However, these were not “journalists” in the traditional sense, but hacktivists who were involved in a number of hacking incidents, which is a violation of Proton’s ToS, and therefore subject to suspension of all accounts. In this case, I made the decision to exceptionally restore two accounts because hacktivism cases are not always black and white.

So, either your original judgement to suspend the account (and to reject subsequent appeal) was correct, or you latter judgement to reinstate the account was correct.

I fail to see how you can claim with a straight face that both of your actions were correct, while every other facts about the owner of that account remain the same during the whole drama.

Nate’s side of this story:

https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/16/a-few-corrections-about-the-transition-from-blue-systems-to-techpaladin

While Proton does have an obligation to stop spread of SPAM mail, this incident is a bit different. Let’s see -

1. Proton was not approached by other Email providers (Gmail/Outlook) about suspected email SPAM campaign originating from their network.
2. This matter is NOT even related to SPAM mails.
3. krCERT - a Govt agency approached Proton and asked them to disable the account.
4. Proton simply complied to that without verification.
5. Appeal made by Owner of that email id was rejected.
6. Subsequently follow ups were also ghosted.
7. Until the tweet from the journalist went viral, Proton was not in mood to reinstate the account.

Note that while Proton Mail (server) is E2E encrypted, but once email exits their network it no longer remains as such. So, whoever (other email provider or incident reporter) reported the incident, should have a copy of unencrypted email to prove abuse of Proton Mail service.

Given that proton now reinstated the account, that proves Proton initially froze that account based on “Trust me, Bro” proof only from krCERT.

In ideal world, any service provider should require a court order to comply with Govt request to remain unbiased in such situation.

If you read through the article, his appeal was originally rejected, and subsequent follow ups were also ignored.

It’s only the tweet, directed at proton for ghosting them, that went viral and eventually forced Proton’s hand to reinstate the account.

If a journalist has to go through this much trouble, what chance a common person from authoritarian or semi-authoritarian country have.

This loophole will certainly be misused by Governments to gag someone temporarily/permanently.

https://tailscale.com/ This is essentially a mesh Wireguard Tunnel connectivity that ensures only you can access your service remotely.

:D

Tailscale is going public, so I don’t really trust them anymore

Even if the source code is open?

In general, for self-hosting, we hardly rely on remote service/server. The whole idea of self-hosting is to shun dependency on external service/server, and run everything on your own hardware and network. So that every aspect of the service is in your control. I don’t think self-hosting comes with much risk, unless you make your service available on Internet.

On a side note: you can remotely access any service running on home network via Tailscale[1] / Cloudflare Tunnel. Your services are never exposed on Internet. Moreover, you don’t need to rely on Plex for that.

[1] https://tailscale.com/ [2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/

Just a stupid question - Is self-hosting (and this forum) only applies to open source products?

UX is a subjective topic.

At first I didn’t noticed the 2nd image, and started wondering what kind of children book this is :P

Using Miniflux for more than year now with 0 issue so far.

My Nextcloud AIO :)

Nope, the server itself.

I though Signal Android client is open source and I can changed the server url if I can get server selfhosted.

I actually don’t want to run it on regular signal network. Just want to self-host it on my home server, and allow home devices to use it to communicate via tailscale.

Basically my own private signal network that my devices connected to.

Managed devices usually have software installed to track all such “events” that gets periodically uploaded to IT team, or gets automatically flagged to IT team based on security policies of the organization.

If you are using a managed devices, in all likelihood, all of your actions are getting automatically logged/tracked.

You may take a look at DNS filtering solutions like Pi-Hole or AdGuardHome [1]. It blocks ads / trackers without directly interacting with website content.

[1] https://www.privacyguides.org/en/dns/#self-hosted-dns-filtering

Third time’s a charm for Germany, I guess :) (running and ducking for cover)

/s