this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Proton

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Empowering you to choose a better internet where privacy is the default. Protect yourself online with Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive. Proton Pass and SimpleLogin.

Proton Mail is the world's largest secure email provider. Swiss, end-to-end encrypted, private, and free.

Proton VPN is the world’s only open-source, publicly audited, unlimited and free VPN. Swiss-based, no-ads, and no-logs.

Proton Calendar is the world's first end-to-end encrypted calendar that allows you to keep your life private.

Proton Drive is a free end-to-end encrypted cloud storage that allows you to securely backup and share your files. It's open source, publicly audited, and Swiss-based.

Proton Pass Proton Pass is a free and open-source password manager which brings a higher level of security with rigorous end-to-end encryption of all data (including usernames, URLs, notes, and more) and email alias support.

SimpleLogin lets you send and receive emails anonymously via easily-generated unique email aliases.

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[–] [email protected] 132 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Man, Proton sure has gone up hill lately.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago (2 children)

My issue with them is that they make their lower tier plans too enticing. I've wanted to upgrade to pro for all the fancy gizmos but the basic mail plan is just too good a deal to upgrade.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 8 months ago

Their en-goodifying trend is concerning to be sure, it's almost like they want users to value their service. It's so confusing in today's business world.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Unlimited for seven or so years now, never regretted it in the slightest. I feel like they throw some bonus to you whenever they can - under promise, over deliver. I've been burned a lot by companies that became evil over time, hence I'm careful with praise but so far Proton has been one of the most pleasant customer experiences I had.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

For real. Why haven't I given them money yet?

[–] [email protected] 68 points 8 months ago (6 children)

I still remember how ludicrous it was when Gmail offered 1GB for free. What did Hotmail give us? Like 50Mbs?

[–] [email protected] 50 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I remember when Google offered "unlimited" for free.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They still do if you can store data as a video file on Youtube.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Write your data as base64 string and scroll it star wars intro style. Bam, unlimited storage on Google via YouTube once you write an ocr to base64 decoder.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

im sure there are some image steganography techniques that could also apply to video. i'd be very surprised if there aren't people hiding data in videos already.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

There are. A few months ago I've seen a Github project aimed at exactly that, already functional at the time

P.S. found https://github.com/DvorakDwarf/Infinite-Storage-Glitch

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Until your video gets compressed — anything that damages the pixels would probably destroy the data completely.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

I’ve definitely seen image steganography techniques that survive lossy compression.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

I'm pretty sure I have 1TB of storage on yahoo email.

...Yahoo though, so I'm moving to proton

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I started with Hotmail back when it was 2 mb.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Wow. I guess we didn't really send attachments that often back then and 2mb was plenty.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well and the attachments we did send were rarely anywhere close to 2MB. Uploading 2MBs on dial-up was TORTURE, especially my shitty rural dial-up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Spending fuckin a half hour to download a shitty quality mp3 of FFVIII Eyes on Me using a download resumer after it fuCKING FAILED FOR THE THIRD TIME

IT’S ONLY A COUPLE MEGS HOLY ASS

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

I've had ProtonVPN for 3 years now and I have 0 complaints.

It's the only VPN I've ever used that doesn't have less bandwidth on VPN than off. I regularly saturate my gigabit connection for hours at a time with 0 issues or throttling, and tunnel my torrent client's traffic through it 24/7. It also allows me to watch 4k content on mobile data without throttling and circumvent my phone provider's restrictions on hotspot/tethering that they want me to pay $30/month to remove.

Best $5/month I've ever spent.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I had no idea you could use a VPN to circumvent mobile data throttling. Fucking amazing info, mate.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you can, it's actually a bad thing because it means the Telco is violating net neutrality by picking and choosing certain traffic to zero-rate.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not all countries are lucky enough to have net neutrality...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

It violates the principle and is therefore a bad thing regardless of what the law is.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Glad to help!

The reason it works is because telecom providers use DNS-based throttling instead of deep packet inspection to selectively limit bandwidth to video sites. They have a massive list of all the popular streaming sites (YouTube, AppleTV, Netflix, etc.) and then throttle the sites in the list. When providers say "unlimited 480p video streaming" they actually have no clue what video quality you are watching. They just pick a bandwidth limitation that would only allow 480p video to play without buffering.

They could in theory use network traffic analysis to identify video websites which have bursty bandwidth patterns (due to the nature of video buffers), but this would be more difficult, more expensive, and extremely prone to false positives.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This doesn't make any sense. Your phone service provider can't see what you're doing, but surely they can see how much data you're using.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Apparently you have to forward an email address to get the 1GB. I downloaded it and set it up. I was able to lie and say I moved the rest of the applications by just saying done.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Great incentive, very clever move by Proton. All stuff that’s a good idea anyway but it’s just way too easy to “get around to all that later.” Then it’s 2034 already and Google still has you leashed tight.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Very good - unless Proton Mail is their first email account. Forcing (or strongly encouraging) them to have a Google account first is counterproductive.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

I use them as my main e-mail and my Gmail for all the spam shit.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (5 children)

So serious question. Is proton worth it and easy to work with?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've been using their Unlimited plan for over a year. ~$8 a month for half a TB of cloud storage, automatic photo backup on mobile, fantastic web email and mobile email client, and a great VPN that allows for port forwarding and P2P-optimized servers.

Totally worth it for me. Great feature set, especially on their email. Everything runs smoothly on my systems. I run Linux on everything and their web client has always been really clean and responsive. Their mobile client too. I use GrapheneOS and haven't noticed any issues with their email or VPN app so far.

Made switching from Outlook & Gmail super easy. I don't miss those trash services at all, especially not Outlook lol.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I use them for email. They're exactly like any regular email except with the potential for encryption.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I used proton mail for a long time on a paid plan with a bunch of aliases, but dumped it eventually, now I just have a free email acct with them.

I pay for their VPN.

I dont use proton drive despite the cool name. 5gb isn't enough for me to care, and I dont care enough to pay for cloud storage at this point in my life.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Give it a try and see. I'm currently looking at moving from them, I shifted everything google workspace to proton in Nov and my main issue has been with Drive the whole time. The email is ok, but as it's all encrypted the search is next to useless.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

free plan is definitely not worth switching to;

You short think of it as a primarily paid service with a free trial, not a "free, but with paid subscription for extra stuff" type of deal

they even go as far as to attach an ad with a referral link to all of your outbound mail on the free tier (btw hiding the fact that this happens is kinda scummy but whatever; if you're curious, it's all the way at the bottom of the settings menu, and locked unless you pay up)

also, it defaults to proton.me, but some large websites ~~including ph~~ don't accept these, protonmail.com addresses are a lot more reliable

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

This is actually kind of huge. I use a variety of cloud storage providers but Proton are the only one I trust to not need Cryptomator!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Niiiice. I use a free account for some backups of some files and this is definitely a huge plus.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I got this email too... And I'm already paying for Mail Plus so it doesn't apply to me

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