This. It's escalating too fast and too high and refusing ever to surrender because it's been trained on a diet of James Bond and tabloid newspaper articles. Sure, yes, more measured scholarly articles exist but I bet they're fewer and much less read than tabloids screaming for blood.
Well, maybe. But the first time I saw this article linked on here the vast majority of the replies were "Oh no, Proton, why?" and "That's me leaving Proton then". Probably people who read only the headline and not the article. But 404 chose the headline, and they know a lot of people read only that.
The article will drive people away from Proton, and you then have to ask where they're going to go instead and whether that will be better than Proton at keeping their data private. And the answer to that is: it's unlikely.
I definitely think people need to be aware that *any* service they use online has to comply with subpoenas to provide their data. I don't think pointing that out via an article implying Protonmail are misbehaving is useful reporting. It is still better than people use Proton than Gmail.
I don't recall exactly where but I don't read EULAs any more than the next person so it wasn't buried in there, it was somewhere prominent.
I have also signed up for Protonmail and I definitely remember seeing something to the effect of "We have to comply with legal demands for user information, so don't do anything like connect a backup email with your actual name if you want true privacy".
Interestingly avoiding Italian airspace and at least one other country (Germany and Switzerland?) that meant they couldn't go east of Italy, hence the dog-leg through the Mediterranean.
If your objection is that the supposedly privacy-obsessed Swiss have this treaty with the US in the first place, that's a different kettle of fish. But Proton itself had no option but to supply the information, they tell you that on signup and to have expected anything else is not reasonable.
I don't agree - again, what else would you expect them to do? If they are served with a subpoena, they have to give the information in the subpoena, *and they tell you that when you sign up*.
You have to have some responsibility as a user. You have to expect that any company will obey the law.
404 does a lot of good work but I don't get why you're pushing this. Company obeys local law is not a story.
Did Proton refuse to give you a refund or something? I don't understand what you think they should have done differently that makes this a story, it's making you look like you have a grudge.
I feel like I need to post this up at work...
Yeesh, this is grim...
Marco Polo eat your heart out!
(Also, Sherborne is a small, sleepy little place in Dorset and it is hilarious to me that it should have any ninth-century connection with India. But also very cool.)
Aren't they owned by a Czech billionaire now?
He'll probably have it without anaesthetic though. The brain worm will provide enough pain relief entirely naturally.
They've got Boris Johnson on as a consultant, the phantom datacentres double as phantom hospitals.
For Britain the EU is a foreign thing to be used when convenient and derided or ignored when it's not. For France the EU is an extension of the state, a tool for extending state policy. French presidents expect to agree policy with Berlin and then for the EU to fall in line.
New at The Empty City
The curious section 3 of the new National Security Act
A broad and vague provision may be a cause for concern -especially for commentators and journalists
Substack version:
emptycity.substack.com/p/the-curiou...
Non-substack version:
theemptycity.com/blog/2026/03...
Iran has signed but not ratified the Rome Statute. If Iran were to ratify it or to ask the ICC to investigate, the ICC would gain jurisdiction over war crimes committed on Iranian territory.
Suddenly a lot of the world might find itself obligated to arrest Trump or Hegseth if given the opportunity.
I'm not calling it getting old anymore. I'm going to say it's time sickness from now on.
I can't see they're about to sell out Ukraine, whatever fantasies Orban might entertain. They've invested too much and put too much political capital into backing the Ukrainians.
In the UK? Almost universally for cooking and heating, and it's the main non-renewable power generation source. We use a lot of it.
It should be possible to contact OpenAI or Google or whoever and say "I am concerned that this person's use of your tech may lead to them harming themself or another person" and that gets referred to a team that can change their interaction with the chatbot to go in the direction of recovery. 3/3
If you are worried that someone is going off the deep end with their interaction with a chatbot, why can the AI company not access that chatbot to see what is being discussed and modify its system prompt so that the bot itself starts to query the delusion with the user, aiming to bring them out? 2/3
It's a terrifying notion. The thing that strikes me though is: unlike anywhere else where someone has an imaginary friend or believes they're getting instructions from aliens, they already have a trusted communications channel that can be monitored, tweaked and adapted: the chatbot itself. 1/3
Yes! This is exactly the right response.
Renewables (and in this country especially wind) have become the stable, reliable, not-blackmailable choice and we should be building them as fast as humanly possible. Because from a geopolitical and economic standpoint it's the only sane option.
Yeah, they've got this sort of bubbling voice, Melvyn Bragg was commendably calm about the whole thing.
a lot of comments this morning about the rate at which old buildings in Glasgow go up in flames so I just want to say: as a bystander with no direct knowledge of this fire, but a good bit of knowledge about old buildings burning, i don’t think this one is sketchy.
www.reddit.com/r/glasgow/co...
There's an In Our Time on slime moulds where they talk about this. It's really quite impressive!
The British government made a bizarre decision back in 2017 to allow the Rough gas storage facility to close (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_(.... That took away essentially all of our gas storage. It's reopened a bit since then but from the look of it still only at a fraction of capacity.
