Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Proton, who I use for mail and various other services, has gone against the wishes of the majority of their userbase as measured by their own survey and implemented an LLM writing assistant in protonmail, which is a real laugh given Protonās main hook is its services are end-to-end encrypted
(supposedly this piece of shit will run locally if you meet these incredibly high system requirements including a high end GPU or recent, high end Apple M chipset and a privacy-violating Chromium-based browser. otherwise it breaks e2e by sending your emails unencrypted to Protonās servers, and they do a lot to try to talk over that fact)
Who is the target audience for this?
People who use Proton are privacy-conscious and mostly (I would argue) tech literate, and yet they shove spicy autocomplete that no one ever needed until two years ago and most people donāt want now because it produces complete horseshit, and spellchecking that every browser under then sun has built in by now.
And then they quietly say you need to use Chromium, so the people who use anything but (like, I donāt know, the majority of privacy-conscious folks who should be their main user base, lol) have their e2e broken?
I really hope they catch a raging firestorm for this.
(Also Iām really pissed right now because used to recommend them to people and now feel like a total jackass for doing that.)
donāt feel bad for making the best choice you could with the information of the past. until we get a workable, interoperable, federated, encrypted communication/online services platform, the choice was to recommend one of the centralized e2e providers. we both chose to recommend Proton and they did this shit, but it could have just as easily been tutanota.
now my brainās going āe2e encrypted federated email but it preferably uses activitypub as a transport and classic email as a fallback, is that anythingā
@mii @self the blog post mentions 70% of ābusiness usersā
Edit: itās āmore than 75%ā of hot air producers
yep! thatās the game theyāre playing. I really donāt give a fuck about Protonās relatively tiny number of enterprise whales, but they make Proton a shitload of money in the short term.
the depressing part is, historically, online services that remain uncompromisingly user-focused tend to stick around roughly forever, while the ones that chase short-term gains and compromise everything else almost always enshittify and fizzle out pretty quick.
Iāve posted at Proton on Mastodon about this with some details on why itās real bad; no reply yet
I linked to your masto post on twitter https://x.com/fasterandworse/status/1813994815991980204
I was reported for posting Eamonās twitter handle on masto
there really are some weird-ass reports from people on fedi sometimes. I imagine it also hits on other platforms, but there we donāt get to see them
I imagine it was reported by proton because they were directly @ in the post :)
fucking wow. so that kinda confirms that:
thatās exactly why itās the point of no return for me ā I canāt trust a company that does this, and Iāll actively advocate against using them
maybe privacy and security are just too precious to trust to something as malicious as a corporation, and I say that knowing Proton just re-incorporated as something that can be called a non-profit but shouldnāt
Jesus fucking christā¦
So where do I switch now? Is this the moment I build my own email server and handle this shit myself? I really donāt wannaā¦
I use tuta and they seem mostly ok.
they have apparently promised they donāt plan on implementing anything AI-related which is good, though Iām honestly hoping for a system where our privacy isnāt entirely reliant on the promises of a single authority
and Iām not saying we should do our own federated e2e email service, but somebody should
ā¦more realistically, Iāll probably switch to tuta when my proton account nears renewal, as Iām not a fan of how much pure unfiltered horseshit Iām seeing them output with the money I paid them
Setting up an email server is really straightforward with simple-nixos-mailserver, highly recommend. No idea how likely you are to be classified as spam though from a new domain
I host my own email and for my day job I run an institutional email system that handles ~50 million messages per week. I canāt recommend hosting email at either end of that scale (or anywhere in between), and I find it difficult to believe that anyone with experience running a mail server would claim itās reasonable or straightforward.
i host my mail services for the last twenty seven years, and yeah, youāre talking shit. starting the smtp daemon is not the same as managing mail server.
this is one of the circles of hell Dante didnāt comprehend when he wrote Inferno
coming up on 18y on mine. my postfix config is almost of legal drinking age in a lot of countries.
modern email ecosystem is a fucking mess.
chance is near 100% though
itās also really, really fucking unpredictable, in the the-other-parties-do-not-reliably-behave-the-same way
used to hate having to debug mail failing to deliver to yahoo, and now lately google has started filling that nicheā¦
eh, nix is experiencing a chudpocalypse at the moment, which might be why youāre catching strays
Saw this in passing earlier and I just laughed
Until indicated otherwise Iām going to presume it was some bizbro PM/PO/whatever pushing it because they really think it should be there āto be able to competeā (because of some laughably idiotic misunderstanding of their own value proposition and pitch)
Tangent: while I mostly run my own servers and services I did a recent assay on whoās reasonable for service shit. Proton kept popping up massively recommended while some occasional critical mentions from folks in anarchist circles, etc - made me a bit š¤Ø and want to dig in more, but also just their product offerings arenāt great. Others I poked into are fastmail and tuta - both seem a fair bit better. Might be worth a look
No surprise that folks in anarchist circles are skeptical of Proton ha. That said, I do know quite a few people in the email āindustryā who are broadly skeptical of Protonās general philosophy/approach to email security, and the way they market their service/offerings.
Fastmail has a great interface and user experience imo, significantly better than any other web client Iāve tried. That said, theyāre not end-to-end encrypted, so theyāre not really trying to fill the same niche as Proton/Tuta.
From their website:
I honestly donāt know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff here (I can barely write functional python scripts lol - so please chime in if Iām completely off base), but this comes across to me as an understandable (and fairly honest) compromise, that is probably adequate for some threat models?
Last time I used Tuta the user experience was pretty clunky, but afaik it is E2EE, so itās probably a better direct alternative to Proton.
re fastmail, david mentioned a thing I wasnāt aware of so theyāre off the list now, more or less just going to forget they exist except as a counter-recommendation
theyāre sorta saying āyeah just use external GPG like beforeā
albeit I will say their reasoning is a bit fucked in the head imo: that āif you canāt trust the serverā shit applies equally for whether itās serving you up the page elements to do message cryptography, or whether itās serving you up a normal webmail client. I think I know/understand where they meant to go with it, but the wording they picked is quite shit
I set up a tuta domain for a thing about a month ago. it couldāve been a bit smoother (esp. domain/dns state checks) but I didnāt find anything immediately jarringly bad - and I was even drunk at the time (which means my diy-able supergrump comes out about this sort of shit). will see how it goes over some longer use :)
Not to downplay what proton mail is doing, but theyāre saying that you can run this locally with a 2 core, 4 thread CPU from 2017 (the i3 7100, which is a 7000 series processor), and a RTX 2060, a GPU that was never considered high end. Perhaps they changed the requirements while you werenāt looking. Or Am I reading this wrong?
only one of the 8 computers I own (and Iām not being cheeky here and counting embedded or retro systems, just laptops and desktops) is physically capable of meeting the modelās minimum requirements, and thatās only if I install chromium on the Windows gaming VM my bigger GPUās dedicated to and access protonmail from there. nothing else I do needs a GPU that big, professional or otherwise ā that hardware exists for games and nothing else. compared with the integrated GPUs most people have, a 2060ās fucking massive.
do you see how these incredibly high system requirements (for a webmail client of all things), alongside them already treating the local model as strictly optional, can act as a funnel redirecting people towards the insecure cloud version of the feature? āthis feature only works securely on one of the computers where you write mail, at bestā feels like a dark pattern to me.
Unfortunately, āextremely expensiveā and āhigh-endā arenāt really synonyms, thanks to, yāknow, bitcoin. Of course, I donāt disagree with your argument that having to buy a GPU just to ensure your webmail does what itās advertised to do is, well, dumb.
What I donāt know is what the LLM even is. Did they just tack on Llama to their webmail app and call it a day? Did they train a model? Was it trained on emails? If so, whose emails? What an advertisement that would be: āUse Protonmail to encrypt your emails so that companies like Protonmail canāt use them to train an LLM.ā
Davidās article has some details on what the LLM is. I donāt think itās trained on emails, but that doesnāt make me feel much better.