I looked for the founders bio, a company contact info. There is nothing on their site. All I saw was a letter in the "About" section by the founder.

You might have gotten to know these guys after various meetings and due diligence process. There is nothing on their website that sells me on trusting them or the company.

I had to go the "Careers" section to see the location of the company.

When you're in the business of selling trust, you really need to focus on selling trust first and not technology (maybe they're connected ultimately) but I just don't feel I can trust this company based on the materials provided on their website.

Hope this feedback is meaningful.

What's the base operating system and hardware architecture the box is based on? It says "Linux" on the page but doesn't go into specifics.

Why not just use regular hardware, e.g. Intel NUCs, or even allow people to run your software on their own hardware (like OwnCloud does)?

In Germany there was/is a startup, Protonet (https://protonet.com/), that had almost the exact same idea a while ago. They went bankrupt though and one of the reasons was that it cost a ton of money to design and produce their own hardware, which also looked very cool (orange hexagon!) but didn't provide much added value beyond what a normal, boring-looking compact PC could provide (at 500 € less than their box for the same specs). They also marketed their own OS, which was based on a modified Linux distribution, modified open-source software and a shiny management layer on top as well. They found out that developing and maintaining a Linux fork isn't so easy either, so they eventually canned it. So what's different about Helm in your opinion?

We are using an ARM-based SoC from NXP. We chose this to ensure that the device can only run signed, trusted code by implementing secure boot and signature verification of software updates. We will make a developer program available in the future.

I didn't use Protonet so I shouldn't speculate about what's similar or different about the products. I think we are in a time right now where people have a strong desire to own their data and are looking for a viable alternative to the cloud. They key, beyond building something very private and secure, is in nailing the experience and we're excited to share more about that.

Okay, so that narrows it down to the i.MX family.

We chose this to ensure that the device can only run signed, trusted code by implementing secure boot and signature verification of software updates.

Maybe read this?

https://blog.quarkslab.com/vulnerabilities-in-high-assurance...

Hopefully the HAB fix is the reason for the 8. Otherwise this seems like overkill for the work involved.

But if I don't actually need to be able to reach the box in order to use my email - if it will work even when the box is offline, powered-down, stolen, or destroyed - then what, exactly, is the point of the $500 box itself?

It's not privacy, it seems. If it were private, how could it work when the box is offline?

I'm not opposed to a "pay for your email instead of it being ad-and-surveillance-supported" model. I just don't see the point of paying $500 for a box that you're telling me the service will function just fine without.

Down? There's continuity of service if you have a 2nd box online, and it's as easy to restore from a live backup as an iPhone from iCloud.

Email is the first app, and there will be more.

For $1000 I get 2 boxes I can't use for anything else right now (and still not very reliable inside my home), whereas with Fastmail (for example) I can get an email service for 20 years @ $50/yr that is very reliable. I'm not sure of the value proposition for this thing.

I think it is a great idea to have a device which is as simple to use as a router but focused on typical cloud services. As security is a critical aspect of the whole idea, the subscription service is a smart move too. Maybe you should offer a monthly subscription too (consumer friendly).

Are there any plans to start shipping to Europe in the near future?

This is the key question, in my mind. There's only one reason I'd want to own the hardware—to manage/add/create my own services and handle my own backups because I don't trust a company's involvement in these[0].

If this is so tightly controlled that I can't add my own services and I can't restore a backup without Helm's involvement, why do I even want the hardware?

[0] I don't mean that I don't trust them in a privacy sense. I mean that I don't trust them to make sure the backups are actually working and able to be decrypted and restored. Or be able to be restored without their software/hardware. There doesn't seem to be any transparency wrt/ these concerns.

How do you know who to trust? You surely have to trust someone. It feels generally true that we can trust Apple since we pay them for hardware and their ongoing business interest is in protecting their revenue streams through their hardware and iOS app store, which means you are aligned.

Generally for Helm that's a good case. That's why we charge money for this hardware and software: it aligns interest.

Free cloud services are not truly free and that's what most people seem to be OK with... but not all people.

This is the classic trade-off. Open source software you can read the code but usability suffers. For the people on HN, most people can run their own servers, but for normal people that's not an option.

Apple has managed to create a computing environment that is highly usable for normal people. This is what Helm is trying to do too.

I still don't understand why this is a hardware play. There are advantages to owning the hardware but none of those advantages seem to apply here.

The hardware feels like a bit of an albatross.

In my experience, the average person doesn’t really understand what GMail or Facebook or whoever do with data or the extent of their knowledge about individuals. Even basic things like lookalike audiences or retargeting across the web regularly blow people’s minds.

I hope this project is successful, partly because that would show that people do understand these things enough to view Helm as solving an urgent need. I wonder if we’re there yet.

I definitely look forward to these posts!

Hosted services like protonmail (great option) support some key management but that's rare. Most everyone stores all your data in the clear, and that sets you up for Facebook-style hacks where people just steal a database en masse, and/or leave you open to warrantless wiretap which has been a problem for email services broadly in the past.

I want to point out that email is just the first part of what Helm wants to do. What is super valuable is that Helm can run its own software and add things like distributed anonymized VPN, or file sharing, and these things are all federated in a way that wasn't possible before.

Not everyone is going to care about this, but enough people should. People reading this thread should care: decentralization and federation of this sort is the way we maintain an open Internet. You can take down individual nodes but you can't take down millions of them. That's the ultimate goal of Helm.

Remember, there's no such thing as a cloud, it's just someone else's computer.

This statement indicates a lot of passion (and I side with it in spirit), but it feels irrelevant and out of place wrt/ this product.

My data is only (available from) my own private Helm server. If mine gets taken down, the existence of millions of other "nodes" doesn't help me. Helm the company can help me with new hardware and my backups, presuming that they're allowed to—but what if they aren't. Then we're back in the same place.

They’re probably not going to go door to door confiscating millions of devices; the cost to do that would be astronomical. You’d still be at risk if they were targeting you personally, but not if they were targeting all Helm users en masse. That’s a big improvement. And even if you were targeted personally, you’d at least be in a position to defend against surreptitious snooping, assuming that took the form of agents physically entering your home to hijack the device.

Of course, there’s a lot of counterfactuals baked into that scenario. Helm does not currently have millions of users, for one. For another, the EC2-based proxy service run by Helm is a single point of failure that someone could take down, though supposedly Helm will release tools to replace it with your own server. And most problematically, the closed-source software could be silently subverted by Helm in an update, with no reasonable means for the user to detect this, even in theory.

Still, it’s a lot better on that front than most cloud email services.

In the parent, the private keys are not on the premises of the cloud company.

I think Helm comes with some obvious trade-offs, but the product looks nice and I think (judging from other HN comments) there's a market for it. I don't know if it's a large market for this to be a success, but it seems interesting at least, and at first blush the product looks well-made.

I don't think this product is exactly for me as my main email, but it could be interesting as a side email service, or one for really sensitive emails. Depending on the price point, I'd consider purchasing. If the price point is too high or the maintenance costs are too large, then I won't. What's the big deal? That trade-off not working for you or me doesn't mean the product shouldn't exist.