During the last two weeks and ongoing, Privnote has been hammered by a DDoS attack, at moments exceeding 400 million sum requests per 5 minutes. These assaults lasting at times 8 hours interrupted is presently equivalent (in this time frame) to 2 months of Wikipedia’s requests!

Privnote is being attacked because of its reputation for providing the first free and anonymous privacy web tool for the world to use with ease.

Since our launch date in 2008, not one of Privnote’s notes has ever been compromised nor will it ever be compromised so long as you make sure the domain you use is privnote.com and nothing else.

Be very aware that cybercriminals will try to fool you with sites that look like Privnote in an attempt to steal your secrets so please recall: there is one and only one Privnote website service.

Privnote still continues to be under attack so expect interruptions to our service. We now only allow very few requests per minute per IP. Moreover, we are closing Privnote’s servers due to a huge amount of “compromised” IP addresses. Feel free to email us at [email protected] if you think we can be of any help.

Privacy is a basic human right and we will invest all of our resources to make sure that Privnote is on-line for years to come no matter who intends to take it down.

To sustain Privnote’s team and infrastructure we get our funding from Google Ads. This has allowed us to keep Privnote’s service free and anonymous for almost a decade and a half already.

Our honest, trustworthy and dedicated team puts forward a huge effort to make Privnote shine everyday, 24/7 if need be.

If you want to support Privnote in this critical moment while cybercriminals are attacking us, you can now contribute to our presently bursting
budget needs by helping us directly via these Privnote’s crypto wallets:

Privnote’s BTC wallet: bc1qk3tvjm28zamas543qv7s0fy4cz7wfqdfxky9tr

Privnote’s ETH wallet: 0xD81ed5D97655550609f15c4A14C3253e894698be

We promise to use 100 % of your support entirely to the Privnote’s service.

Without Privacy freedom can’t flourish. Without Privacy there’s no identity.

Thanks a million for your support.

As announced on our last blog post, several fake scam and phishing sites try to masquerade as Privnote. This post is to announce that we have elevated the quality of our SSL certificate to provide you with an extra level of trust assurance.

In effect, we have installed an EV (extended validation) quality certificate from DigiCert for our company Gletin S.A. (for additional information about Gletin S.A. see our Privacy Policy).

What are the requirements needed to obtain an EV certificate?

• Principal Legal Existence

• The individuals representing the business or private entity are duly and rigorously verified

• Physical Existence

• Ensures that the entity is a legitimate legal establishment

• Operating Existence

• Verifies that the business works with regulated financial institutions

• Domain Name Rights

• Duly ICANN registered

• WHOIS public listing

• Exclusive name rights to its claimed domain.

You can check our EV certificate at any moment, just press on the padlock on the left side of privnote.com url address bar and there you will see listed our company name Gletin S.A. as the certified company.

Always double check that you are on our site

https://privnote.com

or

https://www.privnote.com

and beware of fake sites. We do not have any other valid site for which we offer  our privacy service since 2008.

Photo CC: @jikatu

Due to the popularity of Privnote as the web service to anonymously share encrypted notes since 2008, fake services with phishing purposes are popping out. Refrain from using anything but privnote.com or your information might be compromised. 

There is one and only one Privnote and we don’t have nor we will have any secondary domain—similarly written or otherwise—for sending top secret notes over the internet. Make sure then that the domain reads  https://privnote.com as no other variant is a valid site.

Photo CC: @jikatu

Photo: CC @jikatu

Today, May 25, 2018, we updated our Privacy Policy which has been specifically adjusted to reflect the EU data protection law (GDPR).

To understand how we protect your personal information, see our Privacy Policy.

Specifically, In Section 7 of our Privacy Policy, we describe our Cookie Policy, the technology that we use for our own interest in improving the use of our site and service and, in some cases, for promotional purposes.

Photo: CC @jikatu

We have uploaded a new version of privnote. Here the list of some of the changes:

• As you might know, on options (Show options), you can add an e-mail and a reference so you can be notified as soon as a note is read. We have now coded both, so they are no longer in plaintext in the url. Important: If you were using this functionality and have set it as a bookmark, you will have to generate your bookmark again as the old one will no longer work.
  
• We have added new languages; these are: Italian, Romanian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and both traditional and simplified Chinese. Many thanks to privnote’s community translators!
  
• We have put a lot of effort into making privnote compatible with basically all browsers, but we have now decided to deactivate the stream cipher RC4. This will leave out the ability to use the privnote service with, among others, Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 and 8.1, but as a result privnote gets A rating on the SSL report that some of our user’s were requesting.
  

As many of you might have already seen, a few weeks ago the new privnote became live. This is our first major upgrade of the classic privnote since 2008! Moreover, quite a few new features have been added as well. In this blog post, we will let our users speak through their requests and suggestions as a way to illustrate what we have done in response:

“I LOVE PRIVNOTE
Please keep it free and no login required is great.
Encryption is very important. Everybody needs a service like this.
Thanks”

Privnote Team: Yes, the new privnote is kept free and anonymous, exactly as the classic privnote was!

“Great application, doesn’t work good on every computer though”

Privnote Team: Now it does! Otherwise we want to hear about it!

“Hi, I frequently send customer data (addresses, phone numbers, email etc..) to third party vendors for online orders. I want to make sure they can read the note, even more than once but cannot access it after the note is read… an expiration date on it like "end of the month” would be great!“

Privnote Team: Now you can! Click Show Options and you will see different note expiration options to choose from. Actually, only four options, as we wanted to keep it very simple. For added security, anyone who has the link to the encrypted note can destroy the note at any time!

”… A manual password would be good so that even if someone else gets the link they can’t access it unless they know the password.“

Privnote Team: Now privnote has manual password support! Again click Show Options and you will directly see it there.

"I don’t have an iPhone but copying links on that software is difficult from what I hear!”

Privnote Team: It’s a lot easier now (given the limitations of the browser). Check it out!

“Thank you for the new privnote, it’s very nice and clean looking. However, I believe this new ‘Yes’/'No’ question is really a problem. I’m talking about:

'Read and destroy?’

'You’re about to read and destroy the note with id xxx’

'yes, show me the note’
'no, not now’

I understand you probably made this because people click the link and
destroy the note without knowing to save it. But this "convenience question” is a security risk.

I need to know that my note was deleted when it was clicked on. And I don’t want to have to worry that the person clicked “No” and now my link is there to be clicked on in a future day by who knows who….

Another thing, this Yes/No question can also be confusing to new people. They might be worried about not knowing what to do and they might notwant to “destroy” the note and would click “No” just because it soundslike the safe option. Please understand that this is a very bad featurefor me. Every extra click and every extra question is a potential to confuse the person or scare the person.

I think that the new privnote should behave exactly the same as theclassic privnote by default like everyone is used to. So nothing shouldbe different. If somebody wants to enable a “warning yes/no” messagethey can do it with an advanced option that you should create there. Butby default it should be as simple as the classic way was. Nothing needs to change with that.

If you think this new Yes/No question is good to have by default, then atleast make an option to disable it. But I think it should be the otherway around where it should be an option that needs to be enabled (notenabled by default).“

Privnote Team: We decided to change the default because in our latest survey, more than half the users said that the most problematic issue was destroying the notes by accident, either when sending or receiving a privnote’s link. Nevertheless, we have added a new option called don’t ask to emulate classic privnote. Here is how:

Go to Show Options and select the checkbox: Do not ask for confirmation before showing and destroying the note. 

The good news it that you are be able to turn it on from Privnote’s URL. For example:  

https://privnote.com#dont_ask   ->  will set the “disable confirmation screen” option ON.

You can of course bookmark this URL, so you don’t have to set the advanced option every time. As a matter of fact, you can do that with some of the other options as well, like the notification e-mail or the note expiration. For instance:

https://privnote.com/#dont_ask¬[email protected]¬ify_ref=share_your_comments!  ->  will set the “disable confirmation screen” option ON, set the notification email to [email protected] and the reference note name to share_your_comments!

Try Privnote and share any comments with us!

Photo: CC @jikatu

As you can imagine, bringing the Privnote service to the world community requires a lot of effort and dedication. It is no easy task, as Privnote has been kept as a free anonymous uninterrupted service for the last 7 years already.

But quite often, we get such nice compliments that make us both proud and satisfied. We’ll love to share with you just some of them on this post:

“Thank you so much for all you do. You bring an extra level of peace and security to my life, the life of my friends and clients. Please don’t ever stop, and continue to provide a safe place for the world around you :)”

“Please, please, please continue to develop privnote. End to end encryption solutions are the answer to many security problems.”

“Great service generally. its the only truly idiot proof way of sending messages privately via many third party services.”

“Maybe the best working website for this kind of service. Thank’s for creating this.”

Photo: CC @jikatu

With the new version of Privnote (presently in beta stage), you don’t need to take your hands off your keyboard as Privnote now comes with tabbed navigation: tab, shift-tab, and enter. Try it out!

Photo: CC @jikatu

After a lot of very hard work and dedication, we are very happy to inform you that https://beta.privnote.com, the new version of Privnote, is ready for global open testing!

We did our utmost to keep it as simple as possible and yet quite a bit more powerful once you select any of the available options. And we have done so making sure Privnote works well on any platform, even many legacy browsers, and mobile devices. And we will not stop here. Once we take it out from its beta state, we will bring more features, so stay tuned!

We will be delighted to get any comments or wishes from you regarding beta Privnote, so let us know what you think! 

Enjoy!

PS: We still need contributors to many other languages so please help out if you can.

Photo: CC @jikatu

Photo: CC @jikatu

The new version of Privnote is ready for testing, and you can help us translate it to your mother tongue! 

Click this link: http://bit.ly/1eHUVrb and get started.

All languages are welcome, and we’ll be happy —if you so want to— to credit your contribution. Any doubt, just drop us an email to [email protected]

Many thanks to the following people that helped us so far with the translations and all the anonymous contributors! 

Chinese: Adan Chou, Faria Chan, Yuguo 

French: CRX, kZk, petfouffe. Kalistia, anonymous

German: David Bursac, Austria & Hendrik Michaelsen, Germany & Lukas Hose, Germany & Niklas Abratis

Italian: Pastore 77

Polish: Gal Anonim

Portuguese: Helio

Romanian: Dumitru Marius Octavian, Ivașcu Adrian, Andrei Nastasoiu

Russian: Ромчик, Айго, sumjohn, kkm350, Mikhey

Swedish: Cyberslt, CRX, Cyberdelia SE

Turkish: Emre Özcan

Ukranian: kkm350, Антон