At Proton, we have always been highly disciplined, focusing on how to best sustain our mission over time. This job is incredibly difficult. Everything we create always takes longer and is more complex than it would be if we did it without focusing on privacy, and we generally have to do it with fewer resources. This also makes it a path that we walk alone as few other teams share our commitment to privacy and community and, therefore, understand the unique challenges we face day after day.

But we also know that making privacy the default online will take more than just us, which is why we’re always very excited to meet like-minded teams that are purpose and community-driven. In 2022, we met the team from SimpleLogin and joined forces, and today, we’re happy to announce that Standard Notes will also join us to advance our shared mission.

Standard Notes, as the name suggests, is an end-to-end encrypted note-taking application, available on mobile and desktop, that is used by over 300,000 people. Our personal notes often contain some of our most intimate and sensitive data, and protecting them with end-to-end encryption ensures that they always remain accessible only to you. This really makes Standard Notes complementary to the Proton ecosystem of services, and it is one that we have long used ourselves and are excited to introduce to the Proton community.

What does this mean for Proton and Standard Notes users?

Both Proton and Standard Notes share a strong commitment to our communities, so Standard Notes will remain open source, freely available, and fully supported. Prices are not changing, and if you have a current subscription to Standard Notes, it will continue to be honored. Proton aspires to do the right thing and be a responsible home for open-source projects, and just as we did with SimpleLogin, we are committed to preserving what makes Standard Notes special and much loved.

In the coming months, we hope to find ways to make Standard Notes more easily accessible to the Proton community. This way, in addition to protecting your email, calendar, files, passwords, and online activity, you can also protect your notes.

Why Standard Notes

Proton has long been guided by our unique values. We’ve always believed in putting people ahead of profits, from our start as a crowdfunded project created by scientists who met at CERN right up to the present day as we safeguard the privacy of over 100 million people. It’s hard enough to run a long-lasting and durable privacy company — even fewer have managed to do it without venture capital or other outside investors.

Standard Notes has been around since 2017 and has withstood the test of time. Standard Notes has also grown without venture capital funding and has demonstrated a commitment towards serving its community. This alignment in values is rare, and creates a natural fit to work together. We are proud to have the entire Standard Notes team join us on our journey, and we look forward to learning from them and growing stronger together. But most of all, we look forward to continuing to serve both the Proton and Standard Notes communities together in the years to come.

This is a newly discovered email vulnerability:

The email your manager received and forwarded to you was something completely innocent, such as a potential customer asking a few questions. All that email was supposed to achieve was being forwarded to you. However, the moment the email appeared in your inbox, it changed. The innocent pretext disappeared and the real phishing email became visible. A phishing email you had to trust because you knew the sender and they even confirmed that they had forwarded it to you.

This attack is possible because most email clients allow CSS to be used to style HTML emails. When an email is forwarded, the position of the original email in the DOM usually changes, allowing for CSS rules to be selectively applied only when an email has been forwarded.

An attacker can use this to include elements in the email that appear or disappear depending on the context in which the email is viewed. Because they are usually invisible, only appear in certain circumstances, and can be used for all sorts of mischief, I’ll refer to these elements as kobold letters, after the elusive sprites of mythology.

I can certainly imagine the possibilities.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.

As spotted by The Document Foundation, the government has apparently finished its pilot run of LibreOffice and is now announcing plans to expand to more open source offerings.

In 2021, the state government announced plans to move 25,000 computers to LibreOffice by 2026. At the time, Schleswig-Holstein said it had already been testing LibreOffice for two years.

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