This is a matter of semantics... anyone who actually cares about E2EE probably understands the nature of email being cleartext over the wire and that Proton can't control what is outside of their control. Maybe inaccurate but I doubt they are misleading (in the sense that they are hoping to fool people into thinking their email is encrypted over the wire).
Marketing copy would not likely care to include "E2EE" .... "at the point that Protonmail recieves your message" on their frontpage.
I’m gonna start selling sugar-free soda and when people point out that there is sugar in the soda I’ll explain to them that the sugar was added to the mixture by a different supplier before the mixture arrived at my factory.
My factory does not add any sugar to the soda. Therefore it’s clearly fair to market it as sugar-free!
I've felt this to the point that I attempt to preempt the fake concern with my own rhetorical "Hope everything is going well for you." I'd like to think this alleviates the other party from feeling like they have to share anything they aren't comfortable with but allows them room to respond if they choose.
What is silly and obvious to you is exploratory for others. When you cast shade on curiosity, you snuff out the potential before it ever comes to light.
If everyone put little turbine generators on the downspouts of their houses and businesses, how much power would we generate? Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators?
—Damien
[a house uses rain that falls on its lid to run a turbine]
A house in a very rainy place, like the Alaska panhandle, might receive close to four meters of rain per year. Water turbines can be pretty efficient. If the house has a footprint of 1,500 square feet and gutters five meters off the ground, it would generate an average of less than a watt of power from rainfall, and the maximum electricity savings would be:
(math that works out to $1.14/year)
The rainiest hour on record occurred in 1947 in Holt, Missouri, where about 30 centimeters of rain fell in 42 minutes. For those 42 minutes, our hypothetical house could generate up to 800 watts of electricity, which might be enough to power everything inside it. For the rest of the year, it wouldn’t come close.
If the generator rig cost $100, residents of the rainiest place in the US—Ketchikan, Alaska—could potentially offset the cost in under a century.
You've missed my point or didn't read it. This is not about the market fitness of the idea/product. This is about the parent commenter throwing shade on the inventor's curiosity and aspiring entrepreneurial effort. Regardless about how right you or the parent is about the products fitness, making assumptions about the inventor's motive removes the opportunity for the inventor to learn/grow from their attempt at going to market.
Instead, it would be better to support the inventor with constructive criticism... how they might better measure PMF, how they might prove whether there's a need for their idea in the market earlier, or how they might get more efficiency out of their approach.
And if you don't have the criticism to offer, you can probably find a better way to share your knowledge without saying the idea is terrible or they are acting in bad faith. (Or just don't comment at all!)
Basic test for "Is this a good idea" is to check to see if someone else has already had this idea or one that is similar, and if they have ever executed on the idea, and how did that go.
So they shared their idea, and I showed them that Randall Monroe has already done the math and shown that the idea is dead in the water due to the extremely small amount of energy available to be extracted from rainwater on roofs.
If they didn't know this, hopefully they will stop here and pivot to something else.
If they did know this and made a functionally terrible but somewhat flashy looking website in order to sell this device anyway, then they are just looking for a sucker to bilk money out of.
> This proposed definition adopts the E.O. 13984 definition for “Infrastructure as a Service product”, which is any product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or “trial” offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications.
How would an ISP not be misconstrued as a "managed network"? Deploy/run software could just as easily be running some protocol over the network connection?
Sure, there are very few international ISPs which would be affected by this as physical infrastructure must be local to the user, but I wonder if this would be true always (e.g.: Starlink)
I can't see how an ISP (or VPN for that matter) would qualify for the second half "and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications."
This would apply to all hosting providers, which is bad enough.
- TCP is a spec delivered by a software implementation program. Maybe you disagree that TCP is being "deployed" as opposed to "used"?
- What about peer-to-peer hosted webpages? Certainly this is deployed software served over the internet connection?
The devil is in the details... details which are not specified in the order. It wouldn't be hard to imagine a lawyer arguing the finer details of "deployed" and "software" and falling on a definition which results in a less "open" Internet.
Also, I think of the meaning of "that is not predefined" is not at all clear. Predefined at what point in time?
There are a few projects doing this. This one piqued my interest as having a potentially nice UX after some maturity. https://github.com/OpenInterpreter/01
I did tech support via phone for a popular consumer computer brand. One particular call, a woman reported that her computer was restarting every time someone in the house flushed the toilet.
Long story short, her home was in the back-back woods with the home powered by a generator. In addition to powering the computer, the generator was also the source of power for a water pump which would kick on to refill the toilet bowl whenever it emptied. And wouldn't you know that that water pump had a beefy coil around its motor and would brownout the entire house every time it started?
I have a similar one, with an automated monorail hoist. The engineer who started the job had ordered the monorail hoist with a control cabinet with Ethernet comms to tell it where to move (instead of just controlling the hoist directly from the main control cabinet.) After days' worth of shenanigans trying to troubleshoot seemingly random comms drop-outs I'd narrowed it down to only occurring when the hoist was being lowered under load, which led me to the Ethernet cable in the hoist cabinet which ran parallel to the motor cables from the hoist's 6kW VSD. Whenever it lowered, the EMI was enough to nuke the Ethernet connection. Re-routed the Ethernet cable and after that it ran fine.
Caveat: The other comments mention the file's contents being the only dependency on the hash, but the algo used to hash would also need to be the same. If the hash algo changes in two cases, the same content would have a different hash in those two cases.
Kinda. Shooting from the hip based on fuzzy gatherings from IPFS usage here, but as I understand it: The leaf-level data blocks will be shared between the Merkle trees, but at least the tip (the object a given hash actually refers to) and maybe some of the other structural information will be different.
The problem with block chains is you need the entire history, or at least a good chunk of it to walk it for data. The latest end of the chain doesn't contain everything, it simply contains the most recent transactions.
This can be hundreds of gigabytes if not more at scale.
This is where the central authority comes in play, in the name of storage and performance efficiency.
Even crypto wallet apps use third party central servers to query your wallet totals. Because you aren't fitting the download of the block chain on your phone.
I don't think the blockchain walk has to be done locally. Much like someone looking up DNS records don't need to participate in the DB management to get their records, there can be intermediaries which provide the response and still rely on the blockchain as a source of truth?
The value of the blockchain (in the context of name resolution) would (should) be limited to enabling trustless-ness of the response. I can cryptographically authenticate the origin of the response. If you don't trust that source, zk proofs would enable the user to validate the response is part of the latest version of the blockchain's state without looking at all of the history.
I think the cost of carrying the whole history is a red herring.
> there can be intermediaries which provide the response and still rely on the blockchain as a source of truth
But then you have to trust the intermediaries. You can verify their claim, but doing so is so costly it's what made you turn to intermediaries in the first place.
> I can cryptographically authenticate the origin of the response.
A blockchain is not needed for that, certificates can do that.
> zk proofs (…) the latest version of the blockchain's state (…) cost of carrying the whole history
Knowing enough information about the latest version of a blockchain's state to validate responses would require either that you trust the third party which would provide the hash of the last block to you, or that you follow, blocks after blocks, what's added to to ledger, verifying each block's integrity and all. I'm not saying that's not doable, but that it either requires some boot-up time or to be online all the time; i.e., it more or less amounts to running a node which is what we seem to agree is not something most people / end devices will do.
You should be able to cryptographically prove a) the block height of the current block and b) the state of any account, in constant space, using zero-knowledge proofs.
You don't need to trust a third party and do not need to be online all the time for that.
Based on your wording, it sounds like you're conflating the two things together... running an exit node and using tor are orthogonal to one another both in value provided to the user as well as effort involved.
Plausible reasons for:
(a) you greatly value privacy and the privacy of others such that you are willing to altruistically provide an exit node as a service; your country is a police state and you are sympathetic to those affected while also willing to accept the risk
(b) you greatly value your privacy and do not trust your ISP; you cannot access content sanctioned in your country; you are an internet engineer and need to test services which depend on privacy as a core feature
Also, I assume it wasn't intentional, but consider against arguing from the position of "I can't think of anything". You are betraying yourself by implying that you know all there is to know...which no one does.
Maybe if I'd said "I can't imagine X therefore Y must be true," but what I said was "I can't imagine X so I think Y" which doesn't imply I know everything at all. Quite the opposite imho. It implies I could change my opinion on Y if you showed me an example of X.
In any case, apparently that plus my use of the word "not" were ill-advised, since almost everyone here misread my comment to mean the opposite of what I actually meant. One person did read it as intended, and got another person to see it that way.
As someone else helpfully clarified for me, my point is that anyone with the technical skill to run a Tor exit node is also going to use Tor to hide any illegal activities they do online.
Marketing copy would not likely care to include "E2EE" .... "at the point that Protonmail recieves your message" on their frontpage.
Further, this is explain quite clearly on their FAQ: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained
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