For some reason I have it in the back of my mind that they were at one point accused of being a honeypot for US intelligence because of their association with MIT. Probably complete BS, but maybe not. Are they as open source as they claim to be? Looks like they're on github. F-Droid seems to think they have some Google libraries...
API shenanigans and/or CAPTCHA breaks hydroxide (the foss bridge)
protonvpn: you can no longer fetch all the configs in one download. You have to click “download” >120 times now to get all the configs
account locks if you do not login frequently enough (i think every 6 months)
if you supply your login creds but get a CAPTCHA and say fuck this, and walk, it does not count as a full login needed to reset the expiration clock
the CAPTCHAs are graphical which forces you to enable images in your browser; but when you do that you get images that junk up your screen and waste bandwidth
no public keyring. Hushmail was better in this regard. An advanced user could upload their PGP public key to Hushtools and then encryption just worked for hushmail users contacting that person. After Hushmail started charging, I would tell the normies who need comms w/me to get a gratis Protonmail account. But then I have to send them my public key and they have to figure out how to attach it to my profile in their phonebook. It’s a show-stopper in many situations.
Please read this account from a blind user who could not/can not solve hCaptcha, even with their supposed "accessibility cookie".
Though you shouldn't have to in the first place, please consider turning off open registrations to your instance until this spam wave is dealt with. Open registrations with hCaptcha, may be shutting off access to a not-small subset of potential users.
I know that the mastodon team are suggesting you turn on #hCaptcha for signups to your instance, to combat the spam wave provided by a rudimentary script that doesn't have the smarts to get around it.
I vaguely remember, however, that people have previously raised #accessibility concerns about it. Does anyone have any experience with the accessibility or lack there of, of signing up to instances that use this feature?
If it is indeed inaccessible, I don't consider this to be a reasonable solution.
@james I tried just yesterday to register an account on a site that uses HCaptcha. I use a screen reader on Windows and Firefox as my browser. It was completely unusable. It asked me for an 'accessibility cookie' that requires to give them a 'real email' address, refusing to accept my Firefox Relay alias. After caving in and giving them an address that i had given them a few years back and getting my accessibility cookie, the bloody captcha refused to recognise the cookie. Checking their support pages and tinkering with Firefox settings, none of which worked, I gave up and had to wait for a housemate to arrive after her work to help me solve the captcha.
Is there anything unsavory about ProtonMail?
For some reason I have it in the back of my mind that they were at one point accused of being a honeypot for US intelligence because of their association with MIT. Probably complete BS, but maybe not. Are they as open source as they claim to be? Looks like they're on github. F-Droid seems to think they have some Google libraries...