Web Creator Tim Berners-Lee Joins ProtonMail's Advisory Board

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has joined the advisory board of hosted email service provider ProtonMail. From a report: In a statement, ProtonMail CEO and founder Andy Yen said the addition of Berners-Lee to the company's advisory board was aligned with its goal to "create an internet where people are in control of their information at all times. Our vision is to build an internet where privacy is the default by creating an ecosystem of services accessible to everyone, everywhere, every day," Yen said. Yen said the company already had a past relationship with Berners-Lee, explaining that the idea of ProtonMail was initially conceived at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where the World Wide Web was created.

The addition of Berners-Lee comes almost immediately after ProtonMail received flak for giving a climate activist's IP address to French authorities to comply with a Swiss court order. Addressing the logging of the IP address in a blog post earlier this week, Yen said all companies have to comply with laws, such as court orders, if they operate within 15 miles of land. "No matter what service you use, unless it is based 15 miles offshore in international waters, the company will have to comply with the law," Yen said.

Manners

[beanpott]

That is Sir Tim Berners-Lee to you.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Tim the Webchanter?

Re:[Email] Manners[? Surely you're jesting, Dr F.]

[shanen]

Mod parent funny, but I wish you'd worked the killer rabbit into it.

But it will take some serious magic to fix the mess we've gotten ourselves into.

We can't even fix the spam problem after all these years. Latest flavors blends anti-Jew and pro-gun content with pornography. Largely routed from Facebook with heavy google support. What could possibly go wrong?

(And yeah, I still think we could break the scamming spammers' economic models without falling into a vigilante approach.)

Mixed blessing

[HanzoSpam]

On the one hand, ProtonMail gains prestige. On the other hand, just because the guy invented the World Wide Web doesn't mean he isn't a bit of a dick. I'll reserve judgement on this one.

Re:Mixed blessing

[fafalone]

Especially given the EME debacle where he endorsed binary blobs enforcing DRM for media interests. I'm sure however law enforcement interests "need" to compromise the web is even more important.

Re:

[will_die]

The reason to use protonmail is so that you get an email address not tied to you that can then be used for other sites that actually check for valid email address.
Them gaining prestige does not help with that.

I'll ask now.

[dowhileor]

what about email, encryption, encrypted email, makes one ever think your ip cannot, should not be recovered as a function of the service.

Re:

[shanen]

Your question is unclear, but my first two are "What is the economic model of ProtonMail?" and "How can that economic model compete successfully against the economic models of the corporate cancers such as Facebook, Amazon, and the google?"

My memory is fuzzy, but I think I researched ProtonMail and concluded it couldn't last more than six months. Since that was more than six months ago, I was obviously wrong (again), but I remain skeptical. (If you color me skeptical, then what do I look like?)

Re:

[dowhileor]

headers are still in the clear, layer 2/3 headers as well. I think people want to be completely anonymous and think encryption of application data will do that.

Re:

[fph il quozientatore]

Protonmail gets money from paid plans. It is a niche service that it is not meant to compete with Facebook and the like: it sells to people who find privacy worth paying for, and they are a small minority.

Sorry; if you want to make big money, write an addicting game in which players have to click every 8 hours to clean virtual cat litter boxes.

Re:

[shanen]

ACK, but I can't tell who you were referring to with "you want to make money". If that "you" was referring to me, then the answer is "No, I just want freedom with the costs covered. Since I'm not rich enough to cover all the costs, I map it to those things for which enough people agree to cover the costs."

Soon ocean hosted and starlink

[iamnotx0r]

Someone is going to host offshore and use Starlink(or equivalent). I am sure bandwidth will be an issue but, technology will figure that out too. Soon, land based governments will have to ban satellite dishes.

Re:

[jobslave]

Not going to happen. Nobody, other than today's world powers (countries not tech companies) has the means to defend an off shore data center/hosing solution. What's going to keep pirates from invading?

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

The pirates will just think how nice it was for someone to build such a handy offshore home base for them!

Re:

[Trump One]

Why constrain yourself to the ocean's surface? Why not build a solar powered drone that can forever hover high enough in the sky to avoid all that pirate business?

Re:

[nonBORG]

Submarine might be a good option (probably cheaper and harder to find.)

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[HiThere]

IIUC, every spot within 200 or more miles of any piece of land is claimed by *someone*. So you'd better never need servicing or shelter from a storm.

Even then, what makes you think StarLink (or equivalent) is impervious?

Re:

[libra-dragon]

Or people could just manage their own source IP privacy. Their blog post specifically outlines what you can do to maintain anonymity.

Use ProtonVPN.
Or Tor through to their onion site.

https://protonmail.com/blog/cl... [protonmail.com]

"Within 15 miles of land"

[NoMoreDupes]

after ProtonMail received flak for giving a climate activist's IP address to French authorities to comply with a Swiss court order. Addressing the logging of the IP address in a blog post earlier this week, Yen said all companies have to comply with laws, such as court orders, if they operate within 15 miles of land. "No matter what service you use, unless it is based 15 miles offshore in international waters, the company will have to comply with the law," Yen said.

Which means they can never, ever claim that they'll provide full privacy to their users, since that would be an outright lie.

Lock yourself out

[ghoul]

Yes a company has to comply with court orders to share data whether they be a Chinese court or a Texas court or a legitimate court. However you can build your systems so that even you dont have access. That way you can respond to a court order saying we would like to comply but its impossible.

Re:

[Bert64]

Access to existing user data yes, you can encrypt it with a key that only the user has so that what you have is an encrypted blob you cant open.

Access to data such as IP addresses users have used to connect from is more difficult. You know the IP address as its being used because your web servers and routers need to forward the traffic to it. It's possible to not log the data, although not logging might already be illegal in some jurisdictions. Assuming you weren't keeping logs before, the court could order

Re:

[classiclantern]

But then the Court says, Make it possible. That's where we are with Apple today.

Re:

[ghoul]

And you reply. We are working on it. Sorry its taking so long.

Not the point

[JRZO]

I feel that Andy Yen is being a little bit deceptive here. The problem isn’t that his company has to comply with order from Swiss govt, it’s understandable that companies must operate under the jurisdiction of their governments (or choose to shutdown like Lavabit did). But the REAL problem demonstrated in this case is that another country’s government (in this case, the French government) can compel Swiss government to bend so easily. It isn’t even a case of murder or rape. What’s so great about privacy under Swiss law compared to other major Western democratic nations then??

Non-complying company

[Errol backfiring]

The problem isn’t that his company has to comply with order from Swiss govt

Especially in Switzerland, companies exist that are totally outside government influence, like the Bank of International Settlements. So if the Swiss government wanted, they would not have bent so easily.

inevitable

[retchdog]

And so the long game reveals itself. I mean no disrespect to the man himself, but one must consider the possibility that he has been recruited by the Gnomes of Zurich and has been compromised.

We must secure the American Internet (ARPAnet) against communist foreign European agents. "World Wide Web", more like WWW = 23, 23, 23 = 666.

RESIST, SHEEPLE!

No big deal.

[Qbertino]

It's an "Advisory Board". If you're doing some contemporary commercial E-Mail Service thing that has a first-class-citizen Web-based UI it's good and plausible to habe someone like TBL on that, if only to do some "sincerity theater".

That aside, this doesn't change the fact that E-Mail & DNS need a fundamental redo/replacement that fixes the shortcomings of a protocol from the pre-internet era. If that would finally come to fruit, services such as Proton Mail would basically lose their business-case.

I believe the word is ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

... "sinecure".

Re:

[Errol backfiring]

Which comes from Latin and means "without wax". In other words: statues must be made properly, not fixed with wax.

I am afraid that Tim Berners-Lee is the wax to fix the broken image of ProtonMail