Lavabit competitor Silent Circle shuts down its secure email service, destroys servers

I have no affiliation w/the service, but John C Dvorak has mentioned that he’s used http://www.marxmail.net/ for many years as a private, secure mail server that allows encrypted secure protocols and SSH tunneling IMAP/POP, advanced filtering & the ability to completely download & remove email from the server to a local host machine. (IDK where the MarxMail servers are located - it may be worth noting).

From the Computer Tyme website: “If you saw the John C. Dvorak (Good man!) article - The Death of Email - in PC Magazine - or show #18 on This Week in Tech - We have three spam filtering services. We can provide you with individual MarxMail accounts you@marxmail.net ($30/year) - or we can filter your Email Domain and pass it on you your existing server ($100 year) - or we can host your email domain which allows you to create accounts and aliases on my server ($150 year).”

MarxMail & Computer Tyme Hosting are owned by Marc Perkel: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2013/06/24/marc-perkel-interviewed-about-nsa-spying-at-netroots-nation/

Completely removing one’s email from the mail server via an encrypted service & securing it oneself seems like one of the best, imperfect e-mail service options.

No.

Neo and the fighters were fighting to save the free society of Zion only. No one inside the matrix was freed after the agreement between neo and the machines(at least not in the movies). The oracle and the architect were on the park bench watching as the matrix lived on with its human batteries walking around oblivously.

So, they didn’t really care about the people still stuck in the matrix. They had become “above” them. Those people were simply potential hosts for an agent, an obstacle to be killed and then flushed out of a pod for recycling.

did you not read the PR. their other products are not susceptible to the same kind of government-enforced snooping because of the technologies involved.

Silent Phone and Silent Text, along with their cousin Silent Eyes are
end-to-end secure. We don’t have the encrypted data and we don’t
collect metadata about your conversations. They’re continuing as they
have been

If they’d given warning of the shutdown and destruction of data, that in itself would have been a prompt for an National Security Letter —it gives the NSA advance notice that they think they might have something worth keeping private. Then the only choices would be either to stand on principle; shut down; destroy the servers anyway and go straight to gaol —or just silently capitulate and turn over customers’ data.

This way they’ve merely legally destroyed their own private property. But in the process they protected the privacy of their customers’ data —and get to stay out of prison to play another day. So I’d say very nicely played.

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Not in my version of Star Wars, they’re not.

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I’ve always worked on the presumption that if they didn’t blow them away, they’d get killed by them. Obviously they had to destroy them all.

I call it the Nathan Drake defence.

Too late, it’s gone. Or at least the momentum that built this enormous surveillance and cultural apparatus is so strong it can no sooner be stopped than an avalanche can be pushed back up a mountain.

second and third film not cannon

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What second and third film?

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You guys, stop being hysterical, the second Matrix movie wasn’t that bad. But yeah that third one. Man. Ouch.

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[quote=“Aloisius, post:13, topic:6803”]
So they are shutting down their service preemptively because they may be served with an NSL some day? That seems rather odd.[/quote]

They might actively know they have something on their servers and so feared getting their secret letter. The lack of a warning would be to make it so that they could destroy the servers before they got their secret letter. Once you have your secret gag letter, I imagine that destroying the servers would be destruction of evidence, or whatever you call it when you destroy shit demanded by secret courts.

The unfortunateness of the second and third films does not excuse them from being canon. Which is an unfortunateness in itself.

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You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault.

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They don’t need to know what they have on their servers. They know people who are buying services from them are buying them because Silent Circle is providing communications that are secure enough you can trust them against a wide range of threats, including criminals, crackers, cops with warrants, and unconstitutionally-secret national security letters.

If they can’t provide that for email, because the NSA appears to be able to force Email Service Providers to eavesdrop on their customers on an ongoing basis, or at least to hand over data they need to operate the service with, then cancelling is unfortunately the right choice, and doing it in advance instead of saying “oops, sorry” later is the absolutely correct way to do it. That’s why you’d use a premium service like Silent Circle instead of a less-secure competitor.

(If they wanted to get fancy, they could have had their incoming mail servers bounce mail for a day before shutting down, to give their users a bit more time to download mail without being likely to trigger a preemptive National Security Letter, which an announcement that they were about to shut down might very well have done.)

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