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dan_bkon The Curse of the Internet

Ultimately, we'll probably have to adjust our culture to the fact that the combination of technology and capitalism sooner or later leads to the end of privacy. It's going to be a long, difficult and certainly painful path and there will be victims. But if the current trend continues, there will be a time where everybody will be able to know almost anything about anybody, anytime.

Edit: And if we really have a problem with this, we better start our engines.

dan_bkon [dead]

> “The real scandal is not all these individual scandals but the fact that world’s policy makers who know about this stuff, have basically done nothing.”

That has been going on since the beginning of time. The world's policy makers are friends with the ultra-wealthy.

dan_bkon Linode down in Newark data center

Does Linode automatically check for, detect and replace faulty hardware? Or is this something you have to explicitly ask them to carry out?

dan_bkon Obama Lets N.S.A. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say

> I'm sure that in situations where they're confident they're the only ones with the knowledge, they'll still hold off on releasing anything.

How can they be sure? They simply can't. And this means they're putting US business at risk for their own benefit.

(The other way to put US business at risk is via worldwide reputation damage.)

I doubt this makes US companies more interesting for investors.

dan_bkon “In a typical year the OpenSSL project receives about US $2000 in donations”

The logic is really not that hard:

Open source software benefits the entire society/humanity.

Therefor, it (or at least the most critical components, such as OpenSSL) should be funded by all governments in an internationally coordinated effort (tax payer benefits = tax payer pays).

If we can have internationally coordinated efforts such as NATO, why can't we have them for extremely important/basic elements of our society such as technology?

dan_bkon [dead]

The thing is, corporate operating systems such as Windows and iOS can certainly not be trusted more than open-source code. I'd say even less. So Debian being owned would be really bad.

dan_bkon EU court rejects requirement to keep data of telecom users

> blind mass-surveillance is a thing of the past.

Don't forget the fact that the NSA is everywhere, can intercept and store everything and is above the law (or at least: above the law as it should be (or be interpreted)).

Germany still allows the presence of several huge NSA surveillance sites. Having them inside the country certainly allows for easy tapping of German infrastructure.

dan_bkon Can I delete my Skype account?

I would never trust any of the "data-hoovering" companies to actually really delete all of your data, even if they say so.

(And in the case of Skype, it's terribly obvious that they want to prevent you from deleting data. In the age of NSA mass surveillance, this absolutely makes sense.)

dan_bkon NSA infiltrated RSA security more deeply than thought: Study

"We could have been more sceptical of NSA's intentions," RSA Chief Technologist Sam Curry told Reuters. "We trusted them because they are charged with security for the U.S. government and U.S. critical infrastructure."

PS: "We also would like to express that we believe the entire World to be a bunch of idiots."

dan_bkon Building PRISM-Proof Web Services

So basically it can be summed up as local client software that uses external storage?

dan_bkon A decentralized anonymous marketplace

> * Are there any similar attempts we can contribute to or borrow ideas from instead of implementing something on our own?

RetroShare could be used as a platform for this, given that it's:

- 100% Decentralized

- Public key encrypted

- Open source

...and accepts plug-ins for new features. See: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

dan_bkon Some facts about how NSA stories are reported

> these journalists argue that these revelations are unjustified, even treasonous, because this is the type of spying the NSA should be doing

No, the NSA should NOT be doing this. It's not done to prevent any attacks on the US, it's simply economic espionage. It's economic warfare. It doesn't belong in any "democratic" country.

dan_bkon Why I killed my standing desk

What you need is a standing desk that adopts to YOU, not the other way round. Here's the one I have been using for approx. 2 years now and I can tell you I will NEVER go back to a sitting-only desk: http://www.ergotron.com/ProductsDetails/tabid/65/PRDID/320/l...

There are variations of this model available, but the main points are:

1. Screen (even if laptop) and keyboard/mouse are separated so everything is exactly at the correct height (= ergonomic, won't become a pain!)

2. You can pull up (and push down) the whole thing very easily, with just 1 hand/no force: This means you can change whenever you feel the slightest issue. Changing every 10 minutes easily becomes a healthy no-brainer routine.

dan_bkon Targeting Huawei: NSA Spied on Chinese Government and Networking Firm

> NSA workers not only succeeded in accessing the email archive, but also the secret source code of individual Huwaei products. Software source code is the holy grail of computer companies.

We need to open-source everything (soft/hard/firmware) and modify these business models.

dan_bkon Tamil Nadu state departments asked to switch over to open source software

Every new big player means "more eyes" on the code. And bugs get rooted out quicker.

In the case of proprietary software, every new big player means "more social lock in effect".

dan_bkon US tech giants knew of NSA data collection, agency's top lawyer insists

Simply disgusting.

dan_bkon NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

> As soon as you do anything they deem suspicious they might find you downloaded strange foot fetish porn

At least long term, it's more like: As soon as you are a political opponent...

(Thinking back, General Petraeus' fatal love affair emails that surfaced suddenly may have been such an instance.)

dan_bkon GCHQ Used Fake LinkedIn Pages to Target Engineers (2013)

> We can and must demand free verifiably-secure hardware and software

I agree 100%. Open source software + hardware + FIRMWARE must be part of any long-term solution. "Long-term" because short-term, governments won't let that happen (they will always work with/help corporations to keep circulating products with backdoors in proprietary/closed-source firmware).

dan_bkon GCHQ Used Fake LinkedIn Pages to Target Engineers (2013)

> There you go! Track all the phone users, and anyone who doesn't have one, and is therefore untracked, is probably a terrorist!

This is how I would scare people if I were paid by the NSA.

dan_bkon GCHQ Used Fake LinkedIn Pages to Target Engineers (2013)

There is really only 1 solution to this:

Put your mobile phone permanently in flight mode and go back to relying on landlines/email.

The alternative choice to this is accepting the fact that "GCHQ now wants to turn the mobile web into an all-seeing surveillance machine."

dan_bkon Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

The fact that inequal distribution of wealth is still a reality we accept in our time is really mind-boggling. Even more so given the fact that it's 1 of the main reasons for a likely future collapse of our civilization. (We still don't use the full potential of our collective intelligence; we know exactly what's wrong, but behave like hypnotized rabbits, instead of starting to coordinate for a collaborative culture/future.)

dan_bkon Reset the Net

We're totally anti-surveillance, and that's why we let a bunch of companies track you around the Web, here's the list of requests (potentially tracking you) made behind your back:

optimizely.com googleapis.com amazonaws.com heroku.com googleusercontent.com google-analytics.com newrelic.com chartbeat.com chartbeat.net youtube-nocookie.com googlevideo.com google.com

dan_bkon Why you might not want to incorporate in the USA

> In the US, however, it’s like being in the 70’s in Denmark. In a country, where the NSA supposedly reads all my email, knows how much money I make, what I ate for breakfast and what color underwear I prefer, I cannot report electronically to the authorities!

Well, the plan was to keep the incredible advancements in (mass surveillance) technology secret from the citizens, in order not to be stopped.