@astheroth Their Librem.one service suite requires you to give them your home address even if you are paying with crypto.
@astheroth@freespeechextremist.com
Purism is not a scam, I bought several things from them, things that I use everyday, working fine.
Many people are angry at Purism because Purism promised more than they could deliver. People waited a long time and did not get refund, things like that. But saying Purism is a scam is wrong, it is a real company making real things and importantly making real contributions to free software, which I appreciate a lot.
@eliasr @astheroth There is no reason that you should have to fully dox yourself just to sign up for their paid email when they offer crypto payments. Hell, Posteo doesn't accept crypto payments but you can still pay for their email anonymously by mailing them cash ala MullvadVPN.
It is very possible that you are right and they are handling that badly, but my guess is that there is not any malicious intent behind that, it is just a matter of not knowing how to do it in a good way. Don't assume evil when the explanation can be simply clumsiness or incompetence.
Remember that we are not talking about a trillion-dollar company like google here, this is a small company with not so great resources.
@eliasr @astheroth @xianc78
Ponzi's company could actually have worked if he stayed within the bounds of availability. Instead of stopping short and dealing, he saw more money and went with it.
I bought from gethitch.com in '19. I was supposed to get it by the end of '20. COVID shut things down. They offered refunds in the beginning and were up front in the fact that, if you stay in, your stuck. They finally delivered and it is great. They also communicated the whole way.
I have free librem.one account and I've never given them my address — which would make more sense if they wanted to just collect that data.
Probably they are legally required for you to give them some billing address — for IRS and whatnots, I'm not sure how it works in the US
@m0xEE @astheroth @newt Free accounts don't include email though. Only their Mastodon and Matrix servers.
@m0xEE @astheroth @newt I wouldn't trust ProtonMail either. It has a lot of red-flags such as requiring you to store your private GPG keys on their servers. There is no reason to require that unless they want to be able to read your email.
I would recommend Posteo for email. They accept anonymous cash-by-mail payments (only 1 EUR per month) and allow you to generate your own keys client-side. That or you can try cock.li if you can get an invite. They do offer a few SFW domains like airmail.cc and firemail.cc. The other option would be to host your own email server, but that's out of the scope of my ability, so do your own research if you want to do that.
Granted, you shouldn't fully trust any email provider or VPN. You have no idea what they are doing unless you have physical access to their servers.
> Granted, you shouldn't fully trust any email provider or VPN. You have no idea what they are doing unless you have physical access to their servers.
That's the spirit! I don't really expect perfect privacy/security/secrecy. I feel more threatened by local authorities anyway that Swiss ones or any of three letter agencies from US anyway.
I think they store them on their servers to get people newcomers into using PGP at all. Most people are used to just using webmail and there is no way you can make it simple and not store the keys on the server. It might not be that bad if they are stored in encrypted storage, but of course it always boils down to whether you trust them at all or not. Like I said, I don't expect much from them, they are still better than anything mainstream, they take care about me being able to email my friends using mainstream e-mail services providers — which would require significant effort on you side were you self-hosting, and they allow me to use my custom domain — that's it.
Of course, if you go full-paranoid, you have to self host, but I don't care enough — at least not about email
