Damn. Proton is doing a good job of stacking up W’s these days.
They act just like Microsoft. Lot’s of people think Microsoft is successful. If you think Microsoft is the champion of privacy though you might be in a cult.
Comparing proton with Microsoft like this is a joke.
Really? So Proton saying that they can’t open source the backend code to improve security isn’t something Microsoft would say as well? Proton sells statements, but they don’t back up those statements with proof.
Exposing their backend code to the public would be inviting bad actors to find loopholes in the logic. Your excuse for how they’re not secure is in fact one of their security features. No code is perfect, and you give enough people enough time to peruse through your software they’ll find a flaw to exploit. So they only provide their code to 3rd party audit companies they trust.
Sounds just like Microsoft to me.
I’ll tell you what. When proton ships a product that takes a screenshot of my desktop every 5 seconds and stores it in an unsecured DB any user on my computer can access, we’ll call them even.
I’ll tell you what. If you can prove to me by pointing to the specific source code that would prevent Proton from capturing your private key password when you login or decrypt using their standard clients then I’ll join the Proton cult.
This simply isn’t really possible.
Even if they published open-source code for their backend, it wouldn’t prove that it’s actually what their systems are running.
And when you are storing your data on their servers, and decrypting it by sending over your password, there’s no way you can actually truly prevent them from accessing your data, if they were to modify how their systems function overall. (this is true for every company)
Even if they were using zero-knowledge proofs to verify and prove to you the computation done on the server matched what would be expected from published open-source code, then either their very own systems (and by extension, their administrators), or a different company’s proprietary TPM module, would be the root of trust for those ZK proofs, and would still have the same underlying trust assumptions of at least 1 company having the ability to potentially steal your information.
If you want to rail against Proton for this, you have to be against every single cloud-based instance of code that hosts encrypted data, by any company, for any user.
Saying Proton acts just like Microsoft is a laughable comparison to make in order to justify claiming a lack of privacy or security on Proton’s part.
Why? Is it because they’re both companies that offer online services? Guess what, loads of companies do that. But you know what Proton doesn’t do? Give away the contents of people’s files, like Microsoft states they do in their own transparency reports, that they conveniently stopped publishing in 2022. Microsoft handed over the content (not just IP, email, etc, but actual docs, communications, stored files, etc) of thousands of people’s accounts to law enforcement. Proton hasn’t given out content once.
And this doesn’t even consider the fact that Proton’s business model is privacy. For Microsoft, their users will keep using their services regardless of their privacy, but for Proton, if it comes out that their services are no longer private, nobody will use them anymore, because nobody who got them for privacy would need them at that point.
prove to me by pointing to the specific source code that would prevent Proton from your private key password
You want them to point to code (that’s not publicly available) that prevents Proton from capturing credentials?
What a dumb hoop to tell someone to jump through. Do you expect someone to actually post a block of code? Would you even be able to read it?
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Such source code isn’t possible with the general audience service they offer, even if being open source were a requirement for credibility in any way.
You’re comparing them to a company with a long history of actively hostile behavior despite the fact that there’s never been a single hint of anything resembling hostile behavior from them, they operate from a country with meaningful privacy protections and only surrender data when compelled by their own courts (who only do so in circumstances that actually warrant it), and haven’t actually given up information that’s useful when required to because they don’t have it.
I’d almost believe you were paid to hate on proton, but you’d get fired for how fucking dumb your arguments are.
The only open source mentioned in the post is their encryption. Not the document editing software. OP please remove your change to the article title, it’s extremely misleading.
Fair enough! That’s exciting news
Well, they’re not wrong. It is ‘open-source’, not Free Software.
? It’s not open source, AFAIK.
I like how there seems to be more and more alternatives to MS Office, even from big companies like Google. Best case scenario, this could lead to companies actually starting to use an open format, like ODF, so that all these different office applications can be used without causing issues in the file and that would pave the way for open source alternatives, like LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, to become viable alternatives for a lot more people and companies. Do Google Docs and Proton Drive use/support ODF? I’m pretty sure MS Office supports it.
I wish msoffice would just die a miserable death
Word is a pain in the ass. Resize a table column by 1px and the rest of the document gets absolutely fucked
Excel suffers from similarly frustrating UI issues, but my main problem with it is that it’s being used for things that it was never intended to be used for. On the extreme side, a company will shove all their HR info into one xlsx file and then someone will accidentally, somehow unrecoverably, delete it
More commonly, I’ve had to use it as a progress tracking/ticketing tool. An entire team adding rows, deleting rows, accidentally clearing formulas, highlighting random fucking cells, resizing columns etc. all at the same time. It’s just hell.
Abusing Excel as a crappy database is a very real and very widespread problem.
You use what ya got, and you don’t buy database software or hire a database guy until you know you need one
But access comes with office, so if you have excel you have at least a software that is intended to be used as a DB (efficacy aside)
Let’s be real, using Excel as a makeshift database is probably still better than actually using Access lol
When I started studying IT at a Berufskolleg (German word, literal transaltion would be something like job college or job school), we started learning about databases by using Access. We were all so happy when we were done with that and just used SQL. I fucking hate Access.
The only use case I can see for Access is when you absolutely must have a database and your company will not provide you a real database solution. I have experience with both, but haven’t touched Access in years (and hope to never do so again). To be fair, I also regularly use Excel for things that I should probably be using Word for because it is easier to get formatting right in Excel.
Have you ever tried just using Markdown?
And you’ve never heard of sqlite
Probably true for most companies but I worked at one that had plenty of DB servers and developers, even developed their own database tech. Still, Excelitis as we called it was rampant.
Nothings more permanent than a temporary solution.
It can also link nicely over odbc to full databases which are represented a nice tables…with links between sheets…waiiit a second.
Sadly, the lock-in is pretty extreme… as is user inertia. Office 365 has made the problem worse as well, even if you have something like OnlyOffice that does a good job of compatibility with Office, it can’t sync with OneDrive.
If you collaborate with non-technical people, they will expect you to work in Office formats, and won’t even entertain discussion of any alternative.
Wait who are the technical people you work with who are using things besides Excel?? Or by technical people do you specifically mean computer science people? Cause you get mech, civil, or electrical engineers in a room and I think I would have a heart attack if their designs were not all in Excel or word (+altium, solidkindaworks, etc)
Where I was working Excel was used for the specification of scientific data. You get stuff like thousands of rows in several sheets themselves in multiple files that inherit from one another and everything is edited by hand… And I maintained a tool that combined them to create binary files from this mess. Lot of fun.
It’s criminal that Microsoft has such a monopoly on word processing, they can’t even render text properly. It’s not an issue in Mac or Linux, but it is in all windows applications that aren’t using a chromium base.
I feel you on that first part, I always use Markdown nowadays when I don’t have to use Word (or LibreOffice Writer in my case), I even use Marp to make presentations with Markdown. Since there’s no dragging stuff around and eyeballing if it’s actually coherent, it’s much quicker, the layout is always perfect and changing the layout doesn’t fuck up the entire slide/document.
It…was intended for those things. Excel is modern business’ multi-tool. You’re not going to excise it until there is a solution for the HR person to do basic bulk data processing, basic Excel programming without having to acknowledge they are doing programming, etc.
The other path is better spreadsheet software, but let’s be honest most of the others are poor clones. Gsheets are nearly useless, only office is solid but…well, it’s just Excel but free. Open office is Excel millennium edition and libre while better than open, and has a few nice quality of life improvements, it’s still Excel.
fair enough
Yes, Google Docs exports to ODF.
By default?
No, there is no default option, just a dropdown that offers docx, pdf, rtf, txt, odf…
Open source ? Does that mean I can host my own ? Would it be compatible with other self hosted instance ?
EDIT: the only source code I found hasn’t been maintained for 3 years.
As I’ve slowly been expanding my homelab, NextCloud caught my attention. I haven’t tried it quite yet, but it might be closer to what you’re looking for.
Thanks, I’ll have a look
If you do want to host your own google docs, look into Onlyoffice, or LibreOffice with Collabora
Proton at this very moment
I CANT STOP WINNING!
When I was degoogling a couple years ago I had a heck of a time choosing between protonmail and fastmail.
I went with the fastmail and, while I have no complaints, I’m starting to glance at greener grass.
I love Proton and will advocate for it any chance I get, but I can also see that it might be good to have people like you who don’t put all their eggs in one basket
If you were on Proton then you wouldn’t be able to sync your calendar & contacts and you’d have to share your private keys.
Just signed up today for the family plan in my ongoing degoogling process
It’s a bit pricey but so far loving it. Specially Proton Pass, coming from bitwarden (which I liked), it’s nicer and faster, much faster
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket again, that’s what makes degoogling such a difficult thing. There’s several proton services I intentionally avoid and use alternatives for so I don’t have to uproot my entire digital life to leave them if they start being shitty. If you go from using all google services to all proton you’re setting yourself up to need the same sort of big migration down the road. 15 years ago google was also an awesome company that kept making incredibly useful things for users just because they could and look at them now.
Maps is what makes degoogling hard ;p
Everything else is pretty straightforward.
Does pass support custom url filters yet? I self host and so I have a lot of 192.168 bookmarks…when I tried pass it had no way to organize them by url prefix (port number).
Seems to work fine on my web front to deluge
Good question, don’t know.
I’ll check it out and report back
Unfortunately it doesn’t yet. Having same issue.
And so what happens to your passwords if Proton were to go offline and you needed to continue using Proton Pass? Do they have an open source server you can use like Bitwarden does or vaultwarden? Or are you essentially locking yourself into a new walled garden for no reason other than name recognition? Why not just use KeePassXC which is encrypted locally rather than share your password with a third party who can easily capture your private key password?
I think a lot of these cloud-based password vaults will have a local database that syncs with the cloud. I think you can unlock them and access your passwords without internet access
Keyword… unlock, not add information or use them offline where they can sync to an open source backend. They are cloud-based password managers that are designed to operate online. The backend is not open source. It is designed to lock you into a walled garden.
The unlocking happens locally. it’s simply decrypting. also, i think you can export the data from proton pass.
it’s a cloud solution. keepassxc works great and I don’t know why you want something else to replace it
Browser integration with quality biometric login is a beautiful thing. Keepass’ implementation of both is trash, and keepassxc’s browser integration may actually be worse than the original.
That having been said I always recommend to people they use two managers, with keepass being the secure base for things you don’t often need convenient access to like savings accounts, password manager passwords, tax services, etc.
bitwarden, proton, et al I use for the day-to-day…I don’t give any fucks if my Lemmy account is lost for example.
Proton Pass works offline. Proton isn’t a walled garden.
“A walled garden is a garden enclosed by high walls, especially when this is done for horticultural rather than security purposes, although originally all gardens may have been enclosed for protection from animal or human intruders.”
Agreed proton isn’t this
"A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and/or media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. "
Try using thunderbird and id argue proton is this
Still, that seems like a combo of “comes with the territory of encrypted email” and “their software could use some major improvements”. I think closed platform is closed by design.
Nah, fundamentally proton uses the same encryption as everyone else, they just have a central server to exchange keys rather than one of the open servers.
As everyone else like who? Gmail doesn’t do client side E2E encryption at all.
It will cache credentials for a short time so you can still access some of your passwords. It will not let you add new credentials. It’s like a web browser working in offline mode for a period of time. It is a cloud-based password manager with a closed-source server backend.
Because of their integration with simplelogin.
Vaultwarden/Bitwarden integrate with SimpleLogin… and they offer other alias service providers as well.
Deeply curious about the down votes, isn’t this accurate?
Because the guy criticize Proton in every thread in the comments and clearly sealioning.
Oh…I don’t usually see what other places people post unless they truly suck.
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Doesn’t appear you can do anything of that via the Drive mobile app. Maybe one day they will make that possible.
If they can ever get a spreadsheet application I could fully get away from Google for that kind of thing without losing out on anything I care about.
A lot of people confuse open source with community driven/governed.
If things go awry, you’ll be locked-in, married to Proton.How do you mean? You’d just export your data.
Proton drive has export?
wake me when we can use them as a saml provider
I know there are different use cases for each, but generally do people prefer self hosted nextcloud, proton docs, or libre office?
FWIW collabora and open office can integrate with other clouds like Seafile and owncloud Infinite scale. So even without NextCloud it can be used. It can also be used stand alone.
Great, hopefully it is as useful. Surveys and such are a must for any migration.
Are they trying to become Google alternative?
Only if they start shutting all their services down if they don’t become the world leader within the first 3 years.
Finally. This and decent photo app is what Proton needed. Hoping they would keep going on this path
Immich is amazing as an app with a self hosted backend service.
Interesting. I will try to find out if it’s 1:1 in handling .docx like OnlyOffice which i hope it is. It sucks that OnlyOffice won’t run natively on Wayland.
It is fork of onlyoffice, https://www.onlyoffice.com/blog/2023/07/self-hosted-onlyoffice-docspace
Ehhh It is? Thanks for letting me know cause i didnt know that
