You are not logged in.
I've just downloaded Epic within the past day and installed it on my Mac, which runs fully updated OS 10.9.3. When I tried to register to post on the help forum, each email address I tried was rejected because it "registered as spam." However, once I toggled the proxy off, I had no difficulty registering. Is it the case that activating Epic's own proxy makes it impossible to register as an Epic user? If indeed that is true, the message returned to a newbie user when he/she makes such an attempt could be a bit more helpful.
Also, do you plan to offer a user guide that teaches as well as answers questions? I'd wager that many people who'd benefit from using your browser would also profit from quite basic explanations of concepts. For example, I'm experimenting with using a commercial VPN for browsing on public SSIDs. I have no idea whether doing this is compatible with using Epic, enhances my anonymity while browsing in Epic, or is totally unnecessary BECAUSE I'm using Epic. (I think the last of these is incorrect, because some of my online activity uses other apps; e.g., my email client).
I'm also puzzled by your offering of extensions. I've read some of the forum topics that argue whether or not the browser should permit same. Addressing the risks of using the extensions you DO offer and giving real-world examples of such risks would be one of the topics the user guide might address.
My introduction to Epic came from a Mac blog (Macintouch), and my first glance at it made me think that choosing whether and how to use Epic was very simple (Epic at Starbucks (or the airport, or other public WiFi networks), Safari on my own secure networks (when I'm doing things that require proving to the sites I visit that I AM who I say I am (banking, buying things at amazon, etc.). However, I've just confirmed that I can log into my bank from Epic with "all my shields up." This puzzles me, and that's because even some of the most basic security and privacy concepts aren't clear to me. A teaching manual would be a BIG help for now users.
Thanks for listening. Any comments much appreciated.
Offline
Hi Jim -- great that you've started using Epic, thanks for your support & the great points!!
In terms of a manual and addressing the questions you have and making things clearer, you're right on the mark, we need to do a better job of all of that. A manual would be very helpful you're right!
Below are some issues you mentioned and our thoughts:
Proxy and registration -- great catch, we need to fix this! Forums even ours get notoriously huge amounts of spam, so they're aggressive in not allowing proxies, but we obviously have to allow at least our own if not others. We need to tweak these settings. We have some new proxy servers so we'll make sure they're in the system.
VPN -- you're exactly right that using software other than your browser like your email client, you won't be protected by just Epic's proxy. Also, if you're quite concerned about being anonymous/your IP address leaking, a VPN protects your plugins like Flash from leaking your IP address. If your VPN is on, you can safely turn off Epic's proxy...your IP address would be protected by your VPN. It's definitely a great idea to use our proxy or the VPN when you're on a public WiFi or other WLAN network. The Epic proxy will soon be encrypted for all users by the way.
Extensions -- You're right, we need to be clearer about the risks here. We only support about a half dozen extensions, mostly password managers. We don't control them and they can access your browsing history -- of course people use them because they trust them. We understand their utility and so have supported a few extensions, but we'd recommend users only use them if they really require it.
Bank Login -- We've engineered Epic to work with 99.99% of websites i.e. we've tried to "break the internet". This was actually not easy -- we did many prototypes that were considerably more private than Epic but many many websites got broken -- just to give you one example, if we block "referer" from header data, most banking sites and e-commerce sites break. So we ended up only blocking the referer at search engines where we know that data is collected. So we've built Epic to have as much privacy as possible while still being able to browse the internet normally and at a fast speed -- a daily use browser. If you require really strong anonymity, the TOR browser is a great option by the way. TOR differs from your VPN in that your VPN can see every website you access so you really need to trust your VPN, but the design of the TOR network is such that no one can know where you're going and what you're doing.
Hope that's helpful!
Offline
Thanks so much for the clarifications. By the way, I did watch the video of your presentation. Your point about uncontrolled surveillance almost always leading to abuse of the information gathered thereby certainly is confirmed by the disingenuous responses of the US Government administration to the revelation that the NSA hacked Angela Merkel's personal cell phone (our president's pledge that we won't hack foreign official's devices seeming to forget that there's a past tense to the verb "to hack."
Two days ago on KCBS Radio's Forum call in show, an administration official attempted to trumpet righteous indignation about the "illegal and unacceptable" hacking done by Chinese military officers of US commercial ventures. Seemingly it's OK for NSA operatives to snoop on their girlfriends and ordinary Americans, but it's a "mortal sin" (I don't know if there's an equivalent calibre of offense in India) to do something that might threaten the riches of an American multibillionaire). As you said, a truly free society MUST respect the privacy of its citizens!
Offline