ProtonMail Caught Handing Over IP Address Of French Activist To Swiss Authorities

ProtonMail, an email provider that champions privacy through it’s end-to-end encrypted service, is under heavy criticism after a police report was uncovered showing that they had provided French authorities with the IP address of a French climate activist, leading to their arrest. While ProtonMail does not need to comply with French or EU laws, the Switzerland-based company must comply with the Swiss courts; and so, French authorities went through the Swiss police to get a court order.

Andy Yen, Proton Technologies CEO, came out with a statement that the company had no choice but to comply with the legally binding order as they are obligated to follow local laws. Under its own transparency report, they state that they are legally bound to log IP addresses “in extreme criminal cases,” such as when an account is suspected to be involved in criminal activity. “There was no possibility to appeal this particular request,” he said.

Andy added that their encryption be bypassed, meaning they, and therefore the authorities, have no access to the contents of users’ emails. “We do not know the identity of our users, and at no point were we aware that the targeted users were climate activists,” said the CEO. While Swiss law requires users to be notified of any requests for their data, ProtonMail notes that “in certain circumstances,” a notification “can be delayed.”

The data request was part of an investigation into a group of climate activists that protested against gentrification by occupying commercial locations and apartments near Paris’ Place Sainte Marthe. While it started as a local effort, it quickly grew into a national movement. On 1 September, the group published an article on an anti-capitalist news site that French police had contacted the Swiss authorities through Europol to uncover the owner of their ProtonMail account.

Proton reports that in 2020, it received 3572 orders for user information, contested 750 orders, and complied with 3017 requests. That number is more than double the number of requests from the Swiss authorities on behalf of foreign governments from the previous year, meaning that Swiss courts are issuing orders that violate privacy at an alarming rate. Amidst this worrying case, Andy Yen encourages its users to use Tor or ProtonVPN, as Swiss law does not touch on IP logging for VPNs.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3, Z Flip 2 May Get IP Ratings

While IP ratings on phones are getting more and more common, it’s still a challenge to give one to foldable devices. But it looks like Samsung may be giving them next entries into the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip lines.

SamMobile reports the two new foldable devices from Samsung will feature IP ratings, but what rating exactly remains unknown. Due to the complicated nature of their construction, chances are it wouldn’t be an IP68. That’s basically the best a consumer product can go for, certifying that a product can survive being submerged at depths of slightly over 1m for 30 minutes. And that’s not something easy to promise when you have an important moving part in a device’s construction.

It’s not surprising that Samsung wants to extend the IP rating privilege to its most expensive products. This is especially when the company’s own midrange device is getting such a benefit.

But whether or not the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Z Flip 2 will actually come with the ratings, we’ll have to wait and see. SamMobile also reports that both devices will see an official reveal in July, a month earlier than its usual August event reserved for its Note line. The Note device itself will likely not be making an appearance due to the global chip shortage.

NVIDIA Partners Up With MediaTek; Licenses Out Ampere IP To Create New Gaming SDK

Apart from NVIDIA’s announcement of its Omniverse, its CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang also mentioned that it was expanding its reach to several avenues of the ARM ecosystem, through a series of partnerships and licensing out its technology. Of the lot, one announcement that stood out was its decision to license out the GeForce RTX 30 Series’ Ampere IP to MediaTek.

As Huang briefly stated, the Ampere IP would be paired with the Taiwanese SoC maker’s MT8199x chipset, and be used to create a reference system and SDK for Google’s Chrome OS and Linux-based PCs. It is unclear if this partnership will help NVIDIA re-enter the smartphone market once more, but for now, its partnership with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Graviton2 CPU is what is expected to drive “Android gaming” to the cloud.

For that matter, NVIDIA’s decision to partner up with a mobile chipset maker isn’t the surprising part; its rival, AMD, already partnered up with Samsung two years prior, with the former promising to license out its RDNA graphics technology to the Korean tech giant’s Exynos chipset. There are even some alleged benchmarks of said chipset’s performance with an AMD GPU, although that still remains verified till now.

What is surprising, though, is NVIDIA’s decision to partner up with a chipmaker like MediaTek. While it has been hailed as the third-largest chip vendor for the third quarter of last year, it has also come under fire in the past for purposely “modifying” its own chipsets, enabling it to cheat in certain benchmarks like UL’s PCMark app.

In any case, Huang did not say when a MediaTek chipset running with NVIDIA’s Ampere GPU technology would be arriving.