TL;DR for those of you who won't bother reading:

NordVPN and Protonmail share a CEO. They claim to operate in Panama/Switzerland, but both companies are shell companies, owned fully by PROTONVPN LT, UAB, which is located in Lithuania, which has a law requiring 6 months of data retention (this matters, because, even though they tell you they keep no logs, they are legally required to maintain them). Finally, the headquarters of PROTONVPN LT, UAB, is in the very same building as TesoNet, a Lithuanian data mining service. ProtonVPN claims that the colocation is just happenstance, and they don't actually work with TesoNet, but researchers found NordVPN using privacy certificates signed by TesoNet in their official app binaries.

This also applies to DuckDuckGo as well, who was started by (((Gabriel Weinberg))) to capitalize on all of those wanting to jump ship from google, and does track clicks and links (though it claims not to). An article by the timesOfIsreal on Weinberg's site, which didn't have any traffic worth speaking of until the Snowden limited hangout, which pushed everyone even mildy privacy-aware straight into the dragnet.

Notes on "stealth archives": The archive is a zip file of the page as retrieved a few days ago by me via wget, renamed as a png so the imagehost would accept it. Rename to a zip file to view, or, if on linux, 7z can open it as is.

I call them "stealth archives" because the image host can't tell a download to view the content apart from a download by a browser to display the page, the ISP can only see the DNS resolves to an image host (which gives no hints), and it bypasses the (((internet Wayback Machine))), which watches who is interested in what sites and when, and will memoryhole 'dangerous' sites.

BTW, if the owner of imggoat sees this, your site crashes, showing a traceback, when uploading a not-png named as a png. Could be a security vulnerability, just throwing that out there.

Shoutout to @BloodAndHonour, whose recent recommendation of NordVPN prompted this post.

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modsrcuntz 6.6 years ago

So what are truely the best email and search engines...any?

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alele-opathic 6.6 years ago

This is the exact question which can't have any trustworthy answer. Although I expound on why here, the gist is that you have no way of discerning genuine replies from shill answers. Additionally, shills target these questions because they directly impact consumer decision making, meaning there is a very high likelihood noise will exceed signal in a question like that.

Just set aside 3 or 4 hours this upcoming weekend, and put the topic to rest for yourself.

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GlassSmith 6.6 years ago

Just set aside 3 or 4 hours this upcoming weekend, and put the topic to rest for yourself.

I tried that before (only I spent a lot more than 4 hours) and came up with nothing, I couldn't find any concrete evidence that pointed me in one direction or another. My conclusion was that short of having your own email server in some shithole country there is no way to ensure security... and even then it's useless because you would still be forced to communicate with people who haven't taken such measures so your efforts are in vain; this is on top of the fact that your private email is likely to be filtered out by just about every major email provider.

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alele-opathic 6.6 years ago

I tried that before (only I spent a lot more than 4 hours) and came up with nothing

This is part of the problem - there really isn't an easy way to know whether or not some entity can be trusted anymore.

My conclusion was that short of having your own email server in some shithole country

The server doesn't need to be located elsewhere, if it is, then you are relying on trust and reputation again. It's easy enough to run your own with a domain (and an ISP that'll assign you a static IP), like what this reply describes.

there is no way to ensure security

The problem is twofold - the first is all of the email being stored on external servers (which you can mitigate by running your own), and the second is the protocols themselves, which have no ideal solution at the moment. The best idea would be to use PGP with your friends who will tolerate it, and look/wait for a solution/better protocol for those who won't (there are some ideas out there, if you feel like looking around).

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