You'll note that Proton's PR only mentions the second date - " last one on Sep 6 with a 48-hour deadline."
Proton doesn't mention that the first email from Phrack which Proton ignored was weeks prior to that, which is what led to the second email in the first place.
You'll also note that Proton doesn't mention that their Abuse Team refused to re-anable the account after the article author did the appeals process, as per Phrack's timeline at the top of their article.
That's a great point. I guess at this point it'd be ideal for them to treat this an incident and do a proper postmortem with timelines and decision calculus.
But that would be contrary to their clear intention thus far: to sweep this under the rug. /s
I had previously liked Proton. I started seeing bits and pieces of info about their security being lackluster over the past year or so, causing doubt about their credibility. I'm definitely done with them after this.
This is honestly sad to see. I use Proton and advocate it to others. This does make me rethink my position somewhat - although I’d argue it’s still better than Google / Microsoft-owned email services.
> you're accessing content paid for by adverts, but you aren't contributing to that payment.
If the content is paid for by adverts, then of course I am not contributing to that payment. Because I am not an advertising company, so by your own logic I didn't pay for the content. What's the problem?
You are paying for it. Just not directly. You’re paying the advertiser with your attention, who then pays the website for the privilege to do so. Whether you think that’s OK or not is a different issue, but you are paying, even if you’re not the customer.
Just because you don’t directly pay for something doesn’t mean you don’t do so indirectly. For example, Facebook makes almost all their revenue from ads, but advertisers won’t pay them if users don’t visit. So by visiting Facebook (if you do), you’re keeping them afloat.
To create a safety net for yourself (and perhaps your family)? So that if you were to incur unexpected catastrophic expenses, or lose your job, you would still be able to sustain yourself?
That’s a fair point, but the amount of money needed for those things isn’t insanely high for me. I don’t have kids, don’t own a car, and have pretty low living expenses.
There’s always another job to get. I can always spend less. If something’s truly catastrophic (like healthcare), I just wouldn’t pay the bill. I rent (not interested in owning property) so my exposure there is pretty limited.
I have a pretty big stack of credit cards and would just use those if I absolutely had to. I don’t carry a balance on them now so that’s a lot of freedom in a truly worse-case-scenario.
Plus, I have a chronic illness so I tend to not be too worried about long-long-term. How long do I really want/need to sustain myself for?
> it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.
To see the absurdity of this position just replace "view ads" with the following:
I would stop content creators from breaking into my home and taking money from my wallet in the middle of the night, but I don't because it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.
It is not the responsibility of consumer to accept harmful practices because they're the only practices in broad use.
> even if its pretty clear at this point some of his scores are dodgy.
"dodgy"? Quite the understatement there. This man has made fraudulent claims, has held fraudulent records and, most importantly, has sued people who told the truth.
Defending this person by downplaying their scores as "dodgy" is ludicrous.
Proton doesn't mention that the first email from Phrack which Proton ignored was weeks prior to that, which is what led to the second email in the first place.
You'll also note that Proton doesn't mention that their Abuse Team refused to re-anable the account after the article author did the appeals process, as per Phrack's timeline at the top of their article.