Where and when?
dazo
joined 2 years ago
@case2tv @unruhe @Tutanota @protonprivacy
A while ago, I summarised my mailbox.org impression ... https://infosec.exchange/@dazo/111453908525787194
TL;DR ... Proton is way ahead of most competitors in overall user experience and ease of use, and yet providing a pretty good feature set.
I thought a bit more on these complaints since this post. And I realised these complaints can also be ignored by applying some basic mathematics and common sense.
Proton has more than 100 million users by now. So let's say 100 million in this example. How many public complaints would it need to be from these users to really "catch fire"? Meaning - how often do you read about complaints and from how many users? More than 100.000 users? Okay. Let's say there are 1 million dissatisfied users.
If half of that million users complained loudly on the Internet, I would say that would probably be quite noticeable. Media would most likely pick it up, and it would brew up to media storm right?
Have you noticed anything like that? Do you see that many users complaining?
And if yes, that would still only represent 0.5% of the whole user base of Proton. If you include the other half complaining "silently", it would represent 1% of the Proton users.
That still leaves 99% users which are at least to some degree satisfied with Proton.
Even if you pull it up to 20 million dissatisfied users, they would still be in the minority compared to users finding Proton's services being just fine. And 20 million dissatisfied users - that would definitely have caused some media traction, don't you think?
They could even have a Fedora Copr repo, where they push out the updated .spec file and get a proper package build for all Fedora, RHEL/CentOS and more distros. With proper RPM packaging and repository. Push a new build and all users gets an updated package at their next update cycle.
That's a reasonable path to get started with preparing packages to become part of the native yum/dnf repos at least. And that across a lot of distributions and releases in a single go.
@protonmail could start by actually attending various open source conferences. There are several of them only in Europe. #FOSDEM is the largest one (actually happening this weekend), @devconf_cz is another one, with lots of #Linux distribution focus as well.
Sending HR folks and developers to these conferences, having a stand somewhere, meeting people is a solid way to find new hires with a specific skill set.
Yupp, that's my understanding as well.
But Proton also insists on doing the packaging and distribution of it outside the ordinary distribution paths Linux distros uses (apt/yum/dnf repos or flatpak) ... So they waste time and energy on getting stuff working properly across a broader range of Linux distributions.
The end result will therefore most likely be a poorer user experience where some features don't work well on some distros. Depending on how their "package" will manage to integrate on the distro installing it.
Where did they say that? They don't even have possibilities for remote work?
@Prototype9215 @LunchEnjoyer @LinkOpensChest_wav
That's what really happens when @protonmail insists on doing everything on their own, not even doing the continuous development in the open. They provide source code updates only on stable releases, and even that can be delayed some days until after the release.
That's not how you build a community of users, developers and package maintainers.
Had they instead spent resources getting their Linux packages into the native package streams for the most important distros, they would have solved more bugs earlier with help from the community.
That is probably the most disappointing aspect of Proton. They still don't grasp how to interact with a broader community, to get real help.
They would still need to review contributions, just as I expect they do with changes from their own employees. So it wouldn't reduce the security.
Also, they can't really hide behind the code not being ready to be published; they code is being published in the end.
But they really miss the opportunity to get their packages into the standard Lunux repositories. Which would help resolving all the incompatibility issues they now have with certain Linux distributions.
On top of that, all the needed tooling required already exists. It just need to implemented correctly in their processes.
Just do me a favour, don't follow all the suggestions from random blogs, wikis and such. There are tons of them, the vast majority is rubbish and too often even making things worse or harder to cleanup afterwards. Most of it is even out of date.
@nixCraft is one of the saner ones to pay attention to. Or read the blogs and docs for #Fedora or even Red Hat Enterprise Linux (aka RHEL). The latter one goes through quality checks, often done by tech people knowing their stuff.
Linux Foundation and Red Hat also got some free courses too.
A few starting points:
https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/introduction-to-linux/
https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/rh024-red-hat-linux-technical-overview
https://access.redhat.com/products/red-hat-enterprise-linux/
Yeah, some. You need to learn some new tools, like ssh, command line usage and how to keep the system up-to-date. That's the bare minimum. Then it's good to learn a bit of network firewalling, to secure the host better.
Then you need to deploy a VPN server. OpenVPN Access Server is easily installed and can help settings things up reasonably quickly. The unpaid install allows you to have 2 devices connected at the same time.
Alternatively, there is the Cloud Connexa service. That will function a bit more like the Proton VPN Secure Core when fully set up (you can can connect from your devices from a different region from your VPS's location). You run a few commands on your VPS which the Cloud Connexa wizard setup guides you through. The free plan here includes 3 connected devices (in your case VPS + 2 devices).
With both alternatives you can install the OpenVPN Connect app on your devices, provide the username/password/otp for the account you've created in Access Server or Cloud Connexa, and you're basically ready. The Connect app downloads the proper config file and you can connect just as the consumer VPNs.
There are few alternatives to Proton Drive. Filen.io is the closest one in features. But it's a small company, so it development takes time.
Another alternative is Tresorit. Feature wise it is far beyond Proton Drive and Filen, with more advanced sharing possibilities. But it's quite expensive, closed source and uses Azure under the hood on the server side.
Filen and Tresorit are the only ones with Linux apps. Proton Drive can be accessed via rclone, but that is quite slow tbh.
@Nelizea @nailoC5
I need to look at that video (thx for the time marker). So my comment may miss his point.
If Linux is so hard, I wonder how Tresorit manages it quite nicely across multiple distros. They use fuse to mount the remote repository.
And the file attributes on files/dirs have a standardised API via libc and kernel syscalls. This is needed for the sync capabilities, to have data locally and in Drive. These APIs are identical across all distributions and are file system agnostic. Otherwise the tar command would have had a really hard challenge to be so widely useful for both file distribution as well as backups.
But I'll catch up on the video later.