Terror attacks are tragic. Terror attacks make each one of us long for security. That's why politicians repeatedly call for more
surveillance after every terror attack. Most famously Theresa May, who wants to rip up human rights laws to fight terrorism.
However, compelling data shows that more surveillance won't help at all: Every identified Islamist terrorist in Europe
who killed innocent people with a terror attack since 2014 was already known to the authorities prior to the attack.
Tutanota, the world's first end-to-end encrypted mail
service, has recently joined the Open Invention Network. Tutanota joins companies such as Google, IBM, NEC, Red Hat and SUSE,
who are all part of OIN. OIN enables open source developers to freely develop and share their work while being protected
from patent suits. All members of OIN have joined to voice their support for the principle of non-aggression. We at
Tutanota are happy to be part of OIN and to do our share to support and strengthen the open source community.
With just one year to go before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into force, privacy-focused online
services have come together to highlight the crucial role of encryption
in achieving GDPR compliance. As a key technology to protect employee and customer data, encryption helps organizations
reduce GDPR compliance costs and avoid heavy fines.
The WannaCry ransomware attack that affected more than 200.000 computers was also the fault of the NSA and Microsoft.
While Microsoft is now offering a patch, the lesson we have to learn from this attack is that we need a different approach
so secure the Internet: The open source approach.
The encrypted mail service Tutanota helps over two million users to share their mails securely - also with attachments.
However, when the attachments get too large people and businesses need encrypted cloud storage as well. We've spoken
to Istvan Lam, CEO of Tresorit, about our shared goal to make end-to-end encryption a tool to be used by the masses.
Two weeks ago a massive newsletter email bomb has been executed against Tutanota's main contact mailbox hello@tutao.de, which
sent 500.000 newletters to this mailbox rendering it useless. The attacker has automatically signed up Tutanota's main
email address to thousands of online
newsletters so that confirmation request mails hit the hello-mailbox continuously. Until we implemented a protection method around
half a million unwanted emails were received.
On Friday we had to replace one broken hard drive. During this process mails that had already been deleted
had been accidentally restored. This affected around 10.000 Tutanota users (around 0.5%), who were not able
to access all mailbox folders (ie. inbox or drafts). We fixed this problem Saturday evening.
On April 3, 2017, President Trump signed a bill which was designed to cut out all of the FCCs protective laws for
consumer internet use in the US. This action effectively opened the floodgates for advertisers and increased the reach
of government procurement on data generated by private citizens.
Only recently the American Senate passed S.J.Res 34, an anti-privacy law that allows American ISPs to sell their
customers' internet history to the highest bidder. Now activism online against the bill is spreading like fire, one
activist even started a fundraising campaign to buy politicians' browsing history. We think this idea is simply
amazing and judging from a German example it might actually work.
Our website will be down for server maintenance for about eight hours starting at 10:30 PM (CEST) April 4th. Your
encrypted mailbox will still be accessible via app.tutanota.com or via our free and open source Android and iOS apps.
We are excited to release Tutanota Three in private beta. This is our biggest update to Tutanota since we have started building
our secure mail client with automatic encryption five years ago. We have re-build
Tutanota from scratch to give it a fresh design, to improve performance and to make it fit for the future. Lots of Tutanota
users have already signed up for the private beta and will now start testing our brand new client. The public beta will follow
in the coming months, so stay tuned!
Since January 2017 secure mail service Tutanota is seeing an exponential growth in users. This trend has started in the
second half of 2016, but has really taken off recently. Simultaneous to this development privacy-focused search engines
like Qwant.com and duckduckgo.com are also growing quickly. The reasons - as our users tell us - are not only to be
found in politics, but politics do play a big part.
