It’s not about us. It’s about the rest of the world, a large portion of whom uses M365. These blocks mean we can’t communicate with potential employers, family, government institutions, universities, etc.
Here I am, maintaining several block lists (max of 500 entries per list) on our M365 tenant of spam and phishing domains and addresses, and not a one comes from Tuta, Proton, or any other privacy provider. Nearly all are gmail, outlook, and icloud, with a few customs sprinkled in. Their claim that it’s to fight spam is BS.
Years ago, I worked for a company that provided phone location for emergency services (fire, police, medical) to the big 3 cellular companies in the US. It required cell providers to install special hardware; back then, GPS was less ubiquitous, but it (still) suffers from accuracy in urban environments; it doesn’t take much to block GPS signals. Also, you don’t need access to anything more than the service provider’s logs to do trilateration; it’s harder to get GPS data from a phone without having software on the phone. In any case, Google pioneered getting around that by mapping wifi signals and supplementing poor GPS with trilateration, and it was good enough. Even back then, our lunch was being eaten by the cost of our systems, and work-arounds like wifi mapping.
Anyway, fast forward a decade and I’m working for a company that provides emergency support for customers who are traveling, and we’re looking at ways to locate customers’ business phones to provide relevant notifications. One of the issues was that there are places in the world where data connections are not great, and it was not acceptable for us to just ignore clients without data connections. One of the things we explored was called zero-length SMS. It’s what it sounds like: an SMS message with zero-length does not alert the phone, but it does cause a ping to the phone. It was an idea that didn’t pan out, but that’s not relevant.
Cell phones have a lot of power-saving algorithms that try to reduce the amount of chatter – both to reduce load on cell towers, but because all that cellular traffic is battery-intensive. So, if you’re a government trying to track a phone, and you’re working with a cell provider, and you don’t have a backdoor in the phone, then you will be able to see which cell tower the phone last spoke with, but that probably won’t give you very good location data and it may not update frequently. This is especially true in rural environments, where there’s low density and a single cell tower might have a service radius of 3 miles – that’s a lot of area.
If you’re tracking someone by phone, a normal cell connection may not be granular enough. Sending SMSes to a phone can force the phone to ping the tower and give you more data points about where the phone may be, how it’s moving, and so on.If you’re lucky, you can get pings from multiple towers, which might allow you to trilaterate to within a dozen meters.
Push notifications use data, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some of that going on, too. It says “through Apple and Google’s servers” which means they’re talking about the push notification servers and not the phones. Android phones are constantly sending telemetry back to Google, so if that is what they’re doing sending push notifications is probably more useful to them for Apple phones.
The article is light on details, but that’d be my guess. Forcing traffic to get more frequent cell tower pings and more data points for trilateration.
Just been reading up on this, they’re basically using the push device ID to see when certain devices are receiving data and from what apps. It sounds like more work than its worth, but it’s clearly something that’s being used widely.
Ironically, when I tried setting a ProtonMail account recovery email address, they rejected it because it was on a list like this one. I hope Proton gets off this blacklist, but I also think they should practice what they preach.
A lot of sites are willing to have something that’s good enough, rather than perfect, so if they find that using a list like this solves the majority of their abuse/deliverability issues, it’s unfortunately pretty logical they’d use it for that.
@CrypticCoffee
As for me, I will never, ever use any site that demands a drivers license or a face scan to get on. I'd sooner totally disconnect from the open Internet and move all my work to the darknet only.
I don’t think so. Porn is very much a mental thing too, not just a visual one. Knowing none of the subjects of the pictures and videos exist will ruin it for a lot of people.
Um, so, pretend you didn’t hear this from me, but there are LoRas you can use and even train yourself from a handful of sample images, for anyone in the world that you want to see.
It is logical that large corporations that base their economy on surveillance advertising hate users who protect their privacy by using all kinds of dirty tricks to bypass or eliminate these protections… Luckily I have had no problems so far with the Proton, Tuta and Murena (NextCloud) emails that I use in the EU.
Disposable mails (one time mails) can be a problem for webmasters. But PRIVACY mails or ALIAS mails is PERMANENT addresses. So there is no way that they would be deleted at no additional situation. They gonna be deleted only if webmaster send SPAM or got data leak.
If you will use such addresses as disposable you will be simply banned (there is written in ToS)
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