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PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

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Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#181
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Gigablast, Procog, Yioop and Samuru which also have their own crawled index.

If you think those are viable sources of results, then by all means include them.

Personally I don't, but it should be noted that there are other indexes besides what you have mentioned. That said Samuru and Procog are pretty interesting.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#182
post #31

And as far as browser is concerned, I would recommend go with Firefox vs Google or Safari. Mozilla is a non profit and I feel I can trust it the most.

The only safe thing to do would be to compile Firefox or Chromium yourself.

Well the safest of all would be to write your own highly secure browser and use TOR.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#183
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I haven't heard explicitly about Amazon being part of PRISM, the duckduckgo ips all point to amazon's EC2 platform.

PRISM doesn't matter that much, anyway - the NSA doesn't need a workflow automation system in place to send DDG or Amazon a NSL or a FISA order.

The point is that DDG doesn't log the information—even in the face of a court order, they have nothing to hand over.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#184
post #163
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Bill Binney said that, and if he is right, I'd assume the most likely explanation is that NSA can push over some low-security SSL connections of the type jerf describes above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5877362 , but has to rely on "direct access" to get around most or all high-quality (but still widely-used) SSL encryption. (Or, again, that it also has the capacity to break high-grade HTTPS connections,…

With the history of the gov/NSA being effective crypto gods - my money is they are ahead of decrypting SSL and HTTPS and even of it is not real-time, they store streams from target end points regularly for slower offline decrypt.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#185

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…

What about Yacy? (http://yacy.net). I am not sure if the queries inside a peer network can be decrypted as easily as http requests (I am not a networking specialist though, it is just an opinion).

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#186
Things like PRISM makes me completely want to back out of the Google ecosystem.

Part of that would be replacing Gmail. That can be done, but what good (free) options exists for a webmail solution?

I'd also love this instant to cut gtalk (or "hangouts" which it is called now. hopeless), but Google just declared hate on XMPP, so setting up your own node will land you on your own tiny island.

The trend is clear though: Google is stuffing the exit-holes while the US government is requiring more and more of Google's data.

If you haven't started moving out yet, you better get started. And for the love of God, ditch Chrome. Support someone who supports the open web and respects your privacy.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they need to MITM? If they have a copy of the private key, can't they just use it to decrypt the data .. even old data for which they've only just acquired the key?

Having the root CA's private key doesn't give them access to the end entity's private keys. When you ask a CA for a cert, you only provide them with your public key (in the form of a CSR) for them to sign. The CSR does not contain the private key.

But getting an employee to hand over the private key and giving him a gag order afterwards is an option of course.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#188

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.

> Also, DDG's results compared to a year ago are night-and-day. Still looks 2nd rate. I replicated one of my last searches (learning rails): rails find if element is in array First hit on google is the stackexchange answer with .include? (which I was spacing-out on) DDG yields the Array docs, which is correct but is a helluva lot of info when I'm looking for a concise answer.

That was discussed here some time ago and many people suggested explicitly omitting SO and StackExchange sites when learning new languages/technologies. The argument was that while the answers on SO generally get the job done, they rarely provide the context, depth and coverage the docs give. I happen to agree - I only hit SO when I don't know what exactly I need to search the docs for. It's absolutely great for this. For serious learning not so much.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, if they can get a CA - any CA - to cooperate, they can MITM anyone without having to break SSL.

This is why I tell people that actual fingerprint check is much better than any CA.

Yes, but how do you get the fingerprint to check against?

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, if they can get a CA - any CA - to cooperate, they can MITM anyone without having to break SSL.

Do they need to MITM? If they have a copy of the private key, can't they just use it to decrypt the data .. even old data for which they've only just acquired the key?

to your latter question: no, not with the right ciphers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecy

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