PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

Post by Estragon » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 2:45 AM UTC

elorant wrote: post #25

rednukleus wrote: post #2

Glad to see them succeeding, but personally the privacy of my web searches doesn't bother me - as long as they aren't being passed along with personally identifying information. I'm far more worried about emails, messaging, video, storage etc. Can someone explain to me (or point me in the direction of something that explains) what Google and Bing store in terms of tracking when you are not logged in? Obviously you ca…

TOR is not that safe. If the exit node is compromised you’re f*cked for good. As for Google the thing is that they’re also an advertising network so basically they track you all around the web.

Post by leoc » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 2:54 AM UTC

krek wrote: post #152

leoc wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no question that they're monitoring upstream traffic. In fact they may still be doing the old ECHELON trick in which the US eavesdrops on non-Americans, the rest of the world spies on Americans (among others) - and then everyone swaps the data received. But in the light of the PRISM documents it's even more likely than it was before that the NSA doesn't have the ability to decrypt HTTPS, or at the minimum tha…

I can't remember which interview it was, if on Democracy Now, or his MIT lecture video, but Bill Binney stated that the NSA in fact does decrypt HTTPS.

Post by Zarel » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 2:58 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #102

tracker1 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For programming questions, I almost always append site:stackoverflow.com to my search term... generally the anser is on SO, but I prefer the search engine's results over SO's search... on DDG and Google.

if you're using DDG just prepend your query with !so. Using bang notation is like having every search engine in your search bar at once. ...and of course, I had no idea if !so would work before I tried it. The obvious one always seems to work:)

Post by humanspecies » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 3:10 AM UTC

oinksoft wrote: post #13

I ceased using Google search except as a last resort when this story broke, and I had no idea what I had been missing out on with DDG: Excellent keyboard navigation . Also, DDG's results compared to a year ago are night-and-day. It seems to listen to my keywords better than Google did too, a growing annoyance I had. If you haven't, you really should try out DDG for a week.

Post by abrichr » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 3:18 AM UTC

jerf wrote: post #94

paulsutter wrote: post #56

It's not safe to assume the NSA doesn't log DDG searches. Look at the PRISM logo - it's a beam splitter. Read the slide, look at the "Upstream" portion. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Upstream_slide_of_the... They're logging all your URLs and headers. How much are you willing to bet they can't decrypt https? I dont understand all the hubbub _is focused solely_ on direct server access (the bottom half of the s…

"How much are you willing to bet they can't decrypt https?" I'd bet quite a bit, though not "my life", that they do not have a generalized "read everything" ability for all forms of SSL. They may have what cryptographers would call "a crack", but that's a low bar, and doesn't prove they have a practical attack. However, DDG is currently using 128-bit RC4, which is very weak. [1] I wouldn't care to bet anything that t…