Cutter wrote on Sep 7, 2021, 20:50:
Ugh, so the best they can do is recommend that people use TOR?

ProtonMail also operates a VPN service called ProtonVPN and points out that Swiss law prohibits the country's courts from compelling a VPN service to log IP addresses. In theory, if Youth for Climate had used ProtonVPN to access ProtonMail, the Swiss court could not have forced the service to expose its "real" IP address. However, the company seems to be leaning more heavily toward recommending Tor for this particular purpose.

I've been paying for ProtonVPN for over a year now. Something I was happy to do in order to support them, but now that they've caved that's over. So is it just going to be whackamole with these companies that you use their service until they're compelled to turn over data or are there any email and/or VPN companies that are secure and situated somewhere they can't be compelled to turn over data - Antarctica? international waters? space? I really don't want to have to deal with another client - TOR - in order to have some privacy online.

According to the article, the law the Swiss courts used only applies to email. VPNs are immune to any court order under Swiss law (for now). Proton Mail doesn't log IPs by default, but under Swiss law can be compelled to log a select individual's IP under court order. It sounds like they had no legal choice.

But ultimately, every VPN company is subject to the laws of it's country.

As Steve Gibson likes to say, the only way to REALLY have a secure conversation with someone is under a blanket, in the middle of an open field, with both of you naked to confirm you're not carrying a recording device. Everything else involves some compromise of security.

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 7, 2021, 20:51:
The secure private email service you use is only as secure and private as the country that hosts it.

The EFF fingerprint tracking checker is cool https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Unsurprisingly, my system did very well. One of the best things a person can do is run a user agent switcher. Make it look like you're surfing from Safari 1.0 on a CP/M one minute then IE on a Windows 3.1 machine the next (hyperbolic examples).

Brave is a pretty good browser and my main browser these days.

I guess if you want to mess with hardware detection, you could browse from within a Virtualbox or VMware linux window running inside your regular OS and just keep default hardware settings. Don't mess with things like fonts.

Not sure how much that would really anonymize you, though. It would depend on the number of other people doing the same thing.

Also haven't really looked at how much the default virtual hardware differs between VMware and Virtualbox.

Mr. Tact wrote on Sep 7, 2021, 21:13:

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 7, 2021, 20:51:
The EFF fingerprint tracking checker is cool https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Interesting. Brave seemed to do pretty well, my scores against the average scores indicated were all better than average (many significantly better). I didn't look over the information closely, but I did notice it incorrectly detected how much RAM I have. I have 32 GB, it detected 8 GB.

It got basically nothing on me. Nothing detected on RAM, CPU, etc. It got that I was using Firefox on Windows and what fonts I had installed. It couldn't even tell if I had an ad-blocker. I guess that should be comforting?

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 7, 2021, 20:51:
The EFF fingerprint tracking checker is cool https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Interesting. Brave seemed to do pretty well, my scores against the average scores indicated were all better than average (many significantly better). I didn't look over the information closely, but I did notice it incorrectly detected how much RAM I have. I have 32 GB, it detected 8 GB.

The secure private email service you use is only as secure and private as the country that hosts it.

The EFF fingerprint tracking checker is cool https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

This comment was edited on Sep 7, 2021, 21:01.

Ugh, so the best they can do is recommend that people use TOR?

ProtonMail also operates a VPN service called ProtonVPN and points out that Swiss law prohibits the country's courts from compelling a VPN service to log IP addresses. In theory, if Youth for Climate had used ProtonVPN to access ProtonMail, the Swiss court could not have forced the service to expose its "real" IP address. However, the company seems to be leaning more heavily toward recommending Tor for this particular purpose.

I've been paying for ProtonVPN for over a year now. Something I was happy to do in order to support them, but now that they've caved that's over. So is it just going to be whackamole with these companies that you use their service until they're compelled to turn over data or are there any email and/or VPN companies that are secure and situated somewhere they can't be compelled to turn over data - Antarctica? international waters? space? I really don't want to have to deal with another client - TOR - in order to have some privacy online.