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neobrain commented on US tech rules the European market   proton.me/blog/us-tech-ru... · Posted by u/devonnull
notepad0x90 · 18 days ago
He did in fact support the GOP since they will tackle "big-tech abuse" more (aka benefit proton): https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...

I can only assume they're actively donating to the GOP and trying lobby. In other words, it's not even support for trump that's a problem, but willingness and desire to get into bed with political parties that favor them in the moment (shouldn't at all).

neobrain · 18 days ago
> He did in fact support the GOP since they will tackle "big-tech abuse" more

The context was that some GOP-affiliated politicians attended certain meetings for supporting tech regulation whereas democrats didn't. The article doesn't mention this original context but talks about the secondary tweets as if that had been Yen's primary message.

> I can only assume they're actively donating to the GOP and trying lobby. In other words, it's not even support for trump that's a problem, but willingness and desire to get into bed with political parties that favor them in the moment (shouldn't at all).

Do you have any other data point that supports these ideas, or are you extrapolating from this single specific event?

neobrain commented on US tech rules the European market   proton.me/blog/us-tech-ru... · Posted by u/devonnull
notepad0x90 · 19 days ago
I don't know why proton's leadership just doesn't shut up and make money while providing awesome pro-privacy services.

Is coca-cola american? most people would say so but their hq is in china!

These multi-nationals don't have 'branches' in Europe, they are incorporated there as well, that's why they're called multi-national. they pay European taxes and are subject to European laws such as GDPR and other data-residency laws, which means their data-center, and a large chunk of their support staff (Europeans are cheaper than Americans to hire/pay) are in Europe.

Should Americans avoid Proton and its products so they don't rely on Europe? Hypocrite much there friend? Should we avoid European cars? Maybe Ozempic/glp-1 medication should be manufactured by US companies in America (Denmark's GDP is seeing most of it's multi-digit growth thanks to American Ozempic usage).

Proton's leadership supported Trump and the GOP and now they want to promote nationalistic brand loyalty?

These people make it hard to be against trump's b.s. tariffs and hostility against our allies. Proton has a good product, why isn't that enough? They also have to meddle in politics and make it about "America vs Europe" or "Republicans vs Democrats"?

You know what would be great? if employee and customer owned companies replaced even the likes of proton so we can democratically vote incompetent leadership like this out. Make good products, let the products sell themselves. Why should Europeans have to put up with inferior products for the sake of nationalism? If you want to support Europe so much, tell us about how great your company's product is and how superior it is compared to American alternatives, I'd be down for that. Europeans can and do buy European goods and services of better quality, try finding a Swizz that enjoys American cheese and chocolate, or a European that drives oversized American pickup trucks.

Unless you're speaking as an individual or you are an elected politician, don't misuse whatever platform you have to meddle in politics.

neobrain · 19 days ago
> Proton's leadership supported Trump and the GOP

... this again? Come on.

The CEO once expressed support for Gail Slater as head of antitrust and subsequently criticized lack of effective work towards tech regulation on the Democratic side in the same social media thread.

Calling that support for either Trump or the entire GOP is a massive stretch, and throwing the claim out without context borders on disinformation.

neobrain commented on Samsung Removes Bootloader Unlocking with One UI 8   sammyguru.com/breaking-sa... · Posted by u/1una
wackget · a month ago
My response would be it doesn't make any sense. There are so many reasons why blocking rooting is a stupid idea. Just some of them:

- If you're capable of rooting a device then you're capable of understanding the risks which come with doing so.

- The number of users who root their devices will always be so comparitively tiny that the increased risk of data exfil is incredibly small. Also, similarly to above, if you're technical enough to root your device then you're probably not regularly putting yourself at risk by downloading shady apps etc. anyway.

- Rather than decreasing security, rooting allows you to enhance the security of your device by installing lower-level tools and, most importantly, removing all the bloatware crap which comes on most phones. This reduces the surface area of attack.

Let's be honest and admit that the only reason to prevent users from rooting their phones is to protect companies' profits by ensuring users can't fight back against the blatant tracking, data mining, and analytics capture which is so valuable to companies.

neobrain · a month ago
> Let's be honest and admit that the only reason to prevent users from rooting their phones is to protect companies' profits by ensuring users can't fight back against the blatant tracking, data mining, and analytics capture which is so valuable to companies.

I'm with you on the general sentiment, but how do the companies that block rooting benefit from any of the nefarious activities you mentioned? Those are executed by different organizations, typically.

neobrain commented on Samsung Removes Bootloader Unlocking with One UI 8   sammyguru.com/breaking-sa... · Posted by u/1una
Tharre · a month ago
No secure element, no memory tagging support, no proper cellular baseband isolation, no verified boot, taking months to ship security updates .. the list is long.

From a security/privacy perspective the fairphone is on the worse side of options unfortunately.

neobrain · a month ago
> From a security/privacy perspective the fairphone is on the worse side of options unfortunately.

Compared to Pixel phones this is without a doubt true, but how does it compare against your average mid-range Android device? Do those typically have any of the features you mentioned?

neobrain commented on Cops say criminals use a Google Pixel with GrapheneOS – I say that's freedom   androidauthority.com/why-... · Posted by u/pabs3
subscribed · a month ago
From what I found they're brilliant on repairability, but not so much on security, which is a bummer :(

Couple of pieces on hardware:

- Fairphone does not include a secure element making brute-forcing PIN trivial

- Fairphone 4 used TEST KEYS for verified boot: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/bootloader-avb-keys-used-in-ro... The above alone shows insecurity by design.

I cannot find any of Fairphone technical documentation that would provide details on their implementation of the TEE/HSM. As of now I believe it's only Pixel's Titan and Samsung's KNOX that provide a discrete secure element on Android devices.

Android project recommends secure element to process sensitive data: https://source.android.com/docs/security/best-practices/hard... What it's supposed to provide: https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/keystore

On vendor: Drivers, firmware patches, OS upgrades are a necessity, not an option: most security and privacy updates are not backported. Vendor can't just wait for AOSP to deliver all the patches. Vendor must show a track record providing updates to their hardware

- After a lengthy two-year delay, the phone got a taste of Android 12 in February 2023, with Android 13 arriving relatively quickly in October 2023. For Android 14, Fairphone promised to roll out the update in H2, 2024, almost a year after Google released it. Now, with less than two months left in the year, the company is postponing the update's release to 2025. -- https://www.androidpolice.com/fairphone-4-long-delayed-andro...

- their Security Bulletin patches are consistently 1-2 months behind

- Fairphone 5 is still on Android 14 (since Jul 2024). Android 15 has been released in September 2024. Year and a half later AOSP is on Android 16.

- Fairphone 6 is still on Android 15

- Fairphone 5 and 6 latest security patches are from June 2025: https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/244637136412...

For comparison GrapheneOS had eight releases in July alone (GrapheneOS had a full A16 release on 30th of June for all supported devices). Security patches are usually released within one-three days (or earlier, from the tree, without waiting for being published in the bundle)

GOS Release for Pixel 9 was ready three days after the device launch.

Exploitability matrix as per Cellebrite: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/updated-cellebrite-iphon... That supports the claim the hardware + OS holds.

neobrain · a month ago
Just adding minor context:

> - Fairphone 5 is still on Android 14 (since Jul 2024).

The Android 15 update was actually released this week! https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/186828004651...

> - Fairphone 6 is still on Android 15

Android 16 was released less than half a month before the release of the FP6, which itself is less than a month ago. Seems reasonable that it wouldn't ship the latest version under those circumstances.

neobrain commented on How to Firefox   kau.sh/blog/how-to-firefo... · Posted by u/Vinnl
hypertexthero · a month ago
neobrain · a month ago
Also worth noting it's automatically disabled if telemetry ("Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla") is disabled.

Though even without disabling it, PPA is currently in limited rollout and only visible to Mozilla websites in the first place, so it would hardly cause any harm for now.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/

neobrain commented on Simplest C++ Callback, from SumatraPDF   blog.kowalczyk.info/a-sts... · Posted by u/jandeboevrie
oezi · 2 months ago
I think the one key downside for std::function+lambda which resonated with me was bad ergonomics during debugging.

My unanswered question on this from 8 years ago:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41385439/named-c-lambdas...

If there was a way to name lambdas for debug purposes then all other downsides would be irrelevant (for most usual use cases of using callbacks).

neobrain · 2 months ago
> If there was a way to name lambdas for debug purposes then all other downsides would be irrelevant (for most usual use cases of using callbacks).

Instead of fully avoiding lambdas, you can use inheritance to give them a name: https://godbolt.org/z/YTMo6ed8T

Sadly that'll only work for captureless lambdas, however.

neobrain commented on Telegram, the FSB, and the Man in the Middle   istories.media/en/stories... · Posted by u/xoredev
fsflover · 2 months ago
A few relevant links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39445976

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29888228

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42788647

Also, Signal forces you to use Android or iOS while knowing that "Apple and Google confirm governments spy on users through push notifications ", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38555810

Matrix is the actual solution.

neobrain · 2 months ago
Your links are a bunch of user comments?

The push notification payloads don't contain message/sender data. Signal also runs fine without Google services, which avoids any potential problem entirely.

neobrain commented on Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law   techradar.com/vpn/vpn-pri... · Posted by u/taubek
neobrain · 3 months ago
No, he didn't. You're thinking of the story where he expressed support for Gail Slater as head of antitrust and where he subsequently criticized lack of effective work towards tech regulation on the Democratic side.

Implying support for Trump here borderlines deceitful disinformation.

neobrain commented on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising [...] across Europe has no legal basis   iccl.ie/digital-data/eu-r... · Posted by u/mschuster91
sensanaty · 3 months ago
There's lots of ways to address it, depends on what the feature is. There's always ways you can spin it, like going the technical route: "That would require a new column which would add X to the size of the DB and thus our costs would rise by Y", "That would require X, Y and Z investment from these 3 teams just to add this 1 new column" etc. Usually the people pushing this stuff are non-technical so you can just give them any technical mumbo jumbo and they'll give up.

I also tend to highlight that we do have historical data that nobody is looking at as-is, what's different about this new data? What are the actual long-term plans for the data? Can we reuse what we already have for what we're aiming for here?

These days my default is "Oooh we'll have to check in with legal on that one, not sure if it's GDPR-friendly to include this new column like this". No one likes talking to legal unless they absolutely have to, so most will just drop it.

And unfortunately sometimes there's no winning it no matter what, so you have to "disagree and move on" as it were. If it's some manager's pet project, well, you're SOL for the most part.

> or did you find a resonating way to point out the negative effects on users?

Unfortunately I've found this to seldom work unless you're working somewhere where privacy is part of the value prop. Even pointing things out like "How would you feel if the DB were to leak and all your info were to be made public?" elicits 0 response. The marketing people and C-suite that push these kind of boneheaded things forward don't view the users as actual humans, they're all just numbers to them. Will this cause churn? How much? Those are the only questions that matter to them.

neobrain · 3 months ago
Thanks, this is very insightful! Sadly there's no magic trick but this gives me some good ideas next time I find myself in that situation.

u/neobrain

KarmaCake day51March 15, 2014View Original