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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Protect Your Privacy These Days? Or Do You?
An anonymous reader writes "The NSA snoops traffic and has backdoors in encryption algorithms. Law enforcement agencies are operating surveillance drones domestically (not to mention traffic cameras and satellites). Commercial entities like Google, Facebook and Amazon have vast data on your internet behavior. The average Joe has sophisticated video-shooting and sharing technology in his pocket, meaning your image can be spread anywhere anytime. Your private health, financial, etc. data is protected by under-funded IT organizations which are not under your control. Is privacy even a valid consideration anymore, or is it simply obsolete? If you think you can maintain your privacy, how do you go about it?"
not truthfully responding to such questions
FISA overloards
Unplug.
Nothing you do electronically is anonymous. I don't use the Internet, I don't make phone calls, and I don't do email. Ever. At all. I only pay cash (coins actually, because bills have serial numbers that can be tracked). And I certainly would never, ever, post anything online.
My private data does not leave my home network. I lack off site backups, but Google spies on all my email. I rarely bother with Tor, just enough to draw suspicion. Gee, maybe I should rethink some of this, but that sounds like work.
I think my issue here is the same as a lot of peoples: maintaining privacy requires you actually bother to do stuff. My categorical banning of all cookies, java script and browser plugins except for white lists is really the only effort I've put into my privacy.
I don't go around spamming private stuff on Facebook, but I still expose my reading habits to web servers, my ISP etc. I don't host my own sites, so I'm leaking lots of info about my users/readers to the hosts. I lack HTTPs support on most of my sites, so I'm leaking lots of stuff.
I've toyed with Tor hidden services (I made one), and bitcoin (I have some), but never actually done anything with them. I have a big interest in privacy, but generally I don't bother with it. Its kinda sad really.
We need better tools to make having privacy not be a sacrifice: it needs to be easy, and not lose you features, or even the people who care (like me) won't even bother. We are a long way from this, which in the purest sense isn't even actually possible (You have to lose some features if you have true privacy).
Most people I have talked with are angry, but don't know how to act against it.
I send everything to Snowden for safe-keeping.
Table-ized A.I.
I don't have anything the NSA is interested in.
The people that are likely to try to gain from violating my privacy are likely to spend 10 times more then they gain.
I'm less worried about the likes of the NSA, and more worried about criminal gangs getting hold of my data and using it to make my life a misery through identity theft.
Anyhow, the way these things work is:
- Either a very small percentage of people are seriously affected by breaches in privacy, in which case I don't need to worry too much about it, or
- A significantly large number of people are seriously affected, so that it becomes a political issue and there's a push to do something about it.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
I think it's important to protect my privacy despite not having much they are interested in. I encrypt my harddrives, have my own domain with e-mail that I've set up with GnuPG on my workstation and laptop, I sometimes use the TOR bundle as well as a USB with Tails on it. The simplest thing is that I subscribe to https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ to get proxy/VPN access to the net. Also, setting Firefox up with HTTPS everywhere, DNTPlus, NoScript etc. is important.
It doesn't take much to make their jobs harder. I use these things also for everyday items, it's not like I fire up PIA to "go dark and do evil stuff". I've plenty of friends that don't see the point of doing what I do when what I use it for isn't illegal, but privacy means privacy from prying eyes, I decide what I share with others.
Program your own two-way Firewall.
Get an svchost.exe analyser. You'd be amazed how many are running on your Windows machine and only MS knows what they are sending and receiving!
Don't use Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook (goes without saying, NO MICROSOFT).
I'm currently...
1. Educating myself on how encryption works
2. Resetting all my passwords (I have been keeping a secure record of mine for years), using unique, random passwords and using 1Password for secure storage
3. Continuing to store my secure information (personal info, legal documents, financial histories, etc) in a 2048 bit encrypted disk image not stored on my computer
4. Informing my friends and family about the true depth of the NSA's activities and why they matter
I plan to...
1. Make Epic my default browser: http://epicbrowser.com/
2. Use a Tor box: http://pogoplug.com/safeplug
3. Purchase a small, cheap, air-gappable machine, maybe a Raspberry Pi: http://www.raspberrypi.org/
4. Look into more extreme measures such as device self-destruction on tamper and surgical data storage under the skin
I probably have less to hide than the average citizen. But as we all know, it's not about having nothing to hide. It's about the presumption of innocence and the right to privacy.
For most of my personal communication I use the pidgin instant messaging client with the Off-The Record plugin for easy encrypted messaging on (nearly) any OS. The tough part is talking friends into using it as well. Of course, the NSA could still break into this stuff, but it would certainly waste their time and resources.
Hav given up
The issue is you cannot protect your privacy directly from the NSA. They seem to have tapped communication between Google data centres, can request any information they wish from any company (Google, FB, your local ISB and phone provider, etc), so the only option is limiting the amount of data you provide. Interestingly I started taking the following steps even before the leaks simply because I became uncomfortable with the major corporations gathering my data and then changing their privacy policies at will. That's not how contracts are supposed to work, and disagreeing doesn't seem to have any effect. Once Snowden went public, my paranoia turned out to be justified.
In general terms, I do not share anything truly personal on a public forum. So on FB I never upload pictures, I do not share places I visit, and I do not provide a phone number. I just use it to set up events like Birthdays or nights out. I do not use twitter, foursquare, pinterest, instagram, myspace or whatever social fad of the day happens to be. It could be that in my early thirties I'm becoming a technology Luddite, but then I was never denied a job because my *insert questionable behavior here* is posted all over the net.
Google is a special case. I started using Gmail when getting invites was almost impossible, and Youtube when they were still independent. So giving up my Gmail account would be a VERY significant undertaking, especially since I couldn't come up with better alternatives (fast, supporting POP3, almost perfect uptime, and guaranteed not to shut down). But I never stay signed into Gmail outside checking my mail, I do not use G+, I stopped using YT while being logged in, and I search through DuckDuckGo. And if anyone can suggest a reliable email provider that is NOT Google, MS or Yahoo, I am all ears.
Getting to specific platforms, on a Windows 7 PC, I use Seamonkey with Adblock Plus and No Script. I also block all third party cookies. I'm also considering adding Ghostery to the mix. This takes care of most of the trackers, cookies, ads, etc. I have not used Linux on a desktop in years, and I am yet to touch Windows 8, so I can't comment there. I also never share my location, although it's pretty braindead to find out where my IP is located anyway.
On my smartphone, I run CyanogenMod without GApps, meaning no Google account, no PlayStore, no Google Maps, etc. You get the idea. Every single app on my phone is installed from F-Droid. I have a fully functional, OSS book reader (Cool Reader), browser (Firefox with Adblock Plus), map application (rmaps), email client (k-9). So my phone is fully functional for my needs without any connection to the Google servers. As before, I never share my location which on a smartphone does make a difference.
This is pretty much what I've done to avoid Big Data without using any functionality and giving up only a bit of convenience. Any suggestions for improvements are more than welcome.
Anything I care to keep private, I don't put on the internet. That's about it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Create thousands of false identities. Let the suckers track them.
I use quadruple rot52 encryption on all of my plaintext files, and I store everything else on an AES encrypted partition and make a point of forgetting the password.
So on FB I never upload pictures, I do not share places I visit, and I do not provide a phone number. I just use it to set up events like Birthdays or nights out. I do not use twitter, foursquare, pinterest, instagram, myspace or whatever social fad of the day happens to be.
You don't use whatever the social fad of the day happens to be.... except, apparently, the biggest social fad of the day ever - Facebook (which just happens to be the one that is the most fervently anti-privacy, and does the most nefarious stuff with your data).
That is the question I'd like to start with. Because I'd answer yes it is. I don't want my identity stolen, my economic future decided by whether my boss sees a photo a friend of a friend of mine posted 5 years ago to a social networking site I didn't join, or my emails to my ex-girlfriend read by anyone other than me or her. So if it is worth protecting, then when we realize "how can you protect your privacy" is really broken up into subdomains, and for many of those the answer is "right now you cannot", we have motivation to then ask "how can we change that?".
Real men host their mail themselves. From digitalocean.com you get 5 $ a month VPS to do this and pretty much anything which doesn't involve large storage (>20GB)
The main thing I do to protect my privacy is not to use "free" services, such as Gmail, Hotmail for personal email. I maintain my own server which has a mailserver installed. This means that no-one except me (and anyone who manages to break in) can just access my email.
I live in the Netherlands where ISPs are forced to keep "traffic records" of me. Because I'm an academic I get to use the academic ISP, which is not bound by that law, at least for Internet traffic. But having my own mailserver means that also my my email traffic is not monitored and can not be requested by the police. Furthermore, having your own mailserver and domain also makes it very easy to compartmentalise service subscriptions. Just make a new email address for each service.
I used to use Google Calendar, and Contacts but stopped with that since I discovered that OwnCloud is a really decent private drop-in replacement that you can host yourself.
I use many different privacy plugins (Ghostery, Adblock, etc.), while being aware that this makes my browser ID somewhat unique and identifiable. At least I'm making it harder for them.
Don't worry, it's all just 1's and 0's anyway...
It's been deemed acceptable to gather data on the entire population - though still illegal.
Proportionally, it's acceptable to gather data on everyone in any position of power. Though still illegal.
It's the only way to even the game.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
> And if anyone can suggest a reliable email provider that is NOT Google, MS or Yahoo, I am all ears. ========= Give these guys a try: https://www.fastmail.fm/
I don't use my real name on the internet. This is no small thing, because Facebook will throw you off their network for using a fake name, and while I find facebook to be ubelievably drab and awful, I suffer a penalty in relationships from not being on it, since nearly everybody I know has some kind of presense on Facebook, I'd rather not trust the NSA with my personal information, but since i am not a criminal, the potential negative consequences involved are finite. I could be harassed for my views, though they're not particularly extreme, or falsely accused of a crime, But there are a billion people on the internet, and they've got a billion agendas, and i know from experience that some of them can truly be evil motherfuckers. There's no sense in trying to measure or aniticipate what can happen, what they're going to individually decide or figure out. I'm probably safe. I'm a 55 year old male with not much money. Nobody's going to want to stalk me for anything, but I refuse to participate in this crazy experiment whereby we turn down the privacy settings for civilization, and see who thrives, and who gets hurt. Zuck you, Fuckerberg!
I'm avoiding paranoia.. but having a bit of fun with encryption.
Here's a simple way to mess around -
Zip (8.7k) up the html from https://github.com/JJones780/EasyCryptJS/archive/master.zip and pass it along with your first encrypted email.
To see the cheesy joke I found, use it to decrypt this block. The password is the name of this website, all lowercase:
U2FsdGVkX1963PbAMX34kTCVEE9Lz2ffbQ/RQQnqqCNPYf3me4pDOulEleh+FUqI
2PHGK/7bfY1mivJq9oA9zw9rPrsKEgTlds5iI/kzHZJqUCl5SEfq+sX36k+q6lwg
J/qP+7Eq+fQ9W3/Oe1jvig==
As often and as much as possible, this AC finds it best to treat the internet as read-only.
Any forum I sign up for is done via a throwaway email (usually via mailinator)
I always keep multiple identities and my true/original handle only remains in very old games/irc logs/etc.
I try to read but never post.
Any picture is scrubbed with exiftool before posting, and usually deleted shortly after.
Social media is only for reading, never for communicating. If forced to use it, all info is fake (fakenamegenerator.com) should be the url, pardon any mistypes)
No skype, no AIM, none of that.
Multiple e-mails, with different personalities/names used.
VPN always, and different server locations for different services.
Finally, (among other steps), if I'm not actively on the 'net, the ethernet plug is pulled. Oh, and blocking any possible bg process and using firewall rules.
Trust few, if any. The masses have arrived on our turf. Never do what they do. Why comment? Every comment thread becomes a fight or full of trolls. Trolling was fun, but hold back. Attract no attention. There's no reason to post anything. Can you honestly not find an answer to your question now? If you are at an absolute dead end, learn to search better, and then finally possibly consider asking somewhere as anonymously as possible.
I'm sure there are more precautions, but this seems to be my favorite style at the moment.
Worried about governments?
All data leaks eventually.
Your best bet is a thick layer of data that defines you as normal, therefore boring.
Worried about ID thieves?
Try to minimize the number of online retailers you do business with, or credit cards you have - but do keep at least one throwaway card it's really easy to just drop in case it's taken over, for transactions you don't quite trust.
Worried about purchases being tracked back to you? Use cash.
Basically it's not good enough to be worried about "privacy", the term is too all encompassing. Instead start to think about who exactly you are worried about getting what and minimize that risk.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...at least in this day and age. The trick is to remember that any information that is recorded to any form of media, can be stolen, copied, or given away. If you want to maintain something in privacy, it can't leave your head. You can't write it down, or draw, or paint the idea. You can't make a tape of it or a video of it. You can't say it to your lover or spouse.
Of course that makes it incredibly difficult to act on what you maintain in privacy, but that is more of a problem of getting others to work with you in suport of that idea.
There is a presumption of privacy codified in law, however that presumption does not seem to be all that relavent to our current state of govornment or business, so you are pretty much stuck with what you can control. At the moment that's pretty much restricted to what's in your head.
No, I'm not much happy with that either.
You never know...
Everything Snowden released has shown that the NSA doesn't have magical ways to break modern encryption. They rely on strong-arming various organizations and hacking vulnerable systems.
Real men host their mail themselves.
Anti-Spam, anti-virus, blacklists, security updates, and dealing with shit when it goes wrong? ... and it only costs me a fiver to sign up for that grief?
Most real men have better things to do than administer a personal email server.
And to what end? When most of the personal email I get is from other people with gmail/hotmail/outlook/yahoo/or major ISP addresses... so the 'other half' of every conversation is just wide open anyway.
For most of us in that boat, we might as well just use gmail or whatever with imap and pgp or something with as many people as you can. (Makes the web client worthless... but if you can't read it on the web client, neither can google or anyone else.
Worried about someone finding your child-porn stash?
Don't store it with Google
Basically a lot of the answers to how to avoid "X" would be, don't store that with Google.
It's a rough question though as I have to say I'm OK with Google poking through Picasa in order to catch a real child molester.
Basically I've always assumed myself that anything marked "private" and uploaded to a server I do not control, means it is for my eyes only - plus the eyes of every admin on the system.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Give these guys a try: Your own dam server that you control.
uhh.. if "real men" host their mail themself, surely they wouldn't need to use *SOMEBODY ELSES SERVER* to do it on, but would instead host it themselves: ON A SERVER THEY OWN, NOT RENT
may as well say something useful,,,,,,
no bomb us more mom us no drone us no bone us
free the innocent stem cells
With the glut of information that's available on everyone these days, it strikes me that the best way to retain your privacy is to hide in plain sight. Allow yourself to be seen and then instantly forgotten.
us bearded wonders are just place markers? whatever happened to mrs. god, & the missing monkey hymens? hang on to our hemispheres.....
I use Seamonkey with Adblock Plus and No Script. I also block all third party cookies. I'm also considering adding Ghostery to the mix. This takes care of most of the trackers, cookies, ads, etc.
Not Ghostery -- it has a dubious mission and works by parsing lists that are growing longer by the week. Try the Request Policy extension for Firefox. Request Policy is simpler. It blocks off-site requests and shows you a list of what each site is requesting. You'll learn just how much tracking is happening and you may begin to avoid sites that you used to trust.
The latest Firefox has a "click to play" feature. Type "about:config" and search for "click_".
I have not used Linux on a desktop in years, and I am yet to touch Windows 8, so I can't comment there.
I prefer Linux on my desktop in every way. Just don't buy Nvidia and Broadcom hardware. Linux provides the tools that show exactly what your computer is doing. Debian 7 is excellent.
Windows 8, like ChromeOS, ties your computer to an e-mail account. Stay away.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I use someone elses privacy as my own.
I use a very customized m0n0wall running on some older hardware I had laying around. Multiple VPN connections and the biggest factor of all I am not on Facebook blabbing about the mondane details of my everyday life.
Chris Sheppard
Here's some nice tips which won't ultimately solve the problem but which will greatly improve your privacy.
1) Use common sense. Try to imagine which routes your data will take and which providers will it meet. Will those parties snoop on your data (datamining or wiretapping)? What kind of privacy policies do they have?
2) Use encryption in as many places as you can. HTTPS and IMAPS are good start.
3) Do not put important data into services provided by Google, Facebook or other datamining companies. If possible, switch your e-mail account from GMail to your home country ISP or other locally produced service.
4) Consider using Tor for crucial communications. If you need maximum safety, do not send your message through Internet and all.
5) If you need maximum safety, use an open source operating system. For example, NSA may have talked in backdoors to Windows and OSX.
How do you solve the tagging problem? Your friends get on FB, someone posts a photo of you, that person or someone else tags it with your name and possibly other info. How do you keep your friends from adding you to the FB collective?
I can't find DNTPlus.
I found something similar-sounding on addons.mozilla.org, called DoNotTrackMe, but it's proprietary software so there's no way I'd trust it with my privacy.
(I'm also looking for a free software alternative to Ghostery if anyone has suggestions.)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
The government snooping around doesn't bother me all that much, as while it might be a waste of money, it really doesn't affect me. It's just dead data sitting around on some NSA server. There is more interesting stuff to read then my email. What I am bothered by is the leaking of private data that happens all over the place, things like the people you follow on Twitter or Youtube being publicly visible information. Why exactly does every modern social webpage treat what are essentially bookmarks as public information and publishes it to the world? Why is everybody just accepting that and not complaining about? You can't even switch it off most of the time. I find that incredible annoying and avoid any service that does that when I can. I don't have much of a problem with my information being out there, but at the very least a service should make it very clear what kind of information is public and what is private and modern services don't really do that.
Another thing I have a real issue with is the starting pervasiveness of requiring real life authentication to log into a webpages. Mobile phone numbers started as just a way to get your password back, but now quite a few webpages are requiring them and Google+ and Facebook have their real name requirements. Furthermore there are more and more webpages that only allow you to access them via your Facebook or Twitter login, not via a webpage specific account. So once Facebook or Google switching on the requirement for a mobile phone number or real name and enforce that, that means your real life identity is linked to a ton of a webpages and you can't stop that from happening unless you completely avoid that webpage, as even Tor doesn't give you a free anonymous mobile phone number.
I was going to suggest Fastmail.fm as well. Been using them for over a decade. Highly recommended.
My idea of privacy is closing the window whenever I watch porn. I don't want to deal with my neighbors complaining to me about having to listen to loud screaming creampies. I don't give a fuck that the Illuminati looks at my browsing history, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.
There are no pictures of me on the internet. Or, if there are, I have been unable to find them. You can't tag what doesn't exist.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
It is just why I always insist that any so-called Crypto Phone Program is basically worthless since any of them does nothing to hide a FACT of communication between specific persons. The 3-letter agencies need not know the conversation itself since they can always torture it out of your correspondent.
Now, I see some developments in this direction but all of them are quite far from fruition since every really anonymous protocol is by definition slow.
I don't have anything the NSA is interested in.
It's correctable. Just ask your congressman to make your everyday activity punishable. Here in Russia I read about 3 reports per day about people punished due to use of social networks to publish dissent with official national policy.
Very nice in theory, but having administered an Internet-facing mail system myself that quickly becomes a real pain in the butt. It's not as simple as slapping together Postfix and Cyrus IMAP or whatever and setting up your DNS records. Administering an Internet-facing mail system can very quickly become a full-time job if you want the mail system to be anything approximating usable. Spammers will see to that.
Since it isn't obvious, there are two ways that VPNs help:
(1) They mix your traffic in with everybody else using the same proxy -
Once upon a time when the trees were green I logged to some VPN. Then I found the output proxy address of this VPN and entered
$ ssh this_address
- and logged into my own system. It means that this specific proxy does NOT mix any traffic. And BTW I don't fear NSA which supervises this VPN, I fear only The Party. And also if you think that The Party cannot separate your traffic from the mix - you are wrong.
You should take it on yourself to educate them. Tell them about cheap VPN services and how easy they are to set up. I even give people cheap flash drives I bought of eBay and loaded with a portable version of the Tor browser bundle. I'm trying to figure out if a portable VM with Tails is possible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you believe that anti-virus and security updates are really needed then you possibly believe that the program should have .exe extension to be executable. Throw away this belief. After this your only problem will be spam. And it's quite easy to fight. You just tell your important correspondents to include some keyword to header and tune your mail client to mark it as NOT SPAM. Every other mail is sorted by built-in spam filter of your client.
The fundamental problem is, as I see it, often misunderstood.
The problem is not that data is collected. Police, your grocery store, your jeweller, your car maker, your car seller, your car reparier, your ISP, your insurance comany (and the other insurance companies you get insurance from), your bank, your employer, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your dog, your vetenarian, your neighbour, your judge, your OS-vendor, your Office-Vendor, the company which sells your games (and all the other which sell you games), your bus company, your architect, the companies that build your house, your garden, those who deliver you your bed, your fridge, your postman... ok, you get the idea ... all these do collect your data. And in part they have to to do the business with you or do general administration (that inlcludes the goverment). All that is no big problem. Maybe there are small problems when one of the parties collects more than they should, but that is not the big problem of our time.
The big problem arises when all that data gets connected. When someone collects all those points and little bits above and starts to combine them, when that entity also has access to your movement profile from your GPS in the car etc. We're not facing a "protect your data" issue these days, but the problem we have is that it is laughably easy to connect all that and get... a nightmare in regard to rights, democracy, and everything.And I am not even talking about "misuse" here, which multiplies everything.
Security by obscurity is never a good thing. Basically, if you think that your door will never be kicked down because THEY don't know about your belongings - you are wrong. Your door should never be kicked down because it's strong enough. And while they kick you should have enough time either to shoot or to exfiltrate.
You live in your cardboard and sheetrock cabins - and think it's normal. The normal building is at least wooden one where you need a chainsaw to enter. Here in Russia the Police needs about a hour and a grinding machine to enter an apartment against owner's will.
Your best bet is a thick layer of data that defines you as normal, therefore boring.
You don't live in a country where normal is punishable.
Three things:
- I am making an effort - both privately, and for the companies I consult with, to move away from US-based services. This is a long-term strategy, as changing company infrastructure can take time.
- Encrypt everything. It take a bit of work, but you can set up encryption so that it is transparent to the casual user. Just as an example, with EncFS you can automatically and transparently encrypt data you store in the cloud. The user sees the unencrypted version, but the encrypted version is synchronized with the cloud.
- Teach people about password managers like KeePass. Get people to use long, cryptographically difficult passwords. Bonus points: copy-paste out of a password manager eliminates over-the-shoulder observation, keyloggers, passwords written on post-its, etc.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Come on, you're asking the wrong question!
The sun doesn't revolve around you or me.
Those here who answer "I don't care" are halfway right.
None of us will be betrayed by Google or Amazon - that's bad business.
NSA won't post your private stuff or steal your money - they just want to do their job, damn the consequences.
However, after the next economic depression and mass unemployment, or after the next great war,
when we elect our Führers, or support revolutions ending in a totalitarian states,
they will find it convenient that our governments have built the infrastructure for their tyranny.
To answer the question that your should have asked:
* Voice your opinion.
* Support EFF https://www.eff.org/action and similar organisations.
* Contact your representative.
* Vote with your head and your heart - not your wallet.
No sig to see here. Move along.
1. Fill your ISP logs with TrackMeNot http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ .. how many millions is been created/printed and spent on overtime and "cleared" contractors per person
2. Know the US brands that willingly and knowingly helped the NSA and run any different OS/file systems.
3. Learn to think like a protester in 1980's Eastern Europe. Just keep been political active and know its all been filed, linked, watched, tracked, logged.....
Voice print, face scanning, OS, telco, ISP, cell tower tracking
4. Pay for other brands that are more privacy aware.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
My current solution is: - NAS (QNAP) at home with various apps - Exposure towards the internet is SSH, VPN and https (with self-signed certificate) The only weakness in this scheme is possible flaws in SSH, OpenVPN or SSL. Ignoring those, whatever I do remotely on my NAS is for my eyes only. Accessed through either my smartphone (n900) or debian based linux systems.
What do you 'muricans plan to do about the problem? Why are you already not starting a revolution to turn down NSA?
I just can't be bothered. I try to maintain some sort of security w.r.t my accounts, but int he end, there's no stopping the avalanche. I've given up. They already have all my data.
Move sig!
We've seen a lot of this propaganda in the past years and I refuse to believe it. What I mean is the attempt to spread a meme that says "post-privacy" or "privacy is done for anyways".
Look who the proponents of this meme are. Always, always the people who want it to be the case - Zuckerberg, government spy units, advertisers.
No, the battle isn't over while one side still fights. And there is quite a lot you can do to maintain your privacy. And like everywhere, there's a law of diminishing returns, which means the first steps, that bring you a ton of privacy back, are really, really easy.
Step No. 1: Don't post all your life to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Security researchers have demonstrated years ago how from that data alone they can create extensive profiles on you, including movement data that police would need a search warrent for your mobile provider for.
Step No. 2: Keep your secrets secret. If you want to share them with someone because you just have to talk with someone about the guy you murdered last week, or the hot chick you cheated on your wife with last month, or how you really hate your grandma even though you always play nice at the family events because she's rich - or whatever is on your conscious, do it in person, face-to-face only.
And that's about it. 80% of your privacy restored right there.
Whine about the NSA all you want, but if I can reconstruct where and with whom you have been with at what time on which day from your social media data, the biggest threat to your privacy is yourself.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Use multiple vendors located in multiple countries. I use Google translate, which reports to the NSA. My e-mail is Yandex, which is in Moscow and reports to the KGB. The NSA and the KGB don't talk to each other. I can use a search engine in Europe which does not talk to either. Bejing is my next market to shop at; what does China offer in the way of Internet services? Everywhere you go there will be someone watching you, but if you travel around it is different watchers. The Internet is GLOBAL - spread your business among many vendors all over the world and no one knows all about you.
I think even the Nvidia and Broadcom problem isn't so bad these days, I haven't had any trouble with their hardware in the last few years.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You said "And if anyone can suggest a reliable email provider that is NOT Google, MS or Yahoo, I am all ears.". Look into Yandex (www.yandex.com). It's located in Moscow. I have been using it for a year now. It seems reliable to me. And the most important thing to me is that Yandex does ***NOT*** report to the NSA.
Tell them about cheap VPN services and how easy they are to set up. I even give people cheap flash drives I bought of eBay and loaded with a portable version of the Tor browser bundle.
By buying something off of eBay, you exposed more information then you could possibly hope to protect via a VPN and Tor.
I don't respond to AC's.
So you teach them that it is ok to accept flash drives from others. Great.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Whenever a site asks for your real name, just give it your pseudoname, and never deviate from that. I could really fucking care less about these sites marketing if they don't give a shit about privacy or legal reasons.
"Windows 8, like ChromeOS, ties your computer to an e-mail account."
---
re: win8 - Only if your high and let it.
And if anyone can suggest a reliable email provider that is NOT Google, MS or Yahoo, I am all ears.
Fastmail.FM
Not going to show bias here, just read any review, anywhere. It is a paid service, but you really get what you pay for.
1. Ask /. to change "Anonymous Coward" to Pragmatist.
2. Have all traffic routed through TOR.
3. Use IPSec when possible
4. Publish an RFC that requires all TCP traffic to use SSL.
And remember, you are not paranoid if they are really after you.
On Slashdot, I never post except as "Anonymous Coward". As you can see from the examples above, that prevents anyone from attributing my many contradictory, inane, and often foul opinions to my real pseudonym.
I keep the battery out of my mobile phone when I'm not using it, which is 99% of the time. Apparently I am lucky to have a phone which makes it easy to do this. Various court releases, leaks, research papers and other publications suggest that mobile phones can easily be updated remotely by carriers (and maybe adversaries) to act as listening devices on command, which is why I do this.
I also use multiple web browsers for different purposes (e.g. one for normal web browsing when I don't reveal my identity, another for a few logins, etc.), use Tor, avoid using "cloud computing", use only free (-as in freedom) software, use encryption where possible, keep up to date with security updates, encrypt traffic in my local network (I don't trust my D-Link router very much), etc.
Just don't connect it to the Internet when installing Windows 8. It will skip over the email part. Finish setting up the options like turning off e.g. auto Internet search even when searching locally. Uninstall all the metro apps. Install a better firewall that has more fine grained control e.g. Comodo.
You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
Doesn't that just open you up to more attack vectors? Running an always up mail server and constantly wrenching on it to keep it safe from Pwnage? That's a fuckload of work. Isn't it?
And the most important thing to me is that Yandex does ***NOT*** report to the NSA.
How do you know?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I don't use free webmail or Facebook. Why allow a sleazy corporation to host your social life?
I avoid shopping online, for the most part.
I disable script unless absolutely necessary, and use a HOSTS file to block most web tracking.
I don't use a cellphone, though I have a Tracphone for the rare times when I really need it.
Some people would consider all of that to be extreme. But I'm only living the way most everyone did 5-10 years ago. On the other hand, many people (especially the younger generation) have learned to be "users" or "consumers" rather than citizens, viewing the world as a retail entertainment outlet. For those people, what I call privacy intrusion, they call service. They cannot understand the concept of privacy, so they'll always view the topic as silly.
because my doctor keeps everything online. my doc can not really help me if i lie to them when i visit. if i set up an account with a bank how do i keep track of all the BS i gave them for the account?
@Thor Ablestar: check out the new LG smart TV. Tell my the NSA spooks won't be monitoring what you watch on TV 5 years from now. If you do, you'll be lying.
P.S. that "in Soviet Russia" thing gives away that you're not in Russia like you say, that's a US anti-communist propaganda phrase. I doubt you even speak Russian. Let alone ever visited.
I don't post to internet fora. Not even under a pseudonym. If they know me well enough, they can figure out who I am from my alias. Oh. oops.
soylentnews.org
The real problem is that the younger generation has no appreciation of how dangerous a lack of privacy truly is. Information can be the most powerful of weapons.
A few commenters have suggested that they have nothing to worry about because they let no "sensitive" information out onto the web.
Sorry to break it to you, but the world is not fair. People are sometimes framed or kangaroo-ed into apearing guilty of something when they are clearly not (I have had it happen). Sometimes, various authorities need to catch someone to hang blame upon for some crime. I've even heard cops tell a public defender, "We know he didn't do it, but we know he's a bad kid, so we got him."
Also, numerous (unregulated) consumer-monitoring agencies scrape up everything from public databases, buy lists from shops, service providers, your bank, your phone company, your credit card company, and your grocery "club card," sold subscriber lists, and so on. All of this data is correlated based on a few unique or semi-unique identifiers such as full name, SSN, phone number, credit card transaction number (it's illegal to track by CC #, but they get around this.), bank and account's last-four digits, addresses, and so on. This approach does produce some viable correlations, but typically yields "profiles" that are rife with errors.
HR departments use reports from these aggregators as if they were 100% accurate. There is no law in place that will allow you to opt out, to see their entire file on you, or to correct errors. There are anecdotes of people searching months for a job, only to find out at some point from an interviewer that, "you have XXXXX crime in your profile," even if you don't have a record. I once had collection agencies coming after me from Time-Warner Cable for bills on a Texas account — I have never lived in Texas, but the burden of proof was on me.
Despite what the aggregators would have everyone think, names are not unique. Phone numbers are not unique, as they are recycled. Email addresses are often not unique, as they are recycled.
Like it or not, there are many profiles on you that are beyond your access, and the law has not yet caught up with these practices.
Happy privacy!
I have two states of privacy:
1. Never leaves a machine that is never used to browse the internet, and
2. Public
I simply assume that any "privacy controls" on websites are useless and treat them as public postings, disabling most of the security along the way. Just like good ole' slashdot posts.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's true enough that the world doesn't revolve around you or me. "Government" is a lovely, abstract concept. The problem is: governments are made up of people. Individual people who can make mistakes or take deliberately evil actions. Like spying on ex-lovers, harassing disliked colleagues, or causing problems for companies that they don't like.
The NSA overreach means that tens of thousands of people have access to data that should never have been collected. Can you be sure that you, your family and your friends - that no one you care about has ever pissed off any of those tens of thousands of people? That no one you care about ever will?
It's bad enough that the government has access to this data, which might be misused officially. However, the real problems arise from the fact that the data exists: it can, will and already has been misused by individuals.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
How do you solve the tagging problem? Your friends get on FB, someone posts a photo of you, that person or someone else tags it with your name and possibly other info. How do you keep your friends from adding you to the FB collective?
Wear a burqa. It's a remarkably effective technology invented by Muslims ages ago!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Your personal information is accessible.
Nice try, NSA.
In Iran your'e ok untill they cannot read your fucking network traffic, since that moment you are under 24/7/365 surveillance.
And As you can guess that ship has sank for me, So I have my own way of doing it now, which can be basically summerized like this:
Use different airgapped computers with different keyboard layouts(as in dvorak, qwerty), different monitors, different OSs(linux, BSD, haiku), different CPU architectures(mips, arm, x86), different browsers(yes, it includes lynx) with different ISPs for differnt identities and use different encryption suits with different tunnels and or VPNs with servers in different counteries.
I know It's hard, but once you live in Iran you get used to it.
Hell I'm gonna change my coding and writing style on different PCs now.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
I just use a very robust password. 15 characters which includes a couple of punctuation marks. The password is derived from a phrase that only makes sense to me. Each of the first letters of the phrase words make up the pass. Also, I never lay the pass in by keystroking it in (besides it's too hard to remember). I just keep the pass in a file with a non-pass related title on my desktop and just capture it when I need it. Some dick sites can't take all 15 characters because they're so unsophisticated so I just cut out the two punch marks and use a 13 character pass. Seems to work (since 2009) well. No complaints !
I have a bot which goes into the various nasty parts of the web and grabs whatever's available, but erases it before it has a chance to make it into persistent storage. The NSA may think I'm a perv, but they'll never figure out which kind of perv.
Gives new meaning to leaving a tip.
I always log out and post anonymously.
Doh!...
Protect your privacy relative to what? If you want to exist without leaving an electronic footprint, I don't think it's possible in America. You have to eat, live, buy stuff, and so on - you will either be leaving a trail of debits, or trying to withdraw more cash than allowed. You have to have some sort of bank account. Or do you mean on social media? I exploit the people who want to exploit me, by creating accounts to stake out my territory, and only putting a link to my personal web site in them. I post no personal information.
It's like when people join the military, the advice is to blend in and not stand out. You are "private" as far as you don't stick out, but that's always been the case. Don't appear on people's radar screens.
I can't control what providers do with my data. If my dentist sells my information to a marketing firm, and then that gets sold to someone looking at setting up new id's for people, I don't have much control over that. I also don't have a lot of control over how my phone can be used to track me (which is why I use it a lot less, and am going to be installing CyanogenMod to reduce that control footprint).
What I can do are two things- put as much of my information under my direct control as possible, and make it easier for myself and others to continue doing so.
I'm still migrating off of Google services. I didn't realize just how much they have taken over so many aspects of "making things easy". Looking back on it, it was naive to put things there, but at the time there really weren't any affordable services that offered me what I needed. If anything, the only reason I used Google for free was because there wasn't anything low cost and reliable that I could have used instead. That included self-hosting. And it wouldn't have mattered if I had everything in another cloud or vps, because it still would have been a US based service, and that means it would still have to migrate to a server in my home or on a vps in someplace like Switzerland. The end goal is to get everything important being served out of my home off of equipment that I have secured and verified, and to stop using external services (even the ones in places like Switzerland, because laws can and do change). I'm also no longer sharing services that I do host on my own, because I do not want to be considered an ISP for the purposes of receiving something like an NSL.
The second thing is what is causing me to do this slowly. I'm critically looking at all the things that I need to do and use, and what I am finding to be really important and what isn't. I'm keeping track of my time in setting all of this up, and figuring out what is a time sink and what isn't. Going forward, I'm developing my own installation packages under my favorite OS to streamline my effort to make the hard things I've had to do easy for other people, and at some point I will probably contact a hardware shop that deals in small production runs of ARM microsystems and have a platform put together so I can make it easy for people just to "plug and play" darknet services. And, more importantly, I'm helping anyone out who is doing the same in whatever small ways that I can. It is one thing to tap the communications of most Americans and others in the world by working with willing partners (Google, MSoft, Apple, etc), it is quite another to try to monitor millions of systems that all have major differences and none of which are going to be open to cooperation.
Boot up password, first drive password, second drive password, full disk encryption with softraid on OpenBSD, (It's the best we've got). I have a dumb phone back from when alltel wireless was still current. Tor, custom router firmware, but all of that only takes you so far. Can't always protect against anything or anyone. You just have to put up the walls knowing they probably look like swiss cheese to anyone who wants to get in. If you use the internet, then they know about you in essentially every way. They have the information regardless of what security measures you use.
Tune in, turn on, drop out. Only consume electronicly. Where possable, whenever you have
to submit / disclose information, do it on paper. Pay with cash. It'll take them Internet years to
digitize it, if they ever do. You don't have to be invisable, just less visable than those around you.
I believe that most of my privacy comes from the fact that (1) I'm not interesting, and (2) there are millions of other uninteresting people out there that help make it more difficult for someone to figure out that I might be "interesting".
(And before you say that I'm not interesting "yet" -- I am painfully aware that my privacy hinges on something so flimsy.)
We know that the NSA has purchased exabyte-scale disk storage for a huge facility in Utah. No doubt my information is on those disks. However, I do take comfort in the fact that they have exabytes of data, rather than say, 100 TB of data. If they only needed 100 TB of data, that would tell me that their analysis has been highly refined and perfected, and that the quality and usefulness of that 100 TB of data is extremely high. But with exabytes of data, the signal-to-noise ratio of that data is much lower, which gives me a better chance to "hide" within the noise.
Also -- with exabytes of storage needed, it's likely they have not had a significant cryptanalysis breakthrough: the conventional wisdom is that those exabytes are needed to hold data (perhaps for years) until it can pass through the bottleneck of cryptanalysis. While I'm not happy that my private data is on there, the bottleneck does slow down the prying eyes. The bottleneck also makes it more likely that my private data could be discarded during their first-level heuristics that determine what should be saved for future analysis.
What are the reasons we want privacy?
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
But, here you are! Busted!
Dont attract surveillance with crypting.
Be active in social media, but maintain a dull role.
Make spelling errors to sjow you are not intelliqentsia.
Those are suspicious to every governement.
Give silly answers to show that you are not a nerd.
Simply show that you have nothing to hide. Keep your position high
"Oh that jerk again" -rank.
If you have to transmit something of interest, do it in plain text, between the lines.
It is often effective to express the opposite. Those who rally know you can read that.
I create a different email address for every web site I sign up to, and use different passwords and usernames. I have a Facebook account under my real name, but I post false information, false updates, and false photos by morphing four faces together and photoshopping it into the image. It's very easy to get those four faces at various angles because they are pictures of people in my extended family. My Facebook friends are all random people that accepted me for some reason. I clear my browser and use a different user agent for each of the sites I visit. Any other browsing is done in a private mode in a different browser on a per site basis and I rotate the browser, and this is in a VM that I refresh every day with a backup image. I also force https. I have two different VPN services I use based on the sites I want to visit.
Twinstiq, game news
Kill all the politicians, AND the people that pull their strings. Otherwise you've got no chance.
I travel a lot so I keep my laptop, tablet, and phone (all Apple devices) in an encrypted bubble. I have a battery powered tinyHardwareFirewall and connect only that to the Internet. I then connect all of my devices to the tinyHardwareFirewall where they get to hide behind Nat. The firewall also has a 256bit AES vpn client built in so all traffic and dns calls get encrypted. There is an upstream anti virus proxy available to strip out known malware and nastiness, even web ads.
For email and surfing I use a replaceable temporary Linux virtual machine that I throw away at the end of each session. This provides a thin buffer for zero day exploits and single packet exploits. We also do voip through this system which gives us almost complete end to end encryption when both parties connect to the same vpn server. That is pretty cool. This is just everyday stuff, not gun to the head James Bond stuff but it hopefully keeps me above all but self inflicted cyber wounds.
Everything I do online is based on a fake alias. airgapped from my real life. yes even my cellphone and internet is via a fake alias I pay for a second internet line to a neighbors house, then I ran my own wires back to mine buried. I asked for no paper billing and it's set to an automatic credit card payment.
Works great.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You just don't get it do you? You can encrypt and use multiple hops all day long it makes no difference. At some point somebody will tell one of these big corps about you. I've never used linkedin or facebook yet people I remotely know have told them my name, email address and phone number. I can encrypt my emails yet somebody will forward one to somebody else who will run it through google translator 4 times just for laughs...
Your pretty encryption technology can hide your mostly insignifcant browsing habits, but won't stop others from shouting out to the world the most personal parts of identity. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about that.
That isn't teaching them anything, because they already would accept them by definition. Also, there's probably much more benefit from being given a flash drive with TOR than being taught not to accept flash drives for multiple reasons (the latter doesn't happen too often, flash drive with program seems much more appealing than a lecture, etc).
I think you're making some assumptions about Google that aren't true. Yes, it does appear that the NSA tapped data center connections, but Google has responded by strongly encrypting all of those. And the "they can get anything by asking" notion isn't as true as it appears. Yes, they can, but only if they go through proper channels and issue a narrow and specific request. More importantly, the numbers Google publishes show that such requests are issued for data only about a very tiny percentage of the user base.
And if anyone can suggest a reliable email provider that is NOT Google, MS or Yahoo, I am all ears.
Whatever other provider you use is going to be subject to the same legal requirements to comply with warrants, subpoenas and National Security Letters -- and odds are that they won't do as good a job with securing your data as Google does.
Anyway, I'm not criticizing your decisions, just pointing out that a portion of your rationale may not be factually correct. Personally, I don't have any concerns about Google handling my personal information, but I'm a Google employee so I have a little better visibility into exactly what the risks are and are not. To be completely honest, I also don't worry about it much because I don't have anything to hide... not that I think people shouldn't have anything to hide. It's just that I personally don't. And, yes, I understand that things can change, but if things change so that something I do "needs" to be hidden, I'd rather stand up and fight than hide. But that's just me. YMMV.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I would suggest the DoNotTrackMe addon. It prevents online tracking similar to Ghostery. The biggest difference from what I've read is that Ghostery is open to start, and blocks tracking as you tell it to. DoNotTrackMe blocks everything by default, and if you want a tracker to work, you have to enable it.
I admit, I have a personal bias against Ghostery. Their primary income is from advertisers.
I've done it for many years, it's not so hard. Spamassassin + greylisting + spamhaus DNSBL + SPF checking keep the spam down to a very small amount. The little spam I do get is tagged and filtered into a separate folder. You do need a lot to different anti-spam measures but once they are set-up they keep on working.
Game's still not even. They can rendition you, beat you silly with a pipe wrench, waterboard you, electrify your genitals, etc. You may not return from this little exercise, either. If they don't want to go to that much effort, they can simply charge you with any one of a huge variety of crimes you may or may not have committed, and then use jail (or release from jail) as leverage to ensure you go back to behaving in such a manner as pleases them, in the process ruining you financially almost as an afterthought.
It's all about power. They have it. Oodles and oodles of it. You don't have any. As long as that situation remains stable, you can't fix this.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
educate normal people why nobody has nothing to hide
get them using tools like TOR, vpn regularly for normal stuff...
Using I2P obviates 1-4 in that it keeps everything encrypted end-to-end and mixes your packets with traffic from many other people (this also addresses #6 from StripedCow). Its the P2P twist on Tor-- everyone routes packets thus contributing to bandwidth and overall privacy. Make Google and your ISP irrelevant with respect to your data.
For the general populace today, your list just looks like a convoluted mess (and there is no common sense when it comes to IT... we only see the tip of the internal system iceberg at any given moment). Online privacy can't be done piecemeal, one security scheme per application; that's just a disincentive to follow through and actually use it.
As for a secure open source system, see my tagline. Qubes is hypervisor-based and enforces security to an extent that I've never seen in other desktops.
Yandex has an office in the US. Whether they'd roll over for a tummy scratch or not, I do not know.
Better to use mail.ru instead. There is an English option to sign up and use, just Google.
Thanks. I've made a page on the libreplanet.org wiki and added Disconnect:
http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Privacy_addons_for_web_browsers
And I've emailed the gnuzilla folks asking them to add it to their list of free addons:
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/addons.html
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
You're a good shill. I am sure you are aware of this. Google does actively report to law enforcement.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Actually, I wasn't aware of that, and it disturbs me.
I want to know if the photos were shared publicly. If so, then I have no problem with this, just as I have no problem with Google telling law enforcement (or, actually, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is who actually informed law enforcement) about kiddie porn web sites the Google spider finds while crawling the web. I see no reason why the same logic shouldn't be applied to public postings on Picasa, Google+, etc.
But if the photos were merely stored in a private account, though, I think that's a different story. If that was the case here, then I think Google did cross line, and should stop, and I think lots of other Googlers will agree. I'll raise this question at TGIF* next week (no meeting this week due to the holidays), assuming someone else doesn't (which someone almost certainly will). Thanks.
(*TGIF is a weekly company-wide meeting which includes a 15-20 minute Q&A where anyone can put any question to Larry Page.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I don't think you can do much about the NSA, or what companies like Google or Facebook know about you. However, when it comes to your friends, family, employers, etc. there is plenty you can do. For one thing, it is not necessary to articulate every thought you have. Mark Twain's advice applies more than ever, "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt." I am surprised at what some people post on Facebook. Even friends who are intelligent, mild-mannered people could come off as complete nut jobs based on some of the things they post or pass along. It's madness. Even if you feel strongly about something, it is often better to just STFU about it, rather than proclaim it to all the world.
Proverbs 21:19
I don't protect my privacy outside of using strong passwords and 2-factor authentication (when available). No encryption, no VPN, no proxies. I don't use anti-virus software or firewalls either (other than those built-in to an OS and the NAT firewall of the router). The simple fact is that I do not send anything via email/Twitter/Facebook/Google+ that is unlawful, incriminating, or extremely personal. There is nothing on my computer that I cannot live without either. I have the actual physical media for all movies, TV, and music. Games are all on Steam/GoG. Photos are all posted online and backed up to DVD.
Perhaps the only thing I go a little out of my way to protect is my phone number. I ported my number to Google Voice, setup a silent ringtone as the default ringtone on my iPhone, turned off vibration, and use customer ringtones for friends/family/coworker contacts. That's more a matter of personal sanity than privacy though.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Shall I just tell under which rock my house key is hidden?
I use them myself.
However, they have one big drawback: servers on US soil.
Yet Another Information Security Professional, working in a sensitive information startup.
Of course, a lot of these have been in use long before the NSA revelations...
A few of my personal tools and our corporate-used tools:
All OSX shop configured with strict firewall, fileVault, and openVPN,
Browser plugins to block ads (adBlock Plus), scripts/flash (NoScript), popups (Adblock Plus Pop-up Addon), trackers (Ghostery), and enforce HTTPS (HTTPS-Everywhere).
GPG Tools for encrypting individual files / emails - https://gpgtools.org/
OTR for secure messaging (use Adium which has OTR support off the shelf) https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
Silent Circle for encrypted voice and text - https://silentcircle.com/
Personal VPN for traffic encryption for browsing outside of corporate purposes, e.g. one of these:
https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/4809/best-vpn-service-top-10/
note that several offer payment methods that are anonymous, e.g. gift cards purchased with cash, i.e. http://www.paygarden.com/
Obligitory Schneier:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance
---------
There is no try at jedinite.com
Thanks, that is hugely reassuring that it disturbs some employee(s) of Google. Hope you are listened to at the TGIF.
I do realize that it is less of an issue if it was a public post. I don't particularly share your enthusiasm to report victimless crimes. But I guess I don't have a leg to stand on, as lots of countries have severe laws against victimless crimes, including mine.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Thanks, that is hugely reassuring that it disturbs some employee(s) of Google. Hope you are listened to at the TGIF.
I do realize that it is less of an issue if it was a public post. I don't particularly share your enthusiasm to report victimless crimes. But I guess I don't have a leg to stand on, as lots of countries have severe laws against victimless crimes, including mine.
Child pornography is not a victimless crime. Perhaps sharing the pictures is, once it's made, but the making is definitely not victimless. And shutting down the sharing reduces the incentive to make it -- even better, in the process of shutting it down it may be possible to track it back to the source.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Google has any chance to only report the victimless part of the crime.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Windows 8 is off the list because it's closed source but you can use it without providing an email.
One account for each of my personalities!
I've been using Fastmail happily for a number of years. Never seen them offline. They're based in Australia so you have to worry about cable taps rather than NSLs but they're pretty strong on privacy.