Cock.li being taken down by the government?

Privacy
1

The below is currently posted on the homepage of Cock.li:

COCK.LI IS ON RED ALERT

Date posted: 2024-11-12
PGP Signed Version

:rotating_light: COCK.LI IS ON RED ALERT.

Updates:

  • All services may go up and down while the news e-mails lag the server. This is why there are never any news posts.
  • PW changes and maybe registration will be back within a couple days.

Cock.li will shut down before becoming complicit in crimes against its own userbase under duress of any government or organization.

For nearly 11 years, cock.li has remained one of the only public e-mail providers to allow registration as anonymously as a library card. The fact that it’s still possible to get an e-mail address as easy as 20 years ago is a fact widely hated by international governments; at least the parts of those governments which have dedicated countless resources to target our service, our team, our family, and our friends with illegal surveillance, bad-jacketing, organized disinformation, and much worse.

A combination of these illegal tactics have become so serious that the site is now in grave danger.

The only way it’s been possible for cock.li to weather this and stay online is thanks to the dedication of our entire lives to this bit. Our small team of 3-5 people have had our lives permanently altered and our stability sacrificed so Internet users worldwide can more-or-less enjoy the comfort of being able to access e-mail without requiring a phone number or other surveillance document.

Despite the constant attacks on the service and our personal lives, no one directly involved has ever been paid in 11 years for their work on cock.li. The personal costs of this volunteer work add up over a lifetime, and as we get older we’ve slowly taken steps back to compensate, when we should have been stepping up.

Stepping up is exactly what’s needed right now, and we’re here to do it. These recent issues have forced us to take leave from our jobs to make time just to keep the wheels spinning. I hope you can understand that is why, for the first time ever, I’m asking you to donate directly to the people who make cock.li possible.

Your donation will make a real difference by telling us to use the money where it will help the most right now. We have a sizable war chest for legal expenses that has never once been used to pay us for our work. Problem is, if we can’t make time to put that war chest to work, what good is it? We believe cannibalizing this fund to offset our lost time would put cock.li in a worse position, so by creating a new fund we can make it clear what we’re doing while keeping our legal funds secure.

It shouldn’t surprise you that the people who are so passionate about this service are not profiteers or business people. We are private, unpaid individuals who don’t want to see one of the last great liberties of this Internet fall victim to the criminal and violent attempts to shut it down. If these critical threats force us to change the world to ensure e-mail remains recognized as a human right, we won’t hesitate to do it.

We never once asked for personal donations specifically in the hopes that if this moment ever came, our userbase would appreciate that we were able to make it this long on passion alone, and trust that your donation will make the best possible impact.

There is much work to be done. I will keep you updated as much as I can. Thank you very much for your consideration.

Monero: 41fqXKYNEWuBDuqYczhoSiE1aUN9tCGdWYrfjynebuTM3tdE5UUHEfeZjZ3iZpgqY8LdYLk9h4As66UBC5mARL4z98PfUwB

Bitcoin: bc1qg9ehmfzusgfd6dvudll0qxkcl8c5q3sh8qnetr

External Media In the 2022 film COCKCON 2020 (2019), a 250MB encrypted file was hidden in a second video track of the 1080p release. You can download this film here. I don’t know if the encryption key will ever be released, but if it does, you’ll want quick access to that file.

Furthermore, two more files are released today, 2024-11-12: ins10.luks (555MB) and ins11.luks (64MB). Please download these torrents and seed them as long as you can. Please consider your privacy when seeding.

LIBERTY CANARY

Date updated: See the PGP Signed Version

Cock.li is in 100% control of all of its hardware, and the service is still operating normally. The website (account registration+pw change) is currently offline.

Cock.li will shut down before becoming complicit in crimes against its own userbase under duress of any government or organization.

Until further notice, THIS CANARY SHOULD BE UPDATED DAILY. Under no circumstances will we let this canary go 48 hours without changing the “Date updated” in the PGP signed-version of this message unless a PGP-signed message changes the schedule.

The schedule or PGP key used to sign this message may be changed only according to signed message from key 5CB49CDCEAC797FBF8BDC074FD71AD2771A5CC1B. Any message certifying the change of PGP key should be displayed alongside all messages signed with the new key for at least 7 days.

Fun facts about cock.li:

User count: ~1,400,000

Established: 2013

Domains:

  • cock.li
  • airmail.cc
    [shortened the rest of the list, as not SFW]

I LOVE YOU LADAR LEVISON [NB: Lavabit creator]

Makes mewonder what is really going on: some government trying to take them down for not policing wrongthink enough, some legitimate investigation into a specific user involved in crime, or just a big nothingburger and attempt to get some donations?

Apparently the mail service still works.

If they actually go down, I wonder if there’s any other services that fit the following criteria:

  • don’t need any personal information such as a phone number [most email providers fail here]
  • doesn’t block VPN or Tor users
  • IMAP / generic email client support [Protonmail and Tuta fail here]
  • offers free accounts [Posteo fails here]
  • not overtly political [Riseup and Disroot fail here]
4 Likes
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I never liked this provider or who they are seemingly trying to cater too so I can’t say I would be displeased to see them go.

also…

We have a sizable war chest for legal expenses that has never once been used to pay us for our work. Problem is, if we can’t make time to put that war chest to work, what good is it?

This to me sounds like they want to take their “war chest” (with the built-in excuse of not having the time to fight) and whatever donations they can get and ride off into the sunset instead of fighting whatever “threat” they are dealing with.

2 Likes
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AFAIK they got raided by the feds before and with the clientele they are catering to they will surely get raided again. Good riddance.

1 Like
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The name of the service and their domain names explains everything that a person needs to know. Wouldn’t use it.

1 Like
5

I don’t know anything about them. But if they had actually received anything as serious as an NSL or gag order for software modification, they wouldn’t be posting stuff like this. The warrant canary would be the only actual indication, or they would announce they are shutting down and then announce they received such an order.

So it might be just subpoenas. But on cursory search it seems the owner is on record for saying they comply with ALL requests, so not sure what all this talk of a legal fund is:

Canfield wrote on the Cock.li homepage that he complies “with all federal laws regarding online content hosting and will report any illegal activity to the relevant authorities,” and publishes all the requests he receives.

Source: The Story of Cock.li, the Site Used to Shut Down the LA School District

Seems fishy :eyes:

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It’s never a good idea to pick a meme email provider like this as your main email.

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Not main provider (I wouldn’t use them for real life stuff) but again, there doesnt seem to be (m)any other providers left that dont fail the basic requirements (free, no phone number, IMAP)

3 Likes
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I am not sure a provider that had domains such as hitler.rocks and nuke.africa isn’t “overtly political” for all the wrong reasons. I think its pretty clear what their politics are and I am not sure the benefits outweigh what it means to support those beliefs.

5 Likes
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They’d probably tell you “it’s just a joke, chill bro” but it doesn’t change how they deserve every bit of legal fallout they’re facing.

1 Like
10

Let me remind you that this is completely BS, and illegal (in some countries at least)

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Whats BS? They definitely owned those domains. That one alone had 14k+ users at one point.

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@Parish2555 I meant domain name: fact that Hilter rocks is BS.

1 Like
13

I am surprised to see cock mail get a bad rap here. Yeah it’s got a somewhat humorous and non-serious name, but the most important aspect is it’s one of the few onion mails that gives you ability to sign up freely while also letting you send mail outward to other emails that aren’t onion mails. There’s a few more besides cock mail, but I’m pretty sure they only allow you to send mail to other onion addresses, making their usage severely limited. I’ll be honest, there’s not many great email choices out here anymore. Proton is okay I guess. I thought Kenny from Mental Outlaw gave a compelling criticism of Proton though. NeoMutt is excellent if you don’t mind setting it up yourself. But cock mail and i2p mail are the only great anonymous and free choices.

2 Likes
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They removed these domains years ago and you’ll find zero political stuff on the home page or TOS.

On the other hand, Disroot says they’ll ban you for:

  1. Contributing to the discrimination, harassment or harm against any individual or group. That includes the spread of hate and bigotry through racism, ethnophobia, antisemitism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of discriminatory behavior.
  2. Contributing to the abuse of others by distributing material where the production process created violence or sexual assault against persons or animals.

Even if you don’t want to use the account for political activism, “contributing to” could mean anything. Basically you always live in fear that your account gets banned because you subscribed to the wrong newsletter or registered an account with the wrong forum or had the wrong opinion in a forum where you registered with this email or you accidentally corresponded with a person who’s on some internal no-no list.

edit: some interesting thoughts from dig deeper:

Why the situation is as it is

E-mail services can be funded in a few ways:

  1. By making you pay for an account
  2. By collecting and sharing your data, or showing advertisements
  3. By paying for it from the maintainers’ own pockets
  4. By soliciting donations

Option 1 can afford to be private without needing your data - however, that does not mean it will. After all, privacy is a big business opportunity now and there are lots of frauds taking advantage (many of them I’ve analyzed here). Some do exist that do go out of their way to create a secure, private and functional service - so, use those if you’ve got the money. Option 2 is obviously undesirable and the reason for this report’s existence. Option 3 is extremely rare and doesn’t last long (see SigaVPN), so let’s move on to Option 4:

For a service to earn donations, there need to be people willing to give them. Unfortunately, there are not enough privacy enthusiasts for whom that cause is important enough to support monetarily. There is a group of people who do care more about it, though - the so-called “activists”, or people working on liberatory social change. This means the service will be inseparable from the donators’ ideology - since it was made by them, for them, anyway. The activists consider it an abuse that the big corpos or governments can spy on their communication or even track their web browsing to show them ads, etc. More importantly, since they use the Internet to talk about their “activism”, they cannot afford to be watched - because that innocent convo might be used against them during protests, etc. Privacy enthusiasts alone usually do not have an ideology they identify with from which the privacy would follow - they just don’t like being spied on. They also don’t do real-life stuff such as shoplifts, whistleblowing, etc. for which the privacy would be required. We can see, then, why the “activists” care so much more about the issue that they can afford to donate. This is why we don’t yet have a service that is free, donation-supported, and without a stated ideology - privacy alone just doesn’t move the spirits enough. When the privacy enthusiasts consider the issue more important, these kinds of services will spring up. For now, we’re unfortunately dependent on RiseUp, Disroot and some others.

1 Like
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Is this supposed to matter? The fact is they had them and tens of thousands of their users used them. That says a lot about who they are and who those users are.

Even in their notice they call their users fags and retards. These people have not changed in the slightest.

I think its really silly to discount a service because they ban “hate and bigotry through racism, ethnophobia, antisemitism, sexism, homophobia” but be totally fine using a service that has a history of being pro-hitler and pro-genocide.

Its especially odd to get this from a PG member, since PG has similar rules

Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.

[…]

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things

5 Likes
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There’s a pretty good quote from the crippled.media VPS provider reviews that I think applies here: “I didn’t really have anything super controversial that I intended on posting, but knowing content far worse than I’d ever be willing to host is allowed, provides me a certain level of ease. It’s like when your neighbors blatantly break the rules of your apartment complex, yet never manage to get in trouble for it. It sort of makes you feel better about your position there, since your neighbors make you look like an angel in comparison to them.”

1 Like
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People are getting confused here. The issue is with the provider. We all understand that private services attract bad actors as users. Its why Mullvad had to cease port forwarding.

My point to @Regime6045 is that its just as political to be fine with a service that has obvious fascist and pro-genocide ownership as it is to avoid a service for having anti-discrimination rules. There seems to be this group of people who are against explicit political statements but are willing to bury their heads in the sand to very obvious implicit political statements and actions.

4 Likes
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It’s unfortunate this isn’t enough by itself. But that we need to to bundle it with whatever political koolaid the project creators are sipping on. And what makes it worse is the fact modern politics (at least on the internet) basically has nothing to do with social or economic issues, but rather culture war brainrot. If a service makes itself known as “trad” or “woke” I won’t touch it. Privacy activism should be culturally colorblind, and if someone can’t put their bias aside they should just step aside.

2 Likes