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by ddoscampaign 3941 days ago
If Snowden or IS uses this service, it's still possible for governments to take you to court Lavabit-style (minus SSL private key) (or Mega or PirateBay) and get a court order to shut you down unless you have colo/VPS hosting in Iceland, Sweden or similar jurisdiction and private DNS registration with a registrar independent from most corporate/diplomatic pressures (definitely not name.com, maybe what piratebay uses: https://www.binero.se or similar with less inflammatory/infamous clients).

Privacy as a service/app cannot be sustainably delivered without being distributed, like TahoeLAFS or i2p. Company-run, centralized service/apps are SPOFs because they're at massive risk of being shutdown or blocked by friendly/unfriendly governments, at their whims, by whomever happens to be in power. The instant email option is partly distributed but the bigger risk is being in the US means US courts, FBI, local police, etc. can grab your provider's servers. name.com is also subject to both Irish and American laws.

Unfortunately, most founders of privacy apps are business naïve and unable to manage their attack surface, making them easy prey to non-technical but more business-savvy folks. This resistance is further compounded by the sunk costs-bias, because what's done is seen as an immovable foundation which can never be torn down and, therefore, it must be worthwhile in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence (e.g., 1950's lifestyle worship leads to cognitive dissonance with climate change). In reality, a venture should be a viewed as a never-ending collection experiments, where the assumptions may be turn out to be terrible to excellent (hopefully nearer to this) and trends/disruptions may move out from under it all.

Good luck and I hope it makes a lot of money before it gets shutdown by Hillary or the Great Firewall of China.

1 comments

Forget even government attackers. The entire point of the product is to avoid trusting them. Except... you still utterly and totally trust them, as there's no way to verify what the form is actually doing.