Slashdot Mirror
Online, You're Being Watched At All Times; Act Accordingly.
An anonymous reader writes "Kaspersky Lab's Internet security expert Costin Raiu discusses internet surveillance claims that you should assume that you're being watched at all times. The article reports that Raiu conducts his online activities under the assumption that his movements are being monitored by government hackers. Raiu: 'I operate under the principle that my computer is owned by at least three governments' ... 'this is not meant as a scare tactic, but a rather as a statement of fact that should now be the default setting for everyone.'"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4766259&cid=46193879
Anyone accused of using a computer for illegal purposes now has a perfect defense. After all if credentialed experts believe that computers are controlled by the numerous people of several governments then there has to be hard proof that the doer was the one who took those actions on his PC.
mod parent up. i'm outa here, see ya in a week (or not). -logs out
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
You miss the point. It does not MATTER if you are "important" or not. Seriously consider the implications of a total surveillance state.
We started off with at least the half hearted assumption that this was the case, then the web and the net went mainstream. Society assumed our paranoia was irrational and silly. It might have been for a bit, but it clearly wasn't in the long run. One of the assumptions we made in the interim and that many folks still make is that, "There aren't enough watchers to watch every one of us" or "They might have access to my e-mail, text and data but they don't have enough people to read each and every one of those things" because we the people society at large, just don't get technology, even those of us who do, Watson super-computing and the Google search algorithm can be applied to you and I our behavior associations and the possibility that we will do something bad in the future... BUT brothers and sisters nevermind that, think for a moment of the possibility that those in charge, or some of them, with access to the spying they might use this access to do something bad, like leak secret e-mails from a popular Governor, that show he closed a bridge, or those who work for him did, as some sort of act of dickery, and so we catch him lying about it, and thus remove the threat of him becoming president... Really... Don't tell me why he is in fact a dick.. he probably is, I could care less, the idea is those with access to the NSA cloud can decide who is in and who is out in terms of eligibility for admission to the public sphere.
Finally, we'll all be safe. Finally.
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
I'm sick of seeing posts about the beta.
Well, then, it's your lucky day! Starting in 4 hours and change, a lot of us from the USA will be leaving /. and making no more anti-beta posts for a week! (The Europeans and UTC hardliners everywhere have already left.) Enjoy your week...
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Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet. (Copy-paste the html from here so links don't get mangled!)
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design. Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
http://slashdot.org/recent - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
-----=====##### LINKS #####=====-----
Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=56395415
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=3321441
Alternative Slashdot: http://altslashdot.org (thanks Okian Warrior (537106))
Exactly. It's not the fact that you may or may not be watched right now, it's the fact that everything you do and say can and will be used against you in the future whenever it's convenient, politically or otherwise. I keep quoting this, maybe one day people will actually realize what it means: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." --Richelieu
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Any security expert will tell you to assume that any system you are using, even your own, is compromised, whether it is or not and regardless of whatever steps have been taken to secure it.
Source: I get paid tons of money to provide security consulting.
I've always treated 'online' the same as postcards.
Anything else was/is naive, and this was apparent to anyone that actually understood networks, and 'online'.
Where the problem stems from, is 'security solutions' being added in after the fact. It(the internet) was touted as 'the Information Highway' for a reason...it was.
It was never touted as 'the Secure Information Highway', and when commercialization hit the 'Information Highway', that did not change.
This subject(internet security) is the poster child of unintended consequences.
There are ways of doing business/secure transactions with networks, but it seems no one wants to spend the effort or $$ required to do so.
Until that attitude changes, this kind of 'news' will be a regular, ongoing event. Convenience will trump security anytime money is involved...look at history for supporting evidence.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Anecdotal evidence is usually not all that useful. Real statistics are more reliable: http://chart.av-comparatives.o...
Actually, I like Beta.
In all fairness, there are some things I like about beta, and some things I don't. I think the animosity is stemming from the apparent inflexibility on the idea of maintaining classic as an alternative indefinitely for those who prefer it. And perhaps for not fixing some things (aforementioned via direct linked historical comment) that could use fixing before deploying it on all (or even 25% of) users.
As I suggest here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d... :-) :-) :-) :-) ... ...
"Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.
Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time.
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"They set out to build something even the government wouldn't want to watch! Mission accomplished."
I think this is accomplished already. They could not possibly want to "watch" everybody. You'd have more watchers than watched.
I think OP erred in saying everyone is "watched". That's simply not so. Their data may be collected, and it may be looked at later, but that's not QUITE the same thing as "being watched".
Having said that: I still despise the current situation and it does need to change.
by emmagsachs (1024119) Alter Relationship on Sunday February 09, 2014 @12:58PM(#46205013) I have visited this website on a near-daily basis for over a decade. I have greatly benefited from its community, whether +5 Insightful or -1 Troll. It thus saddens me to watch Slashdot be changed into a bland, cookie-cutter news site, a la the present incarnations of Engadget and Digg. I am perhaps in the minority in this, but I kindly urge you to read this post, and others like it, and to consider joining the week-long Slashcott [slashcott.com] that begins on Feb 10th. I realize that posting off-topic comments such as this is disrupting the Slashdot experience for many of you, and I do apologize for it. But can you honestly say that the new Beta interface does not already disrupt Slashdot for all of us? These anti-Beta posts can quite rightly be viewed as "a series of shock slogans and mindless token tantrums", to borrow a phrase, but since we feel that we are ignored by Dice, this is the best that I, like many other slashdotters, could come up with.
/. at any any cost [slashdot.org], and its users be damned. Dice views its users, the ones who create the site [slashdot.org], as a passive audience. As such, it is interchangeable with its intended B2B crowd. We, the current users of Slashdot, are an obstacle in Dice's way.
What company directs 25% of its users to a partially-working, not-ready-for-production website? Please realize that Beta will not have the features that we want, because they interfere with Dice's plans for Slashdot. Dice presents Slashdot to their advertisers as a "Social Media for B2B Technology" [slashdotmedia.com] platform. B2B - that's the reason Beta looks like a generic wordpress-based news site. To be sure, a large precentage of Slashdotters work in IT, but Slashdot is most certainly not a B2B site.
Nevertheless, Dice is desperate to make money off of Slashdot, even at the cost of losing much of its current userbase. Turning Slashdot into a social platform for IT "decision makers" is a Haily Mary attempt to recoup the failed investment Dice made in buying Slashdot. As they have revealed in a press release [diceholdingsinc.com] detailing their performance in 2013, this acquisition has not lived up to their financial expectations:
Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.
The new Beta interface is not the result of a superficial makeover. Keeping in mind that Dice felt confident enough to present it as the new face of Slashdot to 25% of its visitors, it is safe to say that the new commenting and moderation system is exactly how they intended it to be. It is a new design that deliberately cripples the one thing that makes Slashdot what it is today, viz. thebest commenting and moderation system online today. From the users' perspective, there is nothing wrong with Slashdot that demands gutting its foundations and dumping the one part of Slashdot we exactly like. As others have commented, this is an attempt to monetize
This is why they ignore the detailed feedback we have given them in the months since Beta was first revealed. This is also why they now disregard our grievances and complaints. Their claims of hearing us are a deliberate snow job. It is only pretense, since at the same time they openly admit that Classic will be cancelled soon [slashdot.org]:
"Most importantly, we want
Three Squirrels
This is a standard trope in every epic novel from middle-earth to outer space: the bad guys want you to hunker down. To hell with that!
Smiert Spionam!
davecb@spamcop.net
A whole week without a bunch of whiny Americans? Bliss! :-)
I'm not a fan of beta either, but the amount of entitlement coming from the regs here is ridiculous. This is a free (as in beer) service and nobody volunteers to do any of the coding or back end site maintenance either. Businesses, non-profits, and projects change direction all the time; if they don't they're basically admitting that nobody much cares about what they do. Occasionally there are some posts with thoughtful criticism but for the most part it's fuck this, boycott that, I'm gone etc. etc. It's disgusting and serves as a reminder of how juvenile and anti-social a large fraction of Slashdot readership is.
If governmental institutions have the ability to retain the data indefinitely, and you have no way of knowing whether or not you're one of the ones being actively watched, is there a significant difference?
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Turn off computer. Call and cancel internet service. Spend internet money on more books to read. /thread
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
THE AUDIENCE HAS SPOKEN!
How do you know WHY they have the data, WHAT their intentions are, or WHAT their capabilities are?
Grabbing everything is absolutely useless to going after an enemy. Real bad guys aren't going to be linking to FaceBook when they search for bomb materials, and they aren't going to use their own credit cards.
But it's great if you want to create profiles on people and control movements. If you want to build consensus and monitor people who are not convinced by propaganda -- absolutely awesome.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
If you're unashamed of your past (harmless) behaviour it's harder for people to "use it against you".
This is not how it works. Not even close.
Political operatives dig something up - often something entirely harmless, something that neither you nor any of normal people would even consider to be shameful - and they blow it up until it crushes you. Take, for example, "Dean Scream," or Swiftboating of Kerry, among many other. The defining characteristic of such attacks is that they are, generally, dishonest, and influence the uneducated audience, forcing the candidate to take defensive posture - which never helps. The attack itself may be an outright lie, or a lie constructed upon some foundation of a real event, or a real event that is completely misrepresented.
Besides, a person who has nothing to be ashamed of in his past is either a saint or a narcissist. I am not aware of *anyone* who'd manage to live from cradle to grave without making an unfortunate mistake somewhere.
You miss the point. It does not MATTER if you are "important" or not.
Seriously consider the implications of a total surveillance state.
As someone that grew under a totalitarian regime in Eastern Europe, I can tell you it's ugly like hell.
It doesn't matter that:
* then, you wouldn't know if the other person would snitch on you; and...
* now you wouldn't know if the computer/phone of the other's person or the ones you own/use would snitch on you (might as well add the nowadays almost ubiquitous CCTV-es to equations, possibly all equipped tomorrow with microphones);
in time - quite quickly - the entire fabric of society evolves to "by default, don't trust anyone".
Can you imagine a life where, no matter what you do, you need to use "steganography" (even when talking face-to-face)? Well, this is how it is in a total surveillance state.
What are the consequences, you ask? The most immediate and with the highest impact:
* one is likely to spend enormous amount of effort in balancing between "getting a message across" and "flying under the radar" (expressing the message in an innocuous way).
* the sense of community is broken down (can't build meaningful relations while in a permanent "don't trust" state of mind)
Even letting aside the economy mismanagement, the two above alone would be just enough to explain why the former "communist" regimes failed: too much effort wasted in "being paranoid" by everybody and too less "organic social efficiency".
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I'd like to quote from Michel Foucault's essay "Panopticon" from his book _Discipline and Punish_. Here's a link to the a pdf of the text:
http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/courseblog...
But first an explanation of the term is in order. In the late 18th century Bentham designed a prison where all the cells pointed to a central guard station. Thus, inmates were always being watched. The guard house design incorporated venetian blinds and obtuse corners so that inmates would know that at any time they could be under the watchful eye of guards, but never know exactly _when_. The intent of this was to impose self-restraint upon the inmate community by fear of potential surveillance. That is, self-censorship imposed by an architectural design. Here's what wikipedia has to say on the matter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Foucault took this idea and extended it to surveillance by authorities as a kind of 'social panopticon'.
Foucault extended the idea of the social panopticon throughout all institutions of society, drawing parallels between hierarchical structures in church, state, and corporate spheres where a authority used the possibility of surveillance and the tr
It's not so much "WHY" they have the information or even "WHAT" their intentions are. It's tremendously unlikely that the government has raw computer capabilities even as high as an order of magnitude more than what's currently available on the market. They simply don't have the expertise and such huge amounts of private money are going into the same kind of R&D they'd be doing. I suppose it's possible that all the cost overruns in every government IT project and every recent military project have been going into some sort of super secret project to build high capacity storage and really fast processors, but I think it far more likely that that money has gone to making immensely powerful planes that are useless in modern warfare and paying for 50 levels of contracting.
The most recent data I can find indicates that in 2012 just under 28 exabytes of data per month was flowing through the internet and it was increasing at about 7 exabytes year on year, so a relatively safe assumption is that internet traffice for 2013 was probably about 35 exabytes a month. Based on an old whatif" from xkcd, the highest density storage we have microsd cards is about 160 terabytes per kilogram. Let's assume for the sake of insanity that the government can store 10 times that in a manner which is actually practical to process, so we'll give them a data density of 1.6 petabytes per kilogram. This is obviously insane, but let's do it anyway. By that math storing all internet traffic everywhere will mean 35 tons of storage every single month. Note this is ridiculously low and the actual figure is likely substantially higher not counting the mechanisms to actually process and archive all that information.
None of that even comes close to all the data that isn't on the intranet that they're supposedly trying to siphon down, which probably easily doubles or trebles this figure. This is how we know they aren't storing everyone's information indefinitely, or even temporarily, they can't.