Well, the man in the middle attack does not work if you only accept the far sites public key (as in, no trusted chains at all) which you recognize by sight.
The other way to handle this is to use ssh to port forward the ssh server port, so that the second ssh connection is encoded into the first, and so is unaltered by the evil state. The truely paranoid can do this recursively, so that the connection is an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection. That might be fun to try anyway!
Of course, in general I recommend not doing things that upset governments unless you plan on using deadly force against them (because they will consider revolutionaries as using deadly force against the entity of the government). It is better to change from inside - get into the government and try to make it better, rather than tear down what has been built. Whatever exists, it is probably better than nothing - see Iraq, Afganistan, and Tiananmen square massacre for the pain that must be endured for rapid change.
I like what another poster said - use a graphical keyboard with a mouse controller. To go to the "wearing a tinfoil hat inside a 2 meter thick copper box" level, randomize the character locations. Power off when done, and it is almost unbreakable.
Of course, if I was the evil government hacker, I would then put something in BIOS that records essentially a VNC-like record of your session (including video output)... but if you cannot trust the computer you are using, this is probably the best you can do! (Such a recording device would at least be conspicuous!)
Very true. The primary reason it is difficult to trace is that the trace ends at the ssh terminal, as long as the government cannot access that box. If you are in the US (then I wouldn't call you a dissident anyway!), then you can pretty much assume that the NSA can trace you no matter what (everyone is friendly enough to provide info or dangerous enough to have been hacked). If you are in North Korea, for example, the North Koreans have trouble convincing US or Swiss ISPs to give out connection info.
Most places, having a copy of Knoppix is pretty explainable - and won't get you arrested by itself.
On the other hand, in a regime where crypto is illegal, don't you think they could arrest you without cause anyway? Why bother with the crypto argument?
All this does is allow you to hide what you are doing within reason.
Most keyloggers are passive, recording the info and then storing it for review. Even if it wasn't, if the government really has every place in the country under survelliance then there is no way to do anything anyway.
Really, all you can do is get a reasonable chance as long as they do not single you out.
1. Have a PC with a CDROM drive. 2. Rent or borrow an SSH account outside the country. 3. Boot PC using KNOPPIX (do not load hard drive) 4. Open a connection through SSH that forwards a local to an anonymous proxy at the far end. 5. Use 127.0.0.1 as your proxy address. 6. Surf away!
When done (or if the government busts in!), reboot your computer - no traces left. (Knoppix stores everything in RAM).
Keyloggers do not work against you, because you are booting from known media. (On the other hand, if the NSA REALLY wants you, they will hack your bios - but no one else is probably that anal).
Please let me know if you would like to have a civil discussion. I believe you are wrong on several important points. You believe I am similarly wrong. If you were more polite, I think we might both learn something.
As it is, I'm afraid any discussion with you is pointless.
I am sorry if I offended you - I was trying to state my point of view, not to attack yours. "We" is meant to include the public will, as currently implemented by the government. You seem to believe that excludes you.
On my using a "teacher's voice," I do need to watch that. I honestly care about other people, and want them to succeed - and I often see people doing things I think will hurt themselves in the end. Perhaps that comes off wrong. Anyway, what I was trying to get at is not listening the Rush and making fun of him (which, lets face it, is pretty easy!) but instead trying to empathise with the oppostion - to see there point of view. Perhaps you do that, perhaps not - all I can use is my past experience which leads me to believe that extremists almost never have a 9000 ft viewpoint, instead they see the details of a situation.
I stand by what I said about scientists and policy. Listening to specialists in general gets the public in trouble, because they do not take a wide enough view of society.
As for the stance of the current administration, I can see how from your viewpoint the current administration is horrible. I firmly believe that most of our country disagrees with you - that most of us would rather have electricity at the cost of a few mountains. As I said, this is a balancing act - you believe that the scale is shifted way to the left, but if you got your way I would think the scale was shifted way to the right. In the end, the scale tends to wobble around in the middle.
So, what is your feeling on menenites(SP)?
As for recommending that people move around, I still believe that is the better system. You bring race into it, which is dishonest - I am talking about culture, not skin color. I believe in diversity, so I choose to live around people very different from me. But if you do not like diversity, please live somewhere else instead of trying to get me to conform to you! (Diversity means listening and empathising with others, even if you do not agree with their viewpoint. It does not mean having black friends, pink friends, or as my daughter would say orange friends!)
If you have a sense of harmony and connectedness with the land, perhaps you should lay off the drugs for a while... just kidding! If that's what floats your boat, more power to you. Perhaps the disconnection you refer to is only an illusion, easily broken through visiting other lands and seeing other cultures. I don't feel particularly ungrounded, but I suppose I wouldn't know... I did grow up on a farm, however - I guess it just didn't stick.
Never mind that there is no way in hell anyone will be able to hijack a commercial airliner with knives again.
In fact, it may be better to issue knives to all boarding passengers at this point. I think most americans would rush any terrorist trying to take over a plane in today's world.
WAIT - I figured it out! In almost every accident on record, just before the accident occurs people slam on their brakes - often leading to a loss of control!
We must lobby congress to remove these evil brakes - millions of lives are at stake!
It should be fairly easy to show that a higher speed limit is safer - at higher speeds, with the same number of vehicle-miles driven, the spacing between cars is much larger. Surely that is a driving factor in accidents?
This means driving fast minimizes the time, while driving "aggressively" just trades the force for the distance. So to minimize fuel usage, you want to continuously drive at the velocity with inefficiencies (air resistance, etc.) match the idle power. So next time, instead of stopping to pick people up, just grab them on the flyby - you will be saving gas!
And your assertion that we're "not allowing the extremists on either side to take charge" is completely false. The extremists on one side have taken charge.
Unfortunately, all this shows is that you are an extremist by the measures we use in society. Probably those around you are also extremists, so you do not have any external perspective. One of the most important lessons to learn in life is to listen to those that you disagree with - you cannot learn by listening to those that you agree with.
In the post-war years we traditionally relied on scientific studies to make these decisions. A panel of scientists would be commissioned...
Yes, and look at what that got us! Nuclear power condemned even though (at least at that point) it was the best option - because scientists didn't know how to communicate to the public. The FDA making "food policy" that makes people fatter and at higher risk for heart attacks! Scientists make very poor policy makers - policy makers and leaders require broad and shallow knowlege, not deep and narrow. (Seeing the interactions between different things is more important than a deep understanding of a single thing for decision making).
BTW, the words I put in quotes are not words I don't think exist. They are words that I am using at least a little bit incorrectly - I was trying to show that I meant nature in a larger sense than it is normally used with. The site you link to pretty much agrees with what I was trying to say - though I didn't read enough of it to see their particular biases (we all have them). The propper way to look at environmentalism is as an economic trade off, balancing building airplanes and poisoning lakes. (That example was supposed to show the extremists on both sides. There are no people known to be in power that would trade a poisoned lake for an airplane - as soon as they are found out they are removed, the same as with someone that wanted to eliminate technology...)
BTW-2, what is wrong with suggesting a location change if someone does not like where they are living because most of the other people there do not agree with them? I would think that would be quite logical - if you are the type of person that wants ecology over technology, move to Germany (they tend to agree with you). It's beautiful there! What's wrong with saying that? I have livedin many different cultures, and I am saddened by those that stay in one place all their lives - they have such a narrow perspective, and miss the richness life has to offer.
BTW, the reason hydrogen makes sense is that conversion efficiency is 70% oil/gas->hydrogen, followed by up to 90% conversion to electricity (it can be done this efficiently, though it needs to be done more cheaply). That gives you an overall efficiency of about 60%, which is better than we can currently do. Even if you use a less expensive 50% efficient hydrogen->electricity converter, it is more efficient than a car (including those cool hybrid cars!).
It is not as simple as that. There are people who feel that the propper balance is to have no technology higher than domesticated animals. There are others that believe that poisoning a lake is a fair trade for jet aircraft. There is a question how much value "nature" presents. Presumably, even you have a value of "profit" at which you would destroy nature - for example to save a nation's children, struck with some disease that can only be cured by the processing (destruction) of some rain forest.
The truely difficult part of this is to determine the value (as in profit) of a healthy environment. Different people have different, honest appraisels. The way we solve things in this country is to go with public opinion, weighted by corporate interests (how much weight this is believed to be given varies between individuals). If you don't like this, complain to your government (or move to Europe, they do thing differently there).
The method we have works - we tend to pacify the majority of the people, while not allowing the extremists on either side to take charge.
Yes - and you know what happens when scientists get to make policy decisions based on an emerging field?
You get a food pyramid that kills millions in an attempt to make them less fat (it actually makes them more fat!). Ask a heart surgeon - the FDA listening to early nutritional scientists directly led to the prevalence of heart attacks today.
If we make policy decisions based on early scientific projections, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot.
Personally, I believe that since our ability to effect planetwide change is currently growing exponentially, it is fairly likely that we can fix any messes we can make - any effect we can cause now will be dwarfed by the effects we could cause later. (For example if we really knew that carbon dioxide would kill us all, 50% of the world economy could be switched to fighting the "CO2 WAR," and we would remove the necessary CO2 very quickly. We have political/Financial processes in place to handle such large scale projects now.)
And you can't fly without a self-destruct mechanism.
While this is conventional wisdom, it is not really true. You merely have to proove that the probability of harming someone outside the spacecraft in less than 30/million. As far as I know, there has only ever been one spacecraft launched without a self-destruct - the lunar lander. (Nasa basically refused to put it on.)
Your right, and that is a real problem with most large companies. I would like to point out that the solution to this problem is for you to get a couple of your best software engineers together, incorporate, and then offer to do projects for the managers now stuck with such awfull coders. You get way more money than before, and they get their project done.
What I have found works best is to go to the marketing team or sales team, not the IT people. The IT people will see you as competition, the marketing/sales people will see you as a way to get things done when their IT department says, "that's not a priority."
Well, we just seem to have different points of view on human nature. I can understand your point of view and I am glad people like you exist, because we all have times when we need help - and your existence makes the world a better place. I agree that helping others become self sufficient repays society a hundredfold, we just seem to disagree on what the best method of providing help is. You seem to lean towards the caring and giving love camp, while I lean towards the tough love camp. But I also strongly believe that having both types of love is essential!
One point I would like to add - humans are amazingly maleable. The same people that under Hitler or Tojo became the most infamous human rights abusers are now the most pacifistic under different conditions. So people that do not currently have any necessary qualities (such as strength of character) can aquire them. That's a lot of my objective. I strongly recommend change of environment - for better or for worse, you will learn something.
I respect your viewpoint, I think people with your viewpoint are essential - but not sufficient.
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Well, the man in the middle attack does not work if you only accept the far sites public key (as in, no trusted chains at all) which you recognize by sight.
The other way to handle this is to use ssh to port forward the ssh server port, so that the second ssh connection is encoded into the first, and so is unaltered by the evil state. The truely paranoid can do this recursively, so that the connection is an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection through an encrypted connection. That might be fun to try anyway!
Of course, in general I recommend not doing things that upset governments unless you plan on using deadly force against them (because they will consider revolutionaries as using deadly force against the entity of the government). It is better to change from inside - get into the government and try to make it better, rather than tear down what has been built. Whatever exists, it is probably better than nothing - see Iraq, Afganistan, and Tiananmen square massacre for the pain that must be endured for rapid change.
I like what another poster said - use a graphical keyboard with a mouse controller. To go to the "wearing a tinfoil hat inside a 2 meter thick copper box" level, randomize the character locations. Power off when done, and it is almost unbreakable.
Of course, if I was the evil government hacker, I would then put something in BIOS that records essentially a VNC-like record of your session (including video output)... but if you cannot trust the computer you are using, this is probably the best you can do! (Such a recording device would at least be conspicuous!)
Very true. The primary reason it is difficult to trace is that the trace ends at the ssh terminal, as long as the government cannot access that box. If you are in the US (then I wouldn't call you a dissident anyway!), then you can pretty much assume that the NSA can trace you no matter what (everyone is friendly enough to provide info or dangerous enough to have been hacked). If you are in North Korea, for example, the North Koreans have trouble convincing US or Swiss ISPs to give out connection info.
The command is:
ssh -L proxyport:proxyIP:proxyport sshServerIP
for example:
ssh -L 8000:lvsweb.lasvegasstock.com:8000 shell.frogstar.com
Note that this is not untraceable - especially by the NSA. But other governments will have a difficult time with it.
Most places, having a copy of Knoppix is pretty explainable - and won't get you arrested by itself.
On the other hand, in a regime where crypto is illegal, don't you think they could arrest you without cause anyway? Why bother with the crypto argument?
All this does is allow you to hide what you are doing within reason.
Most keyloggers are passive, recording the info and then storing it for review. Even if it wasn't, if the government really has every place in the country under survelliance then there is no way to do anything anyway.
Really, all you can do is get a reasonable chance as long as they do not single you out.
Yes, the truely paranoid would only do this on their own computer, and check the keyboard each time for "bad stuff".
Like I said, you can also hack the bios (either keyboard or PC), but most people wouldn't bother.
Knoppix does not swap by default - by default it doesn't even mount the drive!
Even better:
1. Have a PC with a CDROM drive.
2. Rent or borrow an SSH account outside the country.
3. Boot PC using KNOPPIX (do not load hard drive)
4. Open a connection through SSH that forwards a local to an anonymous proxy at the far end.
5. Use 127.0.0.1 as your proxy address.
6. Surf away!
When done (or if the government busts in!), reboot your computer - no traces left. (Knoppix stores everything in RAM).
Keyloggers do not work against you, because you are booting from known media. (On the other hand, if the NSA REALLY wants you, they will hack your bios - but no one else is probably that anal).
You are missing the real danger! What if a focused nuclear blast hits you while using your laptop! The tritium could fuse, and KILL you!
Please let me know if you would like to have a civil discussion. I believe you are wrong on several important points. You believe I am similarly wrong. If you were more polite, I think we might both learn something.
As it is, I'm afraid any discussion with you is pointless.
Your probably are a troll, but just in case...
I am sorry if I offended you - I was trying to state my point of view, not to attack yours. "We" is meant to include the public will, as currently implemented by the government. You seem to believe that excludes you.
On my using a "teacher's voice," I do need to watch that. I honestly care about other people, and want them to succeed - and I often see people doing things I think will hurt themselves in the end. Perhaps that comes off wrong. Anyway, what I was trying to get at is not listening the Rush and making fun of him (which, lets face it, is pretty easy!) but instead trying to empathise with the oppostion - to see there point of view. Perhaps you do that, perhaps not - all I can use is my past experience which leads me to believe that extremists almost never have a 9000 ft viewpoint, instead they see the details of a situation.
I stand by what I said about scientists and policy. Listening to specialists in general gets the public in trouble, because they do not take a wide enough view of society.
As for the stance of the current administration, I can see how from your viewpoint the current administration is horrible. I firmly believe that most of our country disagrees with you - that most of us would rather have electricity at the cost of a few mountains. As I said, this is a balancing act - you believe that the scale is shifted way to the left, but if you got your way I would think the scale was shifted way to the right. In the end, the scale tends to wobble around in the middle.
So, what is your feeling on menenites(SP)?
As for recommending that people move around, I still believe that is the better system. You bring race into it, which is dishonest - I am talking about culture, not skin color. I believe in diversity, so I choose to live around people very different from me. But if you do not like diversity, please live somewhere else instead of trying to get me to conform to you! (Diversity means listening and empathising with others, even if you do not agree with their viewpoint. It does not mean having black friends, pink friends, or as my daughter would say orange friends!)
If you have a sense of harmony and connectedness with the land, perhaps you should lay off the drugs for a while... just kidding! If that's what floats your boat, more power to you. Perhaps the disconnection you refer to is only an illusion, easily broken through visiting other lands and seeing other cultures. I don't feel particularly ungrounded, but I suppose I wouldn't know... I did grow up on a farm, however - I guess it just didn't stick.
Never mind that there is no way in hell anyone will be able to hijack a commercial airliner with knives again.
In fact, it may be better to issue knives to all boarding passengers at this point. I think most americans would rush any terrorist trying to take over a plane in today's world.
WAIT - I figured it out! In almost every accident on record, just before the accident occurs people slam on their brakes - often leading to a loss of control!
We must lobby congress to remove these evil brakes - millions of lives are at stake!
It should be fairly easy to show that a higher speed limit is safer - at higher speeds, with the same number of vehicle-miles driven, the spacing between cars is much larger. Surely that is a driving factor in accidents?
The way it works it:
c e* Distance
E=IdlePower*Time+Inefficiencies+AcellerationFor
This means driving fast minimizes the time, while driving "aggressively" just trades the force for the distance. So to minimize fuel usage, you want to continuously drive at the velocity with inefficiencies (air resistance, etc.) match the idle power. So next time, instead of stopping to pick people up, just grab them on the flyby - you will be saving gas!
And your assertion that we're "not allowing the extremists on either side to take charge" is completely false. The extremists on one side have taken charge.
Unfortunately, all this shows is that you are an extremist by the measures we use in society. Probably those around you are also extremists, so you do not have any external perspective. One of the most important lessons to learn in life is to listen to those that you disagree with - you cannot learn by listening to those that you agree with.
In the post-war years we traditionally relied on scientific studies to make these decisions. A panel of scientists would be commissioned...
Yes, and look at what that got us! Nuclear power condemned even though (at least at that point) it was the best option - because scientists didn't know how to communicate to the public. The FDA making "food policy" that makes people fatter and at higher risk for heart attacks! Scientists make very poor policy makers - policy makers and leaders require broad and shallow knowlege, not deep and narrow. (Seeing the interactions between different things is more important than a deep understanding of a single thing for decision making).
BTW, the words I put in quotes are not words I don't think exist. They are words that I am using at least a little bit incorrectly - I was trying to show that I meant nature in a larger sense than it is normally used with. The site you link to pretty much agrees with what I was trying to say - though I didn't read enough of it to see their particular biases (we all have them). The propper way to look at environmentalism is as an economic trade off, balancing building airplanes and poisoning lakes. (That example was supposed to show the extremists on both sides. There are no people known to be in power that would trade a poisoned lake for an airplane - as soon as they are found out they are removed, the same as with someone that wanted to eliminate technology...)
BTW-2, what is wrong with suggesting a location change if someone does not like where they are living because most of the other people there do not agree with them? I would think that would be quite logical - if you are the type of person that wants ecology over technology, move to Germany (they tend to agree with you). It's beautiful there! What's wrong with saying that? I have livedin many different cultures, and I am saddened by those that stay in one place all their lives - they have such a narrow perspective, and miss the richness life has to offer.
My point exactly. And if you don't know, don't go off half cocked trying the fix something you don't understand. In other words:
BTW, the reason hydrogen makes sense is that conversion efficiency is 70% oil/gas->hydrogen, followed by up to 90% conversion to electricity (it can be done this efficiently, though it needs to be done more cheaply). That gives you an overall efficiency of about 60%, which is better than we can currently do. Even if you use a less expensive 50% efficient hydrogen->electricity converter, it is more efficient than a car (including those cool hybrid cars!).
It is not as simple as that. There are people who feel that the propper balance is to have no technology higher than domesticated animals. There are others that believe that poisoning a lake is a fair trade for jet aircraft. There is a question how much value "nature" presents. Presumably, even you have a value of "profit" at which you would destroy nature - for example to save a nation's children, struck with some disease that can only be cured by the processing (destruction) of some rain forest.
The truely difficult part of this is to determine the value (as in profit) of a healthy environment. Different people have different, honest appraisels. The way we solve things in this country is to go with public opinion, weighted by corporate interests (how much weight this is believed to be given varies between individuals). If you don't like this, complain to your government (or move to Europe, they do thing differently there).
The method we have works - we tend to pacify the majority of the people, while not allowing the extremists on either side to take charge.
Yes - and you know what happens when scientists get to make policy decisions based on an emerging field?
You get a food pyramid that kills millions in an attempt to make them less fat (it actually makes them more fat!). Ask a heart surgeon - the FDA listening to early nutritional scientists directly led to the prevalence of heart attacks today.
If we make policy decisions based on early scientific projections, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot.
Personally, I believe that since our ability to effect planetwide change is currently growing exponentially, it is fairly likely that we can fix any messes we can make - any effect we can cause now will be dwarfed by the effects we could cause later. (For example if we really knew that carbon dioxide would kill us all, 50% of the world economy could be switched to fighting the "CO2 WAR," and we would remove the necessary CO2 very quickly. We have political/Financial processes in place to handle such large scale projects now.)
Well, imagine if it was really cold out, and there was this kid saying I dare you to lick the wall...
And you can't fly without a self-destruct mechanism.
While this is conventional wisdom, it is not really true. You merely have to proove that the probability of harming someone outside the spacecraft in less than 30/million. As far as I know, there has only ever been one spacecraft launched without a self-destruct - the lunar lander. (Nasa basically refused to put it on.)
Your right, and that is a real problem with most large companies. I would like to point out that the solution to this problem is for you to get a couple of your best software engineers together, incorporate, and then offer to do projects for the managers now stuck with such awfull coders. You get way more money than before, and they get their project done.
What I have found works best is to go to the marketing team or sales team, not the IT people. The IT people will see you as competition, the marketing/sales people will see you as a way to get things done when their IT department says, "that's not a priority."
Well, we just seem to have different points of view on human nature. I can understand your point of view and I am glad people like you exist, because we all have times when we need help - and your existence makes the world a better place. I agree that helping others become self sufficient repays society a hundredfold, we just seem to disagree on what the best method of providing help is. You seem to lean towards the caring and giving love camp, while I lean towards the tough love camp. But I also strongly believe that having both types of love is essential!
One point I would like to add - humans are amazingly maleable. The same people that under Hitler or Tojo became the most infamous human rights abusers are now the most pacifistic under different conditions. So people that do not currently have any necessary qualities (such as strength of character) can aquire them. That's a lot of my objective. I strongly recommend change of environment - for better or for worse, you will learn something.
I respect your viewpoint, I think people with your viewpoint are essential - but not sufficient.