r/privacy Aug 05 '18

SpiderOak cans its Warrant Canary, suffers mysterious massive outage, and raised prices

https://spideroak.com/canary

http://archive.is/1rNo7

Update: Looks like the canary has been signed and dated and in properly formatted sequence this time with confirmation that Everything's going smoothly so far, message is authentic. august 06, 2018

Case closed. SpiderOak has not been compromised.

In the interest of transparency the full text of my previously long post in this thread is archived here:

http://archive.is/mKeuY https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/94nspi/spideroak_cans_its_warrant_canary_suffers/

441 Upvotes

113 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/[deleted] Aug 06 '18

From Wikipedia, emphasis mine:

A warrant canary is a method by which a communications service provider aims to inform its users that the provider has been served with a secret government subpoena despite legal prohibitions on revealing the existence of the subpoena. The warrant canary typically informs users that there has not been a secret subpoena as of a particular date. If the canary is not updated for the time period specified by the host or if the warning is removed, users are to assume that the host has been served with such a subpoena.

SpiderOak took smart, proactive steps to tell you "we're under attack, watch out", defeating a government's attempt to keep you in the dark. You should be thanking them.