3 ms·

You literally signed up five minutes ago just to post these wild allegations.

by Udo 13y ago

mike-cardwell 13y ago
To be fair, that was my first thought too. I find it difficult to believe they would close down if the service was successful and growing. I know this is exactly what Lavabit did, but I feel Lavabit is an exception to the rule in this respect. I have no evidence either way, just my gut feeling. Until I've seen evidence that it was anything other than a simple money related business decision, I'm going to assume it was so. I don't mean to make any accusations: This is just the way my brain works.
- Udo 13y ago
  So if he wasn't trolling, why didn't cryptomaniac use his real account to say this? It's very sad that these kinds of drive-by accounts are so successful (he got at least two upvotes at the time I'm writing this) for what seems like a personal attack without any data to back up the claims. And regarding the actual content, it doesn't really make sense to me why a startup would lose face if they shut down a service that wasn't viable. They are expected to experiment. It happens all the time and nobody minds. Sure, it probably makes the decision easier to shut down if there aren't a lot of users, but let's not jump to conclusions.
  - mike-cardwell 13y ago
    > So if he wasn't trolling, why didn't cryptomaniac use his real account to say this? I did not make this claim, so feel no need to answer your question. > It's very sad that these kinds of drive-by accounts are so successful (he got at least two upvotes) for what seems like a personal attack without any data to back up the claims. I don't think he meant to express it as a statement of fact, but meant to suggest it as his strong oppinion. I just think it was worded badly. Lots of people don't sign up until they decide to make their first comment. > And it doesn't really make sense to my why a startup would lose face if they shut down a service that wasn't viable. They are expected to experiment. It happens all the time and nobody minds. Sure, it probably makes the decision easier to shut down if there aren't a lot of users, but let's not jump to conclusions. Many people are embarrased when their companies fail.
    - rdl 13y ago
      > Many people are embarrased when their companies fail. In this case it was just one product getting shut down (and only until we can do something better); there's clearly a demand in the market for it, maybe stronger than ever. I'm actually much more embarrassed by the horrible formatting of my PGP message (I never really did PGP stuff on Mac before, and forgot about the newline issues.)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- rdl 13y ago
  We didn't have millions of users, but were making decent profits to cover costs on the users we had, and growing. If someone outside the US wants to run a privacy VPN service for consumers, or if the lavabit case is resolved successfully, I'd probably say it's a decent business (boring, but decent). The financial issue was the potentially huge liability due to a legal action or battle, not the (small) costs of operating the service; my cofounder and I are both not really able to take a lavabit-style stand (I do DoD/USG consulting work, so I have additional special considerations in doing anything which isn't absolutely legally compliant in every appearance which Ladar et al didn't have...). We're still working on similar things, now without the revenue from the privacy vpn service.
  - bencollier49 13y ago
    This is probably just a turn of phrase but > decent profits to cover costs Do you mean it was meeting costs and growing in a way which would have led to profit in the absence of a legal tangle with the FBI or whatever?
    - rdl 13y ago
      Yeah, it was covering operating costs and some profit, and would feasibly grow into a decent overall business. But even if it became a decent overall business ($100-200k/mo profit in 2014?), one pen trap incident on one customer would have had vastly higher costs -- civil or criminal contempt being the most likely outcome (maybe not -$inf, but at least -$millions). If we were the legally best VPN option, I would probably have pushed to keep it going anyway and just shut down when/if that happened, but as it is, non-us providers run by non-US people (there are several good ones) are an objectively better option, so in good conscience there's no reason to continue running a US privacy VPN service without technical controls to prevent being compelled to screw over a user.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Has anyone written a review of Sealand in the light of the current situation of "no privacy anywhere"? I'm very pleased that there are people working in this area, and I look forward to seeing what happens.

You literally signed up five minutes ago just to post these wild allegations.

by Udo 13y ago

You literally signed up five minutes ago just to post these wild allegations.

To be fair, that was my first thought too. I find it difficult to believe they would close down if the service was successful and growing. I know this is exactly what Lavabit did, but I feel Lavabit is an exception to the rule in this respect. I have no evidence either way, just my gut feeling. Until I've seen evidence that it was anything other than a simple money related business decision, I'm going to assume it was so. I don't mean to make any accusations: This is just the way my brain works.

Udo 13y ago
So if he wasn't trolling, why didn't cryptomaniac use his real account to say this? It's very sad that these kinds of drive-by accounts are so successful (he got at least two upvotes at the time I'm writing this) for what seems like a personal attack without any data to back up the claims. And regarding the actual content, it doesn't really make sense to me why a startup would lose face if they shut down a service that wasn't viable. They are expected to experiment. It happens all the time and nobody minds. Sure, it probably makes the decision easier to shut down if there aren't a lot of users, but let's not jump to conclusions.
- mike-cardwell 13y ago
  > So if he wasn't trolling, why didn't cryptomaniac use his real account to say this? I did not make this claim, so feel no need to answer your question. > It's very sad that these kinds of drive-by accounts are so successful (he got at least two upvotes) for what seems like a personal attack without any data to back up the claims. I don't think he meant to express it as a statement of fact, but meant to suggest it as his strong oppinion. I just think it was worded badly. Lots of people don't sign up until they decide to make their first comment. > And it doesn't really make sense to my why a startup would lose face if they shut down a service that wasn't viable. They are expected to experiment. It happens all the time and nobody minds. Sure, it probably makes the decision easier to shut down if there aren't a lot of users, but let's not jump to conclusions. Many people are embarrased when their companies fail.
  - rdl 13y ago
    > Many people are embarrased when their companies fail. In this case it was just one product getting shut down (and only until we can do something better); there's clearly a demand in the market for it, maybe stronger than ever. I'm actually much more embarrassed by the horrible formatting of my PGP message (I never really did PGP stuff on Mac before, and forgot about the newline issues.)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
rdl 13y ago
We didn't have millions of users, but were making decent profits to cover costs on the users we had, and growing. If someone outside the US wants to run a privacy VPN service for consumers, or if the lavabit case is resolved successfully, I'd probably say it's a decent business (boring, but decent). The financial issue was the potentially huge liability due to a legal action or battle, not the (small) costs of operating the service; my cofounder and I are both not really able to take a lavabit-style stand (I do DoD/USG consulting work, so I have additional special considerations in doing anything which isn't absolutely legally compliant in every appearance which Ladar et al didn't have...). We're still working on similar things, now without the revenue from the privacy vpn service.
- bencollier49 13y ago
  This is probably just a turn of phrase but > decent profits to cover costs Do you mean it was meeting costs and growing in a way which would have led to profit in the absence of a legal tangle with the FBI or whatever?
  - rdl 13y ago
    Yeah, it was covering operating costs and some profit, and would feasibly grow into a decent overall business. But even if it became a decent overall business ($100-200k/mo profit in 2014?), one pen trap incident on one customer would have had vastly higher costs -- civil or criminal contempt being the most likely outcome (maybe not -$inf, but at least -$millions). If we were the legally best VPN option, I would probably have pushed to keep it going anyway and just shut down when/if that happened, but as it is, non-us providers run by non-US people (there are several good ones) are an objectively better option, so in good conscience there's no reason to continue running a US privacy VPN service without technical controls to prevent being compelled to screw over a user.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Has anyone written a review of Sealand in the light of the current situation of "no privacy anywhere"? I'm very pleased that there are people working in this area, and I look forward to seeing what happens.