Warrant canary

[kbps 26]

Has Air ever considered this or is it not needed because you are based in Italy?

 

Generally the flaw that I see with them is the fact that the page hosting your Canary needs to be updated literally everyday for it to be of any use, and we all know for a lot of sites this is impossible. 

 

Thoughts please.

[LZ1 662]

Hello !

 

It has been mentioned a couple of times, but I think the consensus is that it's not that valuable. Furthermore, Air has showed its resolve on more than one occasion to avoid breaches of privacy or security.  So I'm inclined to think that Air would sooner shut down, than succumb to the requests that a Warrant Canary is thought to guard against. Some other providers have used them though.

[kbps 26]

Thanks for the quick reply. 

 

I can't decide if they are usefull or not.  It's only because I was reading this page and wondered what people ( Air) thought. 

 

Ive been on the net a long time, so to me it seems like canaries are no better than "page last updated on xxx" text/script that used to be ubiquitous in the early days!

[LZ1 662]

No worries

 

Perhaps they are useful. Perhaps not. For a VPN service, they could be deadly, since VPNs are largely trust-based services.

 

I'm sure that Air has considered them. I mean, they sure considered all the other security features didn't they! Haha. So if it's not here, then it was probably not deemed useful.

 

It's a lovely concept however.

[zhang888 1065]

It's just a flawed concept that never yet proven itself in practice, and the majority of the infosec community agrees with that.

Too many VPN providers that have other "minor" issues to cover up, jumped into this concept just as an extra buzz fashion trend.

Would you feel more safe with a cron script echoing the same message to a static text file?

[snaggle 25]

Hi

I asked the same question a while ago.

I now don't see the value as it seems even when a canary is breached its just business as usual... see Silent Circle http://www.zdnet.com/article/silent-circle-quietly-kills-warrant-canary/

and Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4ct1kz/reddit_deletes_surveillance_warrant_canary_in/

 

It pretty much boils down to trust in your provider, if in doubt you can always connect via tor.

[jean claud 45]

Anyway , warrant canaries were an act of resistance (with its limits) , I regreat it's disparition due for a big part to business reasons .