491–500 of 671 posts
Please donate to their defense fund. It's not often you get a chance to directly support a cause like this. The link is at the bottom of http://lavabit.com/ , but I'll repost it here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_b...
P.S. smalltalk, you're dead.
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Yes, seriously. People like to think that computer hackers have some perfect sense of morality, I have real-life experience that they don't. The government, though occasionally surreal, has not once been a serious impediment to anything I've wanted to do, and in fact has occasionally been an exceptional aid in what I've wanted to do.
I find it amazing that anyone can still justify what the government is doing. Every line has been crossed. To the DEA, to the IRS. And, still, you are okie dokie. I am amazed.
If those like you were in charge of invention shops in the 19th century the light bulb would never have been invented. "Ugh, look, this piece of shit failed for the 20th time, this will never work, we should just give up entirely."
Luckily we have had innovators throughout history who are not afraid to see the future as it should be and to iterate, iterate, iterate and iterate some more to bring the world closer to that ideal reality.
Does the government still have work to go? Absolutely, but it can be made better, which is not something I can say for everyone.
There's a lot of ridiculously smart folks on here who are making good money working on advertising, social networking, and other typical web 2.0 startups and companies. There's nothing wrong with these things, they are certainly enriching peoples' lives and create value.
But if what is going on in the world isn't a clarion call for a lot of these smart people to look into startups, networks, services, software, open source projects, etc that try to defend peoples' privacy I don't know what is.
I urge everybody to look at your notes, ideas, forgotten projects, and see what you can come up with to provide services and ideas and concepts that will work to defend people's security and privacy from government entities that have gone drunk with power.
Not only is this vital to everybody's liberty, but there is a ridiculously huge business opportunity here for services and software that can provide some measure of defense for people.
If we don't stop what is going on soon there will not long be a market for a lot of cloud based services that people are going to want to use.
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"encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers" how is that possible? I'm curious to know as to how they achieved that technically. I mean if the user is reading an email in their browser, then it would've had to have been created on the server first.
It all happens on the client side. Servers only store the encrypted emails and have no idea what the contents or the keys are.
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This would imply that the court can order you to lie to your customers. I think this is not the case. If there is any precedence for any US court requiring public citizen to lie I definitely want to know about it. If the courts are acting like they have this power then it will greatly change my perception of how the courts, NSA, and congress are currently acting.
There was a HN discussion about this two months ago [1]. The general consensus seemed to be that a court would not take the same kind of philosophical and logical approach that most HN types use, and would classify a failure to update the canary as effectively a communication that a NSL has been received. Since the courts only care about the facts that communication is occurring and that the court prohibited it, cont…
I am definitely interested in any court cases that set a precedence for ordering/mandating/require lying.
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"It was recommended you do not do that, and use the provided Java applet" Which is equally insecure, as the company could easily insert a back door the next time you load the applet. Hushmail was and is snake oil.
For sure, but can I fault idiots for inability to read the documentation and caveats? Maybe, but not really lest most on this site could not "do computers" professionally. Unfortunately, the trust problem you mention is pervasive. It was a signed applet IIRC, but we both requires you trust the original and modified applets from the developer. I am wishing someone released an auto-encrypting PGP service and client, op…
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Obviously you're being somewhat facetious. If you're good/confident enough to write your own crypto, go seems fine as it's open source so you can inspect it. I don't trust myself to write my own crypt for important things, so obviously I would not use Golang for that and I would pause before using the Golang crypto module, but that's probably a bit paranoid. In general, I would probably use Golang on projects. I use…
Good analysis, I largely agree. Then again, you hear about Microsoft or Sun/Oracle passing notes to the NSA about insecurities in the OS or JVM so that they can go about their stealthy ways. I wouldn't be surprised if the same happened with Go. But good point, it's open source. There is also an issue with Go dependencies that may make it easier to introduce vulnerabilities. The solutions are discussed here: http://ky…
The US government is destroying one of the few bright spots in the American economy with its out of control military. It is unconscionable. And the sad thing is it has been enabled by the betrayal by many of the web 2.0 giants, Facebook, Google etc. Google especially is sad to see since they were willing to forgo the Chinese market on principle, but then decided that taking on the authoritarian US government was too…
Agreed, these US Gov contractors and agencies systematically destroying our industry and our prospects. As a community, let's shun and shame all those who continue work for those agencies (NSA/CIA/FBI/DIA/DEA) both directly and as contractors from this date forward. If you didn't quite in August 2013, we don't want to hire you. If you quite now in disgust, we should view that in a positive light. If you or your compa…
It would be one thing if Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other big firms were selling out their customers' privacy for money. They do it all of the time for advertising. I wouldn't like that, but it would be somewhat understandable that a big uncaring firm would look at their bottom line as the only determining factor. But are they making more money by being the government's snitch?
The really weird thing here is that what's going on isn't even in these companies' self-interest because they're going to make people and businesses not trust online storage of their data in any way. So all of these cloud services, all of these online storage services, anything that impacts peoples' privacy in any way is going to be put at risk of customers choosing other options for managing their data.
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This would imply that the court can order you to lie to your customers. I think this is not the case. If there is any precedence for any US court requiring public citizen to lie I definitely want to know about it. If the courts are acting like they have this power then it will greatly change my perception of how the courts, NSA, and congress are currently acting.
There was a HN discussion about this two months ago [1]. The general consensus seemed to be that a court would not take the same kind of philosophical and logical approach that most HN types use, and would classify a failure to update the canary as effectively a communication that a NSL has been received. Since the courts only care about the facts that communication is occurring and that the court prohibited it, cont…
If all actions but the one the government wants are ment with punishment then it is functionally equivalent to ordering/mandating/requiring a specific action.
If there is precedence for punishing all but the course of action desired by the government I would be interested. If there is legal precedence for ordering/mandating/requiring an action being different form punishing all but the desired action I would also be interested in knowing.
Hmm another tremor... I wonder how long until the big one hits.
This is big news to a persistent minority. The larger population will never care. They simply don't have the context required to understand the extent and severity of the problem.