
Are there any other decent alternatives for mail that arent just 'store in plaintext on our server'. Of course it will never be perfect but my biggest concern is always weird sysadmins and ransoms, theyre always the most likely threat to an average person
edit: I also feel like proton is fairly 'normie' and most people wont flinch at the email address
I stopped using Proton products last year when they gave a donation to Bellingcat, but hell, if you want a free VPN use Proton and let them cover the costs!
Proton Mail: Imperialist Stooge? - via Propaganda in Focus
Donating to an intelligence agency should be the biggest red flag for everyone here.
I mean how could you get more sus than that?
If you read about how it was chosen it was elected by a community poll and they mentioned they didnt really verify anything. Yeah, ridiculous thing to do, but possible for a lib that doesnt know what bellingcat is, and they later apologized
take it as you want, theyre obviously libs and the other alternatives arent any better, and are probably worse
you could always host your own mail of course but that has its own issues too, you obviously cant host your own vpn so the only option is tor which can be very messy to use regularly
I didn't have time last year to move to another email service, so unfortunately I needed to renew my Proton Mail subscription. I plan to move to Forward Email. I am going to get the team plan so I can create email accounts for my family. I also plan to use IVPN.
Edit: Just learned IVPN disabled port forwarding. Damn, that was the reason I was going to use them. I may need a IVPN or MulladVPN account and a separate VPN for port forwarding for torrents. Perhaps AirVPN.
Edit 2: Wait, what do you mean you can't self-host your own VPN? I am going to use Wireguard and a VPS service to run a dedicated server from home available to the Internet and use the VPS service to hide my IP. It's often cheaper to run your own VPN (with some limitations and tradeoffs), plus certain ISPs allow Tor exit relays. There's also alternatives to Tor, such as I2P, which is good for torrents.
as to 2 i do use wireguard and so on on occasion but its not really a good way to obfuscate who you are to some random website or bypass a firewall (unless you own a server in china or something)
ive heard of i2p but afaik it has similar issues with slowness as tor, hosting your own exit relay from that list of isps is still going to result in excessive latency
im talking stuff like daily driver privacy, not 'organizing a revolution' privacy, which really shouldnt be done on the internet to begin with
The purpose of WireGuard in my instance is to hide my IP as I would be self-hosting a website with my home ISP. But yeah, VPNs are not really great for privacy and mostly just serve to hide your IP on peer-to-peer multiplayer gaming, bypass region locks, etc. You would need to take extra steps to maintain anonymity (VPN isn't really one of them), such as hardening your web browser to resist against fingerprinting. I2P is slow, yes, and the list of ISPs good for hosting Tor exit relays was to show ISPs that are lenient on people hosting various, risky things. I was just confused when you mentioned self-hosting a vpn wasn't viable, as it is, but with different costs and may or may not work for certain use cases. Having better security and privacy does tend to come at the cost of performance.
I also agree organizing a revolution should involve relying on as little of the internet as possible, especially when shit hits the fan.
Yup, another red flag. I think they're directly CIA controlled. https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/
Are there any other decent alternatives for mail that arent just 'store in plaintext on our server'. Of course it will never be perfect but my biggest concern is always weird sysadmins and ransoms, theyre always the most likely threat to an average person
edit: I also feel like proton is fairly 'normie' and most people wont flinch at the email address