Bitcoin Forum

http://lavabit.com/

Lavabit had the best privacy policy of any webmail provider out there. What a shame.

at least Levison shut it down with an official and honest statement.
I'm not sure if every provider would have handled the situation like that.

With the growing demand for secure and private browsing, mailing and chatting
I'm sure we will see a lot of new providers soon. (located outside US of course)

e.g. heml.is sounds quite interesting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPeujbY3feM
https://heml.is/

Be very careful about these 'anonymous' providers, you will find when carefully reading through their terms of service and the way they conduct business that most of them are full of shit when a government starts threatening them. I've found most of them even cover their own asses in the terms of service saying the usual garbage of "we will not be held liable" etc. etc. despite their marketing and main site boasting about how they'll keep everything you upload or post anonymous. I'd like to add as well that if they don't use Bitcoin in their payment options they're definitely full of shit because using the conventional currencies will always leave a trace :D.

If we want the same type of anonymity Bitcoin has peer to peer technology really does seem to be the way to go, but how would you accomplish such a thing with communications and hosting?

From the Lavabit white paper, "... incoming e-mail messages are encrypted before they’re saved onto our servers. Once a message has been encrypted, only someone who has the account password can decrypt the message."

http://web.archive.org/web/20120502035558/http://lavabit.com/secure.html

By adapting the Bitcoin protocol for such a purpose (http://bitmessage.org/). :)

So a million email addresses and the stored content of a million people bites the dust.

Which means what?

That what they were doing  is unsustainable?

That their business model was flawed?

That they were based in the wrong country?

Is this the end, or the beginning?

Thought you should know, after some reading I came across this website posted in a comments page which looked very cool people seem to be organising against government intelligence..... You know, I think that's giving them to much credit, I'm going to call it government stalking :P

https://prism-break.org/

http://tox.im - a project that should see more better project than BitMessage.

Well of course they do.  The last person I would trust would be someone who claims they are going to take a bullet for me.  They are either hopelessly neive or bald-faced liars.

It's an aggravating corundrum that one gets the best info on who is trustworthy only after they've been shut down.  Parenthetically, I gained a lot more confidence in Mt. Gox after they were given a fair amount of grief by the US authorities.


Accepting Bitcoin is one of the things that gives mega.co.nz some credibility in my mind.

After Snowden's leaks shedding light on how closely the 'five eyes' are cooperating I do not like that they are based in New Zealand...but it's preferable to the US at least.  I do hope that they employ infrastructure commissioned in disparate jurisdictions, and that they and engineered the nerve center to be able to migrate seamlessly if the need arises.


The only solution I will truly trust is one where it is technically impossible for the provider to do one thing or another, and who provides a lot of transparency and system level design whereby I can validate certain things.  Here again, Mega.co.nz seems to have a pretty solid framework for making that theoretically possible.

Lavabit (or perhaps Zimmerman) mentioned the difficulty of securing mail (presumably meta-data) under the current (and dated) protocols such as POP and IMAP.  I assume that they are talking about routing.  It may be possible to devise a system based on one-time use addresses which are similar in some ways to Bitcoin addresses, and combined with a series of proxies operated on a P2P basis, it could become pretty challenging to perform meaningful analytics even with a huge advantage in terms of network taps which the NSA and it's minions have.

One way or another, I think it is finally safe to assume that it makes no logical sense to trust 'the powers that be' to have any restraint at all in terms of their means and methods of imposing control on the masses.  Nor is it wise believe anything they might say since it is abundantly clear that they will flat-out lie about any operations or plans.  Thus if the masses desire or need a solution, it is only logical to work on one which is theoretically sound against any and all attacks.  This stands for both a currency solution and a communications solution.

Do not discount the possibilty that the systems which have shut down - lavabit, silent circle, and the hosting service - may be ops ran by agencies as honeypots.

Then they would have shut them down as damage control, to pre opt Snowden's revealing them for what they really were.

That hypothesis should remain open in most cases, and especially in anything related to Bitcoin.  Even the Bitcoin solution itself.

The best marker I can think of the lend confidence to a system is whether the principles have been put under significant personal attack.  Phil Zimmerman (Silent Circle) and Kim Dotcom are two people who have received a fair amount of grief over their histories of involvement with the Internet.  It's always possible that the purported attacks and punishments were elaborate hoax's and/or that the individuals have been flipped, but it is still a highly useful data-point.

Lavabit went Galt.



EDIT:


Lavabit shrugged.

Which means they are still here.

My medium term prediction.  Any and all attempts to centralize the Internet are a bastardization of the original design protocol, and will fail as alternative paths and methods naturally arise.  Email is a slightly different problem as the protocols are actually obselete.  NSA etc interference will accelerate deployment and utilization of modern alternatives.

Should be fun to watch.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929294.500-meshnet-activists-rebuilding-the-internet-from-scratch.html#.UgRMsbyhA9c

Dan Ryan is one of the leaders of the Seattle Meshnet project, where sparse coverage already exists thanks to radio links set up by fellow hackers. Those links mean that instead of communicating through commercial internet connections, meshnetters can talk to each other through a channel that they themselves control.

Each node in the mesh, consisting of a radio transceiver and a computer, relays messages from other parts of the network. If the data can't be passed by one route, the meshnet finds an alternative way through to its destination.