You might be surprised. The obvious culprit is the government, but consider...
There have been numerous instances of "terrorist sympathizers" who hunt around online for people who say things they don't like, about their religion, their objectives, etc. They attempt to shut the blog down, even to discover the identity of the blogger to cause further trouble.
Can you imagine if this grew to further proportion, where you would be in danger of being "discovered" by some amateur terrorist or terrorists, who decided to make your life a living hell, or even to cut it short?
Sure, you had Theo van Gogh killed because he made a film that "they" didn't like, but what if they start aiming a bit "lower" on the food chain, start cyberstalking and tapping the phone lines of some guy who's an outspoking blogger or letter-to-the-editor afficianado?
How do you protect yourself at that level of obscurity?
Exactly, it's the terrorists who we should be worrying about. They DO want to know about us for obvious reasons.
it's this kind of thinking that lead to the 911 attacks in the first place. You don't have to be very interesting,maybe you just happen to work in the world trade center or some important high paying career and that alone gives terrorists a reason to wiretap you.
And believe me, they are out to get you and WILL wiretap you. I don't know why people think Iran, Syria, and whatever terrorist cells are only going to do dumb shit like ram planes into buildings but at the same time they give personal information out over the phone.
Nothing stops the terrorists from monitoring and spying on us.
The way the article makes it seem, it's as if the only people who want to use PGP or TrueCrypt or have security and privacy are the terrorists and thats completely backwards.
If the goal is to protect the American citizen from the terrorist then the American citizen should be using PGP and Truecrypt and the government should be telling citizens to use encryption.
Now,as far as corporations cooperating, that always happens and thats not really the problem.
The problem is that governments expect citizens to support them in a war, but then the government wants to outlaw everything the citizen would need to feel safe. Citizens are scared of terrorists so they try to buy a gun, but guns are banned.
The citizen is afraid of hacker terrorists so they try to get PGP and the government bans encryption?!
The terrorists are going to win because the average citizen does not give a damn about security.
If the USA is losing the info wars it's not the fault of the terrorists. We didn't have to wage the war in this manner.
We broke international law. We broke treaties. We did not have to do any of that, and we set up those prison camps, and we authorized torture.
The US government should spend some money building up encryption software.There is no way the US can defend critical networks if the passwords are in plaintext.
I mean honestly it doesn't make any sense how anyone could be against encryption yet expect to win any kinda war.
Encryption is essential to fighting the war on terror.How can you build an anonymous tip line so people can report on the terrorists if you have no encryption?
No encryption means no one would come forward. And if no one can come forward then you have no way to track Bin Laden down.
I don't see how we can be safe from terrorists when terrorists can have access to all our medical records, our financial history, our identity, and basically track our every move.
Yeah we are supposed to win a war against terrorists who have more privacy and security than we do?
PGP is good. Privacy is good. The reason PGP and privacy is good is because you can't have security without privacy, and without security you can't have liberty, and without liberty then the terrorists win, because what else is worth fighting for besides freedom?
You can't put all your faith in the police.The terrorists can become police officers and then access satelite data, and listen to your cellphone calls, even have you put on some watch list.
Somehow people think that terrorists who were smart enough to learn how to fly planes,wont be smart enough to go through the police academy, get a gun license, and then become police chiefs and from that position ask for your file.
They aren't stupid. And because they aren't stupid, I don't feel safer than before 911, I feel less safe. I don't feel safer with all this wiretapping,I feel less safe,because I don't know who the wiretappers are or what their agendas are, we don't get a list of names of who they are but they know who we are.
You can only win a war on terrorism by disabling terrorist cells and changing the behavior and thinking patterns of the individuals in leadership positions.
I don't buy the idea that terrorists are the best hackers in the world.They probably do use PGP, they probably do know about computers, but chances are they run Windows, and run commercial closed source software with backdoors in it.
Even if they run Linux it doesn't mean their passwords can't be cracked to their webservers.
I hope when we have a new President that our foreign policy and the way we fight wars changes so that victory is the goal and not just killing as many of the enemy as possible.
It's not that Bin Laden is kicking our ass,we are kicking our own ass with our ridiculous laws.
While we are buying wiretapping ourselves, the terrorists roam free and get on the internet without any wiretap whatsoever.
While we are busy attacking our own people, the terrorists are attacking us. It's ridiculous.
All the US government has to do is set a billion dollars aside,and them maybe give slashdot 50 million dollars to distribute to people who can hack into the Al Qaeda Sony laptop systems.
Within a few months most of them will be hacked into.
It's from a reputable source. Besides, there's nothing really strange about this. The idea of using PGP and decentralized servers makes perfect sense. The dubious bit is that warning lights go off in my head every time someone mentions Al-Qaeda because usually it's someone trying to scare me for political reasons.
I'm sure Al Qaeda are running Microsoft Windows.
I don't see why we don't just break in through the back door and spy on them.
Am I supposed to believe that some guys living in caves somewhere in the middle east are more tech saavy than the average college educated American?
And how tech saavy can they be to be using Sony laptops?! If they knew their shit they'd have used Macs with Linux, or IBM, but SONY?
And so what? they use PGP? sure it's impossible for civilians to crack PGP,maybe even difficult or impossible for the NSA, but you don't have to crack PGP to deal with Al Qaeda, all we have to do is wait for them to connect to the internet and drop the bomb on them while they are uploading their Bin Laden video.
What happened to tempest? UAV's? I'm skeptical. I think this is just being used for political reasons as a way to crack down further on internet freedom in the same way kiddie porn is used.
If we want to catch Al Qaeda, hire some hackers to hack their computers, this is slashdot, some of the people here would gladly hack into their Sony computers, for a fee of course.
I'm not sure I'm up for supporting research that would make Rupert Murdoch or Fred Phelps live forever.
In all seriousness, if humanity lived forever we'd be screwed. We're not built, physically or mentally, to be able to survive more than a hundred years of changes, and we're terribly poor at letting go of things that don't match the facts unless they physically hurt us. Bad ideas would never die. Bigotry would never fade. Bad people would never go away unless they crossed the line and had an 'accident'. How many people who undergo this procedure would end up trying to change the world to reflect the way it was when they were kids, being too unwilling to accept the world changing underfoot?
Besides, if Einstein could have lived longer, even if Hitler could have paid for medicine to make him healthy it wouldn't have saved him from all his enemies.
Actually, I'm willing to bet that just about anyone who wants to could quite easily afford it. I don't know where you are, but here in California community college classes are around $13 per unit (hour). Need something higher level than that? No problem, California State University tuition is less than $2000 per semester for a full time student, or less than $1000 for part time (under 12 units). Yeah, books can be expensive, but if you put a little effort into it you can usually find them relatively cheap, and if that's still too much the school library normally has most required textbooks on reserve. There are even some places that will rent textbooks to you.
I know plenty of people making less than $10k per year that manage to do it, while still paying rent, eating food, and maintaining a car. If you can't find the time or money, it's not because you can't afford to, it's because you just don't care enough.
Perhaps I should move. I don't know where you live but Rent is $1000 a month here and gas prices keep rising.
When stupid things happen, such as in Ubuntu removing the part of the code that asks you to move your mouse around to create entropy Uh-oh. Sounds very Debian-esque. Stop making crypto weaker, people. Poor cryptography is worse than no cryptography. Actually no, it's not. Poor cryptography gives people a false sense of security. They think when they use Linux they are "safe". This isn't Windows, people don't switch to Linux to find out they are just as insecure in Linux s they were in Windows.
There are weaknesses in the Linux random number generator, some of the ideas you talk about would be smart to implement in Ubuntu but so far Ubuntu seems to be giving up on secuity in exchange for ease of use.
Honestly, this should be the main focus of desktop security in linux, the strength and efficiency of the random number generator. I think using the soundcard combined with the webcam would be good enough to stop the majority of criminal organizations from cracking your key.
Linux needs to also better intergrate biometric and smartcard security mechanisms into the OS so that it's literally a plug and play affair.
I want GNUPG to automatically recognize my smartcard or biometric interface. Even voice recognition providers better security than passwords, why don't we use that?
Passwords need to be phased out of linux altogerher and replaced with mouse gestures, voice recognition, face recognition, fingerprint scanning, and vein scanning.
When you use passwords you make it easy for crackers, and when those new GPUs from Nvidia come out it's going to let them crack a strong password in a matter of hours.
Because most people store their keyring under password protection, really to steal someones private key you just have to crack an 8 character password most of the time, and usually it's not a very strong password.
What this means is PGP gives the average user a few hours of privacy, to a few days, to a few weeks, depending on the limited strength of their password.
A smartcard combined with biometrics would solve all of this. Ubuntu should support this, but if not, maybe Redhat or Suse should.
Because I was diagnosed with it as a kid and it's probably why I became so good at working with computer technology.
In school sure you have to pay attention to one person,but on the computer if you can read 100 websites at a time while chatting with 3 people and watching TV, then ADD is helping you take in far more information than you'd haven taken in if you were to focus on just TV or just one website.
Learn to use your ADD as a strength and stop using it as a crutch.
See, the problem with that statement is that most people nowadays who have large sums of money got that money by saving and investing rather than flashing cash to attract women.
Not if you earn triple the salary of everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
You might be surprised. The obvious culprit is the government, but consider...
There have been numerous instances of "terrorist sympathizers" who hunt around online for people who say things they don't like, about their religion, their objectives, etc. They attempt to shut the blog down, even to discover the identity of the blogger to cause further trouble.
Can you imagine if this grew to further proportion, where you would be in danger of being "discovered" by some amateur terrorist or terrorists, who decided to make your life a living hell, or even to cut it short?
Sure, you had Theo van Gogh killed because he made a film that "they" didn't like, but what if they start aiming a bit "lower" on the food chain, start cyberstalking and tapping the phone lines of some guy who's an outspoking blogger or letter-to-the-editor afficianado?
How do you protect yourself at that level of obscurity?
Exactly, it's the terrorists who we should be worrying about. They DO want to know about us for obvious reasons.
it's this kind of thinking that lead to the 911 attacks in the first place. You don't have to be very interesting,maybe you just happen to work in the world trade center or some important high paying career and that alone gives terrorists a reason to wiretap you.
And believe me, they are out to get you and WILL wiretap you. I don't know why people think Iran, Syria, and whatever terrorist cells are only going to do dumb shit like ram planes into buildings but at the same time they give personal information out over the phone.
Nothing stops the terrorists from monitoring and spying on us.
This means the terrorists can wiretap you.
So yeah while you don't have anything to hide from your government, how about Bin Laden?
Bit torrent is old tech.
The truth is, they (the telecoms and others) have started an arms race.
P2P will become infinitely more sophisticated.
http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/
http://wiki.offdev.org/Main_Page
It's the single piece of software that forces me to keep Windows.
The only reason I still have Windows at all is for fruityloop.
When will you get it working?
The way the article makes it seem, it's as if the only people who want to use PGP or TrueCrypt or have security and privacy are the terrorists and thats completely backwards.
If the goal is to protect the American citizen from the terrorist then the American citizen should be using PGP and Truecrypt and the government should be telling citizens to use encryption.
Now,as far as corporations cooperating, that always happens and thats not really the problem.
The problem is that governments expect citizens to support them in a war, but then the government wants to outlaw everything the citizen would need to feel safe. Citizens are scared of terrorists so they try to buy a gun, but guns are banned.
The citizen is afraid of hacker terrorists so they try to get PGP and the government bans encryption?!
The terrorists are going to win because the average citizen does not give a damn about security.
If the USA is losing the info wars it's not the fault of the terrorists. We didn't have to wage the war in this manner.
We broke international law. We broke treaties. We did not have to do any of that, and we set up those prison camps, and we authorized torture.
The US government should spend some money building up encryption software.There is no way the US can defend critical networks if the passwords are in plaintext.
I mean honestly it doesn't make any sense how anyone could be against encryption yet expect to win any kinda war.
Encryption is essential to fighting the war on terror.How can you build an anonymous tip line so people can report on the terrorists if you have no encryption?
No encryption means no one would come forward. And if no one can come forward then you have no way to track Bin Laden down.
I don't see how we can be safe from terrorists when terrorists can have access to all our medical records, our financial history, our identity, and basically track our every move.
Yeah we are supposed to win a war against terrorists who have more privacy and security than we do?
PGP is good. Privacy is good. The reason PGP and privacy is good is because you can't have security without privacy, and without security you can't have liberty, and without liberty then the terrorists win, because what else is worth fighting for besides freedom?
You can't put all your faith in the police.The terrorists can become police officers and then access satelite data, and listen to your cellphone calls, even have you put on some watch list.
Somehow people think that terrorists who were smart enough to learn how to fly planes,wont be smart enough to go through the police academy, get a gun license, and then become police chiefs and from that position ask for your file.
They aren't stupid. And because they aren't stupid, I don't feel safer than before 911, I feel less safe. I don't feel safer with all this wiretapping,I feel less safe,because I don't know who the wiretappers are or what their agendas are, we don't get a list of names of who they are but they know who we are.
How can we win a war on terror abroad if we have no security or privacy at home?
Some of our policies don't make any sense at all.
You can only win a war on terrorism by disabling terrorist cells and changing the behavior and thinking patterns of the individuals in leadership positions.
I don't buy the idea that terrorists are the best hackers in the world.They probably do use PGP, they probably do know about computers, but chances are they run Windows, and run commercial closed source software with backdoors in it.
Even if they run Linux it doesn't mean their passwords can't be cracked to their webservers.
I hope when we have a new President that our foreign policy and the way we fight wars changes so that victory is the goal and not just killing as many of the enemy as possible.
It's not that Bin Laden is kicking our ass,we are kicking our own ass with our ridiculous laws.
While we are buying wiretapping ourselves, the terrorists roam free and get on the internet without any wiretap whatsoever.
While we are busy attacking our own people, the terrorists are attacking us. It's ridiculous.
All the US government has to do is set a billion dollars aside,and them maybe give slashdot 50 million dollars to distribute to people who can hack into the Al Qaeda Sony laptop systems.
Within a few months most of them will be hacked into.
It's from a reputable source. Besides, there's nothing really strange about this. The idea of using PGP and decentralized servers makes perfect sense. The dubious bit is that warning lights go off in my head every time someone mentions Al-Qaeda because usually it's someone trying to scare me for political reasons.
I'm sure Al Qaeda are running Microsoft Windows.
I don't see why we don't just break in through the back door and spy on them.
Am I supposed to believe that some guys living in caves somewhere in the middle east are more tech saavy than the average college educated American?
And how tech saavy can they be to be using Sony laptops?! If they knew their shit they'd have used Macs with Linux, or IBM, but SONY?
And so what? they use PGP? sure it's impossible for civilians to crack PGP,maybe even difficult or impossible for the NSA, but you don't have to crack PGP to deal with Al Qaeda, all we have to do is wait for them to connect to the internet and drop the bomb on them while they are uploading their Bin Laden video.
What happened to tempest? UAV's? I'm skeptical. I think this is just being used for political reasons as a way to crack down further on internet freedom in the same way kiddie porn is used.
If we want to catch Al Qaeda, hire some hackers to hack their computers, this is slashdot, some of the people here would gladly hack into their Sony computers, for a fee of course.
There will always be a divide between the rich and poor.
However,if the right people are rich, then they wont prevent the poor from having a better quality of life a well.
Here in 2008, I'm only interested in Free Software-friendly 802.11 N routers. Anybody know of any?
anyone know how to fix it?
I'm not sure I'm up for supporting research that would make Rupert Murdoch or Fred Phelps live forever.
In all seriousness, if humanity lived forever we'd be screwed. We're not built, physically or mentally, to be able to survive more than a hundred years of changes, and we're terribly poor at letting go of things that don't match the facts unless they physically hurt us. Bad ideas would never die. Bigotry would never fade. Bad people would never go away unless they crossed the line and had an 'accident'. How many people who undergo this procedure would end up trying to change the world to reflect the way it was when they were kids, being too unwilling to accept the world changing underfoot?
Besides, if Einstein could have lived longer, even if Hitler could have paid for medicine to make him healthy it wouldn't have saved him from all his enemies.
And through the death industry, people will die.
It's not that there should be a master race. Hitler did not take merit into account.
How about we simply let people buy their immortality like everything else?
That way we can sell immortality to the richest people and get rich ourselves.
Actually, I'm willing to bet that just about anyone who wants to could quite easily afford it. I don't know where you are, but here in California community college classes are around $13 per unit (hour). Need something higher level than that? No problem, California State University tuition is less than $2000 per semester for a full time student, or less than $1000 for part time (under 12 units). Yeah, books can be expensive, but if you put a little effort into it you can usually find them relatively cheap, and if that's still too much the school library normally has most required textbooks on reserve. There are even some places that will rent textbooks to you.
I know plenty of people making less than $10k per year that manage to do it, while still paying rent, eating food, and maintaining a car. If you can't find the time or money, it's not because you can't afford to, it's because you just don't care enough.
Perhaps I should move. I don't know where you live but Rent is $1000 a month here and gas prices keep rising.There are weaknesses in the Linux random number generator, some of the ideas you talk about would be smart to implement in Ubuntu but so far Ubuntu seems to be giving up on secuity in exchange for ease of use.
Honestly, this should be the main focus of desktop security in linux, the strength and efficiency of the random number generator. I think using the soundcard combined with the webcam would be good enough to stop the majority of criminal organizations from cracking your key.
Linux needs to also better intergrate biometric and smartcard security mechanisms into the OS so that it's literally a plug and play affair.
I want GNUPG to automatically recognize my smartcard or biometric interface. Even voice recognition providers better security than passwords, why don't we use that?
Passwords need to be phased out of linux altogerher and replaced with mouse gestures, voice recognition, face recognition, fingerprint scanning, and vein scanning.
When you use passwords you make it easy for crackers, and when those new GPUs from Nvidia come out it's going to let them crack a strong password in a matter of hours.
Because most people store their keyring under password protection, really to steal someones private key you just have to crack an 8 character password most of the time, and usually it's not a very strong password.
What this means is PGP gives the average user a few hours of privacy, to a few days, to a few weeks, depending on the limited strength of their password.
A smartcard combined with biometrics would solve all of this. Ubuntu should support this, but if not, maybe Redhat or Suse should.
Because I was diagnosed with it as a kid and it's probably why I became so good at working with computer technology.
In school sure you have to pay attention to one person,but on the computer if you can read 100 websites at a time while chatting with 3 people and watching TV, then ADD is helping you take in far more information than you'd haven taken in if you were to focus on just TV or just one website.
Learn to use your ADD as a strength and stop using it as a crutch.
If you have ADD, you'll naturally be good at multitasking and this article does not apply to you.
This article applies to those who have the new disorder, multitasking deficit disorder.
See, the problem with that statement is that most people nowadays who have large sums of money got that money by saving and investing rather than flashing cash to attract women.
Not if you earn triple the salary of everyone else.As a CEO you can afford to spend money on women.