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Clarifying ProtonMail and Huawei

by gavingmiller on 9/9/19, 1:50 AM with 64 comments

• by dewey on 9/9/19, 7:55 AM

  Looks like Bloomberg is doing the same as with the "implant" rumors and Supermicro a few months ago.

  Gruber has a very nice disclaimer at the bottom of posts mentioning Bloomberg now:

  "Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” last October — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Bloomberg’s institutional credibility is severely damaged, and everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract the story or provide evidence that it was true."

  https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/09/05/gurman-touch-id

• by uallo on 9/9/19, 1:56 PM

  I wonder why ProtonMail is getting so much negative press. They are releasing articles like that to clarify "the truth" on a regular base. Even here on HackerNews, there are so many negative voices repeating the same things over and over again. Even and especially those that (seem to) have been rectified by ProtonMail. Usually, the people here seem to be neutral and fact-based, but as soon as ProtonMail is involved many are getting wild.

  While I have an inactive account at PM, I'm not involved with them in any way. This is just an observation that I have made over the recent years.

• by ztjio on 9/9/19, 6:59 AM

  As if I needed more evidence that Bloomberg is below 0 on the credibility scale. They are officially a tabloid to me now.

• by stakhanov on 9/9/19, 10:07 AM

  At the risk of making myself a punching-bag for downvoting, here.

  Bloomberg is a source that investors and traders trust with getting them some level of access to the rumour mill (in the spirit of the saying that exists among traders that goes "buy the rumour, sell the news"). The problem here is that, fact or fiction, rumours affect the financial markets, and not knowing about them puts a market participant at a disadvantage.

  The article starts by saying in indicative mood "ProtonMail is in talks with Huawei Technologies Co. about including its encrypted email service in future mobile devices [...]" ...I don't really see a problem with that part of the statement since they were indeed in talks of some kind, and there's a certain bandwidth of what "including" could mean. It could just mean "making available through Huawei AppGallery", so there is nothing wrong with using indicative mood here.

  In the second paragraph, the article switches the modality and says "The Swiss company’s service COULD come preloaded ..." Now, it could of course be the case, as people are alleging, that they just completely made that shit up and MANUFACTURED a rumour. But it could also be the case that they were reflecting a rumour that was already out there and sufficiently widespread that they thought that investors and traders should know about it. They used subjunctive mood using the auxiliary verb COULD to signal that there was something going on here about the modality of the statement.

  ProtonMail speculated that a misunderstanding of their earlier announcement must have been the basis of Bloomberg's article. But I guess we'll never find out if that was indeed so.

  ProtonMail clarified their earlier announcement and took issue with the word "partnership" being used to describe their relationship with Huawei, but, interestingly, they did not come flat out to respond to these assertions. For example, they did not say that preloading was not a topic that was discussed.

  Now, it stands to reason that preloading would amount to Huawei handing a huge chunk of marketshare to ProtonMail, and then it's up to users to make up their minds about the likelihood of Huawei asking for quid-pro-quo and ProtonMail's response.

  Rather than there being no basis at all for the Bloomberg article, another scenario could be that ProtonMail saw that making-up-of-minds play out on social media in response to the Bloomberg article and decided to do a one-eighty on that as a result.

  ...I guess we'll never know.

• by sessy on 9/9/19, 7:04 AM

  It's a recurring theme: Media outlets publish whatever they 'want' to believe with little due diligence and the product makers have to scramble to put up clarifiers.

• by zenlot on 9/9/19, 7:06 AM

  I'd me more interested in their clarification on NordVPN, ProtonMail/VPN and the data gathering agency Tesonet.

• by t0astbread on 9/9/19, 9:01 AM

  Does an F-Droid release mean Proton will finally remove their GSF dependencies?

• by turc1656 on 9/9/19, 1:14 PM

  I'd like to point out one thing. The people at ProtonMail are clearly under the belief that they are only subject to Swiss law because they are located in Switzerland. That's not my understanding of the law at all. Granted, it seems like an obvious conclusion but legally the truth seems to be different.

  For instance, at my employer we had training on the GDPR rules and how they relate to us. We are a US based company with many global clients. However, we do have a physical presence in some EU countries so that does differ with the ProtonMail situation. However, in our training we were told that our business presence in the EU is irrelevant to the actual law because we would still be bound by it as it relates to our global clients. The layman's explanation we were given was that if you are using the internet to conduct digital business across country borders then you are pretty much subject to the laws of both nations between the client and the service provider.

  That generally translates to defaulting to whichever law is more restrictive. For companies like Facebook and Google, they've rolled out GDPR style protections for everyone globally because it's much easier to do so than to only have it apply to a portion of their users, but that's a separate story.

  I think everyone intuitively understands and knows this to be true. We can all think of cases where hackers have committed crimes that may only violate, for example, US laws and have been tried and convicted of such crimes even though they were committed overseas but the aggrieved party is the US or its citizens.

  I think what ProtonMail is really saying is that because Switzerland doesn't have laws similar to China in this regard, China won't be able to convince Switzerland to extradite them to China for prosecution.

  That's also why Russia threatened to ban them - because they know there is zero chance they will be willingly handed over to Russian authorities for this.

• by Mbaqanga on 9/9/19, 10:58 AM

  Well that's kind of dramatically different than how the press is portraying it.

• by humble_engineer on 9/9/19, 3:12 PM

  I was a gmail user a few months ago and I switched my entire life over to protonmail because I didn't want to contribute to Google. I would have to say the most frustrating part of the switch is the somewhat perplexed look I get from people when they ask why I don't have gmail, they have to learn to spell proton, fascinating. I would imagine we will see quite a few hit pieces against protonmail in the coming years, and likely other email providers as more and more people make the switch to a service that markets privacy.

• by scoobyyabbadoo on 9/9/19, 7:29 PM

  I don't understand why people ever believed Protonmail's privacy claims to begin with? Not that I have reason to doubt them either, but their security seems nothing more than an unverified promise? I'm skeptical of my privacy protection coming from small companies that could easily be bought outright by governmental or political groups.

• by xgapp on 9/9/19, 8:21 AM

  By posting this you're practically caving to the mass media. In the long term, it's best for everybody that you ignore them. Never pay the ransom or they will become more powerful.

• by paulcarroty on 9/9/19, 12:12 PM

  This article sounds like suspicious excuse, really. I don't wan't to touch any device/service affiliated with Huawei/Chinese intelligence.

  Is there any good&reputable replacement for ProtonMail?

• by rshnotsecure on 9/9/19, 2:49 PM

  ProtonMail does not support Yubikeys. I would like to ask all of HN to think seriously about this and what this means. ProtonMail does many things exactly right. This 1 oversight suggests something very very scary going on at the organization.

  HN does not allow you to delete comments. I would ask that if you think that not having Yubikeys does not require a significant and immediate answer from the ProtonMail team, to sign your name (I will) at the bottom of your response. If you can’t do that, perhaps provide a burner email address.

  Dan Ehrlich

  dan@ehrlichserver.com

  CISSP, CCSP, CISM

  EDIT: spacing between my signature, change of comment to commentS

• by rossmohax on 9/9/19, 6:54 AM

  I'd prefer to see them spending time on polishing their mobile app, which lacks in UX in important areas. For instance offline access to received, but yet unopened emails simply doesn't work. There is a (mis)feature where email bodies are downloaded only on notification, but in my case emails remain unavailable offline and Protonmail support was unhelpful.

  But even if email-via-notification worked, it is still pretty much unusable. My usecase is to get to wifi, download emails and get offline, but with Proton mail I'd have to be super careful not to have my app open when enabling connection to wifi, otherwise it instantly downloads all headers and shows no notification, because app is in a foreground, after that there is simply no way to download message bodies other than opening them one by one in all folders. Surprisingly support saw not problem with this UX either.