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Comment by nickdandakis | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that Amazon is portrayed as the "massive corporate server" provider that stores your email "outside your home" on your homepage, yet you use AWS EC2 instances to pipe email traffic to/from Helm.

I understand that it's just an encrypted VPN connection, and are not actually storing email on the EC2 instances. But is there any way for your customers to ensure that? Can your customers shell into the Helm and/or EC2 instance(s)?

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We will be making public the configuration for these instances as part of what we publish in open source. We haven't considered allowing customers remote access to the gateway but we will based on your suggestion. Thanks!

If you _do_ "consider it", I hope you discard it as an awful idea pretty much immediately.

I'd suggest allowing customers who're concerned to run their own instances with your code on it (perhaps a Docker image?) - but giving random customers shell access to gateways you're responsible for (at least to Amazon) - would be insane...

Signal/WhisperSystems are doing some interesting work on how to prove the code running on their servers is identical to their published and auditable code - might be worth checking that out (for a post MVP roadmap idea).

Yeah, there'a a lot of confusion about "the cloud". Consumer SaaS (Gmail, Facebook, Alexa, etc.) is "evil" and privacy-invading but B2B IaaS (EC2, GCP, etc.) is not bad. Often these services come from the same companies so we can't simply claim that Amazon or Google are wholly good or evil when it comes to privacy.

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