The inner circle so to speak
The thing is, ownership of any of these can change at any time. Bitwarden, Mullvad, and Tutanota could be sold to very different owners.
That is up to and including something like uBlock Origin, which only has one developer, and would suddenly be very different if that developer died and the project had to be forked.
You can never trust that the person who takes on the reigns has the same ideals as the people running them now.
Hell, Mullvad was abused to the point they removed access to Port Forwarding on their VPN service, which has led to many people needing to switch to crummier, shadier VPNs that still offer port forwarding access. That’s not Mullvad’s fault, but it is an example of them having to change their philosophy and what they offer because of abuse.
Trust should only go so far, and loss of trust should be very easy. There’s not a good reason to keep “trusting” something when it has fundamentally changed from its initial ideals.
Hell, Mullvad was abused to the point they removed access to Port Forwarding on their VPN service, which has led to many people needing to switch to crummier, shadier VPNs that still offer port forwarding access. That’s not Mullvad’s fault, but it is an example of them having to change their philosophy and what they offer because of abuse.
It’s a real shame too. It was a nice feature.
Hell, Mullvad was abused to the point they removed access to Port Forwarding on their VPN service, which has led to many people needing to switch to crummier, shadier VPNs that still offer port forwarding access.
Could you explain what happened?
As clear as I can make it out, it seems like it was related to a search warrant that was executed on Mullvad.
Because just a little over a month after the news of the failed raid, there was news of them removing port forwarding.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports/
Emphasis mine.
Unfortunately port forwarding also allows avenues for abuse, which in some cases can result in a far worse experience for the majority of our users. Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.
The result is that it affects the majority of our users negatively, because they cannot use our service without having services being blocked.
The abuse vector of port forwarding has caught up with us, and today we announce the discontinuation of support for port forwarding. This means that if you are a user of forwarded ports, you will not be able to add or modify the ports you have in use.
They made a smart call that has probably increased the long term privacy of their users.
People were using port forwarding to host illegal shit, and governments were getting pissed off about it. Mullvad has been able to prove in court that they don’t keep logs, but that’s not a perfect deterrent; a properly motivated government, perhaps if somebody is using Mullvad to host CSAM, might attempt to legally force Mullvad to put logging in and add anti-canary clauses.
Preventing port forwarding keeps customers as consumers rather than hosters, and avoids this issue.
This is true and people should always be mindful of this. Additionally you should consider not just the ownership of the companies but also the infrastructure they rely on such as their rented servers, payment processors, on-site staff etc. However commercial VPNs remain a convenient compromise for many use cases. These services are probably fine for your shitposing needs but should not be relied upon for activism for instance.
Same thing just happened with IVPN :-\
I used to use proton until I saw them give info for a warrant. After that I gave up on the VPN thing. If I lived in a country with limited streaming options I might use them but
bruh, i can’t be the only one confused why state farm’s drive safe app was being touted…
deleted by creator
Ah, the new pokemon game that just came out.
the mole creates the tunnel for the road, and the shield is for the travelers’ protection
Why do you trust a Germany based secure email over something like Proton? At least Mullvad is Sweden based.
Because in Germany we value privacy and the protection of personal data
Not more than the Swiss. Germany is part of the spy dragnet. It does not offer the same level of privacy protection.
Five and eleven eyes doesn’t matter if the service is encrypted and open sourced. Also, did you know that Switzerland has no superior privacy laws comparing to Germany? It’s all marketing bluff.
So why are my German relatives super-scared of pirating because of the government finding out, and get me to torrent all their shit for them and mail it to them on cheap hardrives?
Correction: It’s not the government, it’s private law firms doing this. Your IP is public when you torrent, they just have bots monitoring the most active trackers and try to extort money from the people they catch.
Piracy is not privacy
Tutanota is German, which is part of the 14 eyes global surveillance network. I prefer my Switz Protonmail better.
https://www.engadget.com/protonmail-climate-activist-ip-swiss-french-authorities-233004304.html
Europol requested it. Even though you think your service is not under 14 eyes there still is gonna be many other problems.
You can always find problems with the service itself.
And that proves what exactly? Swiss law required them to hand over an IP address. Swiss ptivacy is not absolute. They have laws. An IP address didn’t grant them access to the encrypted emails. Proton openly admits they had no idea who the user was. The activist should have used a VPN, which Proton also offers as a service, and then whatever activity trail they linked to the IP would have died at Proton’s VPN network.
Protonmail then went to court, and got the law changed so it doesn’t happen again https://www.reuters.com/technology/proton-wins-swiss-court-appeal-over-surveillance-rules-2021-10-22/
Five and eleven eyes doesn’t matter if the service is encrypted and open sourced. Also, did you know that Switzerland has no superior privacy laws comparing to Germany? It’s all marketing bluff.
Selfhosting an email is very hard but I think that at the end it’s worth it
Until Gmail/Hotmail decides your IP is a spammer and forever you have deliverability issues from then on
Interesting, is this a wild spread problem? I have heard of people that host email services for years and have no problems.
It’s a worry I see posted a ton, and have been advised numerous times that email is the one thing you don’t wanna selfhost.
I self-host (postfix and dovecot) and will admit of all the self-hosted stuff I have it’s the most annoying/time-consuming to manage but doable if you’re willing to spend a lot of time reading and updating things. I wouldn’t recommend it to the vast majority of people though.
I read some horror stories about folks who self-hosted for years and how they eventually quit and moved to an established email provider. It didn’t seem like something I wanted to deal with.
Do you think using one of those federated email networks where it’s invite only and between people you know would have any appreciable use cases in conjunction with an established provider? I can think of having a small org use it maybe but not between friends or family.
I have bitwarden and mullvad, but what’s the other one?
keepass > bitwarden
vpn providers should be reviewed regularly
email is inherintly insecure/non-private, self hosted is best
why do you prefer keepass to bitwarden? has it better privacy or is it just a personal preference because you like the UI more for example?
keepass is a different paradigm. it uses a locally encrypted file. many frontends for it (use keepassxc and keepassdx). dont have to rely on some 3rd party, even if they say they have e2ee. theres no better privacy (and security) for an app than not using it with the internet. im not too concerned about ui for pw manager personally, the less time i spend w it unlocked the better. only (slight) problem for me: multi device usage (i just copy the file onto my phone occasionally). general rule of thumb: if it can be selfhosted, it is best to.
i think bitwarden is the best one of its type, it comes down to your needs and threat model
Idk if anyone else mentioned this but bitwarden can be selfhosted.
good point!
I use syncthing to sync my KeePass file, and I highly recommend it. Very easy to set up
I really like the cross device sync, even tho it’s a security risk of course. also, I don’t know anything about self hosting (might get into it when I got the time), so bitwarden might be the best pw manager for my requirements rn.
It’s possible to sync keepass using syncthing, i use it that way.
not on iOS, at least last I looked into it.
Well I have both my kidneys. Edit: there’s a fork of it on the app Store called Möbius sync.
sorry i didnt mention but yeah like the other reply says u can absolutely sync, i just personally prefer not to
Many use syncthing to sync their keepass files I personally just use my nextcloud
Mainly cuz it doesn’t store your passwords on someone else’s computer.
You can selfhost bitwarden, there’s also vaultwarden, an open bitearden api implementation. You could host this on an internal-only server. But you also can sync your single password file with a lot devices and use keepass, I just find that a bit annoying. You also cannot share some passwords with your relatives easily that way.
Hey it’s fine if you trust them, it’s a very convenient service and from what I found it’s pretty secure, since there’s no way to recover logins if you forget your master pass. But i personally don’t like the idea of having passwords on someone else’s server and I’m too stoopid to set-up my own instance on a docker container server thingy. Syncthing just works for me, got GUI and everything.
Totaly valid choice!
Proton does all of this at once
You do also kind of put all your eggs in one basket so to speak though. I don’t have anything against Proton and the pricing makes sense if you value all their services and pay for Ultimate (though by my estimate, less sense if you are only looking for a smaller handful of services). However, if you go fully into Proton for everything, you’re placing your trust into an entire stack of services and it can end up a single point of failure.
I trust their privacy claims but if you backup your email and calendar you can just as easily move elsewhere if Proton does go down. Having only one provider can make things a lot easier to manage.
However, if you go fully into Proton for everything, you’re placing your trust into an entire stack of services and it can end up a single point of failure.
Yeah, I know
The point is that Proton offers good service at a reasonable price, and for me that’s it, that’s perfectly fine
For anyone still using Mullvad and wants port-forwarding, I recommend AzireVPN.
Good list! I use all of them too.
I don’t get what you mean, Mullvad supports port forwarding
They very recently stopped supporting it.
According to this blog post, they don’t seem to 🙂 https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports/
I trust bitwarden, but android app doesnt trust me!
I might swap bitwarden by passbolt as it uses a more recent programming stack, although vaultwarden looks to be a good alternative too.
Does a more recent stack translate to any real benefits?
Not necessarily, plenty of good programs written in C89 for example.
With something that is heavily library dependent, having a more recent development stack may mean better maintained libraries but definitely not a sure thing.
One of these is Bitwarden. What are the other two?
That mole is sus to me, I am more like into Snakedragons.
Snakedragons
I heard it was a mythical creature
What’s bottom right? Top is Bitwarden and Left is Mullvad VPN
that’s Tutanota
Tutanota, an email service.
tutanota, an email service
Had anyone heard of or tried buttercup? Any thoughts?
I was mulling around the idea of using KeePass but it seems to be too inconvenient. The pretty UI and cool name makes me want to try buttercup.
KeePass + Syncthing is pretty convenient.
Buttercup looks to be using AES-CBC with PBKDF2 and no authentication, but I only took a very brief look so I may have missed important details. That’s not secure if an attacker can alter the vault file, and PBKDF2 isn’t a great KDF to use. If you use this, you definitely need a 128-bit or higher entropy passphrase (10 Diceware words). You usually want that anyway, but using a weaker string for your master password will be less secure than you expect compared to something using a modern KDF.
Thanks for the insightful response. I’m gonna spend some time searching for all those terms you mentioned because much of it is stuff I’ve only heard in passing or never heard of at all. I’ll try to find what works well enough for me. Wish me luck!
