Just tried it out with my proton account. Looks great! It’s very simple, but I also like that about it. And of course being private is wonderful.
Simplicity is an underrated feature. I’m really excited to see this come out because I’m becoming a bigger fan of proton every day.
I don’t see anything different… How did you access it?
From what I read it’s being released to users gradually I think?
It’s rolling out slowly. I got access to it yesterday :)
How is it private?
Today we’re announcing a new end-to-end encrypted, collaborative document editor that puts your privacy first. Docs in Proton Drive are built on the same privacy and security principles as all our services, starting with end-to-end encryption. Docs let you collaborate in real time, leave comments, add photos, and store your files securely. Best of all, it’s all private — even keystrokes and cursor movements are encrypted.
Literally the second paragraph of the post (but I’m sure you haven’t read it, since you seem so busy replying to every comment here about how Proton is becoming Microsoft or something).
So sending a company your private key and trusting their servers to do E2E encryption despite them being able to modify their code whenever they feel like it to capture your password without encryption and masked in obfuscated JavaScript is now considered security? Wow, people really are gullible.
I agree with your general sentiment here (that such an arrangement is not trustworthy enough for me to feel completely private) but your delivery of said sentiment is really fucking rude, dude.
Even if it’s not secure enough for you or I to feel private, it likely exceeds the security necessary to satisfy most people’s threat models so they can not only feel private but objectively be more private than if they just used Google docs.
incremental or opportunistic privacy improvements are better than none, a fact that has seemed to be lost in elitist privacy circles these days.
He’s wrong about what he said, too. You do not send Proton your private key.
Incremental in what way? There is an illusion of privacy. If that makes people feel good then sure, you increase your illusion of privacy.
Dude, you’ve made your point on virtually every comment on this thread. We get it, you don’t trust them. The world has given all of us every reason not to blindly trust this sort of thing. But I’ve done enough digging that I’M happy with the security, and the fact they’re not feeding my private content to the AI monster.
Please, for the love of the flying spaghetti monster, don’t keep spamming EVERYONE with the same 3 points you’ve already made elsewhere.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about ? You’re not sending your private key to their server without first encrypting it first locally. Their servers are not doing the E2EE, your client is. The website front and apps are open source.
Yes they could send you a compromised front if you use it via their website, that’s a compromise you accept, otherwhise you could only use their apps which are open source.
Tell me… when you visit a website that gets updated daily, if not hourly. If it served you a different version of JavaScript than what it served someone else… would you know?
I already answered that. Yes you can’t trust a website’s content, that’s why they offer apps. It’s your choice to trust the website which is as secure as they can make it, or you simply use the apps…
How does a WebView wrapped app offer much more security than a website? Why do they require a paid subscription to use the desktop apps?
Last I checked the apps are mostly just wrappers around WebView, so either way you’re getting served different content randomly without ever knowing. AND, Proton specifically prevents the desktop apps from functioning on unpaid accounts. That would be like Gmail disabling IMAP for unpaid users.
Ain’t this a website issue? Or is somebody doing it better?
No JavaScript?
ooooh I love this. Proton is just winning constantly these days.
No they’re not. They can’t even finish a single solution, let alone actually make anything functional when you’re not using their proprietary servers. They’re becoming Microsoft.
They can’t finish a single solution
Gee, it’s almost as if that’s the whole point of an ever-evolving SaaS platform.
A SaaS solution that claims to be private but won’t provide the backend code to prove it. You don’t find it at all suspicious that they claim releasing backend code would make it less secure? What kind of security product is not open for inspection? The same kind of “security” you get from Microsoft.
I imagine it probably is inspected, just not by the public. They probably do it themselves.
And they may have contracts with certain companies specializing in this sort of security that also inspect it.
And there’s also the cybersecurity companies that test it whether they’re contracted or not. At some companies, their entire job revolves around finding bugs (especially security bugs) in other companies’ software.
Just because it’s not on GitHub doesn’t mean it’s not a good product that hasn’t been thoroughly tested.
Surely we’re not gullible enough to accept “we inspected ourselves and determined we are secure and you should use our services”?
That’s where the second and third paragraphs come in. Because other companies likely test it themselves, too.
They’ll typically report security bugs privately and then, after X amount of months, publicly announce the bug. Doing it this way will, ideally, force the other company to patch the bug prior to the announcement. If not, they’ll end up with a publicly known security bug that bad actors can now exploit. The announcement will also let the public (including companies) know to update their software.
Yes, and those other paragraphs are the same thing other proprietary companies do. Your opening paragraph is just absurd on the face of it because “inspected” does not mean “by themselves”.
The second paragraph is literally speculation about something that might happen.
The third paragraph is about bug bounties, which every major software company does and which does not involve code inspection.
You just smokescreened and talked around the fact that your opening statement “it probably is inspected” is entirely unverifiable and non-credible even if true. I guess since you started that sentence with “I imagine” then it is technically true. You did imagine that.
You realize that Microsoft code is inspected as well, even more heavily and regulated… and yet they still end up with major breaches. Security evolves through open source collaboration and inspection by experts that aren’t being paid to say you’re doing a good job.
You are making a lot good points… But is there any other practical solution?
Seems this is the best a normie on budget can get
They’re not actually good points at all… Proton’s open sourcing of the clients is for the purpose of trust in terms of security and privacy. The backend doesn’t matter because the point is that the data is encrypted before it ever gets to the backend. The goal with Proton’s open sourcing is not the ability to make it self-hostable. Sure, a lot of concerns are valid, but this isn’t like Microsoft or Google. Nearly all of Proton is verifiably and provably secure. Well, at least as long as you trust the web clients being served are the ones whose code is publicly available. But again… You can’t verify that with any SaaS. Such a risk is even present with self-hosting tbh. But that’s another discussion.
You don’t find it at all suspicious that they claim releasing backend code would make it less secure? What kind of security product is not open for inspection?
No, because Proton has 3rd party audits all the time and they share the results openly.
Microsoft has third party audits all the time and say they’re secure, and then you learn of new backdoors every 6 months. Audit companies are unreliable and paid to give good feedback while doing the least work possible.
Yeah because enterprises primarily use a ton of open source security tools…
ಠ_ಠ
Enterprises are using a plethora of open source tools at this point. They may still utilize closed source solutions, but they definitely have quite a bit of open source solutions tied in.
Releasing unfinished products and expect users to just make do while they launch the next product can’t be the solution either.
Then it’s a good thing all of their products are fully functional and working as advertised, I guess.
Sure, whatever you want to belief :)
Which bits are not functional? I’m using their email and calendar… they aren’t completely polished, but they’re very usable.
Drive has no Linux client, Photos is extremely barebones and locks you basically in, as there is no export function.
Pass still has no proper SimpleLogin integration, no credit card support and UX wise is the browser extension pretty bad. Funny enough, years after launch you still can’t auto fill on Reddit.
The only thing I don’t like about Mail is that you still have to create reverse aliases through SimpleLogin. Better integration would be great.
Contacts still don’t sync to you local mobile contacts. Which means you either do it manually or you have to keep two sets updated.
Calendar is good too, I’ve heard it has no offline support though. Although I haven’t verified that.
Last thing I would like to see is notification support without Play Services.
Some of those things might be super unimportant to some, but for me it makes the use of their stuff unnecessary cumbersome. Especially if you consider that those are all Proton products and should work together well.
My by far biggest problem is their communication and general development speed though. Stuff like contact sync has been requested for 5(?) years now but there hasn’t been so much as a “we’re working on it”.
It feels to me they come out with new products all the time, like the document editor now, without addressing the little things that would make their ecosystem great.
Anyway, long ramble. But I appreciate that you asked for more details without insulting me.
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Whatever, dude. They’re most probably not a native English speaker, and even if they are, a spelling error doesn’t make them an “idiot”. You’re being a complete dick.
❤️
All Their services are online based right? I don’t understand why using their proprietary servers is an argument here.
So, if you want to have any sense of a service respecting you, it should be hosted on a server you can control?
No difference at all between the server of the world’s biggest advertiser and a server by a company that opens itself for audits and is in a country whole laws require no bullshit? Are you sure those two are the same? All or nothing?
Was that reply for me?
Because their primary audience is those gullible enough to believe they somehow can’t read your messages, yet they can easily capture your private password.
It is entirely possible to keep secure data on a server that only someone else with the password can access. They don’t store your password in plaintext, they don’t test whether what you typed is the same thing they keep on their servers. If the password works to decrypt your data then your client can read the emails. If not, your client gets gibberish and knows your password was wrong. With a secure system your password should never be sent to the server at all.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s trustworthy. There could be holes in the security, and I certainly would feel better controlling my own server, but it’s not automatically insecure just because it’s hosted by them.
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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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Yes I can read it. You think I’m an f’ing idiot?
I mean, you’re certainly not providing much proof that you have any measurable software skills that enables you to do the proper evaluation even if you received the code from proton. Why should anyone believe this unsubstantiated claim from you?
Edit: for the record, I’m don’t give a shit and I’m just yanking your chain here.
I’m a black belt in TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, Rust, C, C++, Python & can read and write assembly with my eyes closed, okay?😉
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.
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
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.
And you’ve never heard of sqlite
Have you ever tried just using Markdown?
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)
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.
Employer: Print out this .doc and bring it to work. Me, with a Mac: alright, here you go. Employer: why did you print it like this? Me: that’s what you sent me.
Uses compute platform that’s spent (all of personal computer history) trying to exclude any outsiders from working with them, a design intention of Steve Jobs from day one leading to significant waste and suffering for the past 50 years.
Sad that Microsoft doesn’t care
At least Linux has a leg to stand on. The culture can be exhausting but is generally in the right.
Life sure is terrible when people enjoy things you don’t, isn’t it?
No idea what your point is. Are you arguing the history of apple as a morally depraved company?
I was just talking about dealing with .doc files, but you are free interpret that however you want, buddy.
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.
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.
