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Prism Break

prism-break.org

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181–190 of 205 posts

Re: Prism Break

#181

Post by jamesdelaneyie »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #163
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to think people should begin to create "crypto-selves". I've seen a lot of talk saying essentially "get off facebook! get off gmail!" But that's a lot of persistent effort even for fairly technical people. Plus even in secure, anonymous environment interacting with your real life friends, purchasing your favorite books on amazon etc will reveal who you are anyway. In non-web life we have private and publ…

The problem is that the selves bleed into each-other. For instance, making up a completely different city to claim you live in while still talking to other people from your own city is hard . If the NSA spots half a dozen people on Crypto-Reddit's /r/boston who claim to be from San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Chicago, rural Tennessee, and Miami respectively, then it knows it has probably found six actual Bostonians…

I thought about this problem, but it was more to do with soliciting anonymous feedback from a group of close nit friends. It's a hard problem to fix, but I think maybe running the text through something that reduces it to all lower case and all txtspk, with some sort of grammer-fucker-upper might remove some of the personality attached to the original text input.

Re: Prism Break

#182

Post by comex »

sondr3 wrote: post #101
comex wrote: post #8

Several of these suggestions seem somewhat disingenuous - e.g. many of them to be about free software more than actual concerns about tracking, as reflected in the labels "Proprietary" and "Free alternatives". In particular: - None of the proprietary browsers will track you - well, beyond what's specified in the privacy policy. Two of the alternatives are Tor applications, but the other two are Firefox (which provide…

I'm at a bit of a crossroad, and I'm not entirely sure whether it's worth it; I've converted to Firefox from Chrome, moved to Piwik from Google Analytics, moved from Google Reader to Fever and so on. But it's just that it doesn't feel like it'll make a difference in the long run because nothing I'm doing will stop them if they actually do go after me. It might help against tracking and such, but I feel like it's just…

It won't stop the government from getting at your data if they have time to spend actively targeting you. But it will stop them from passively slurping up your communications (possibly along with many other users') as part of an everyday protocol, which is surely an important difference.

(At least, for the present! I could totally imagine a near future where the government had a standard method to collect the data of various self-hosted services from VPS providers.)

Re: Prism Break

#183

Post by comex »

jafaku wrote: post #61
mxxx wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In relation to OSX, Windows, Chrome, IE, etc, I thought it was more to do with the fact that Apple, Microsoft and Google have all willingly turned over data to the feds...

> Apple, Microsoft and Google have all willingly turned over data to the feds More like gave direct access to their backends . [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StlFKE_UVI4

A claim that has been explicitly denied by the companies in question. As serious as Snowden's leaks are, he has repeatedly made exaggerated claims regarding them, and I wish he would stop.

Re: Prism Break

#184

Post by exceptione »

comex wrote: post #183
jafaku wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple, Microsoft and Google have all willingly turned over data to the feds More like gave direct access to their backends . [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StlFKE_UVI4

A claim that has been explicitly denied by the companies in question. As serious as Snowden's leaks are, he has repeatedly made exaggerated claims regarding them, and I wish he would stop.

How do you know these claims are exaggerated?

Re: Prism Break

#186

Post by hosh »

MisterWebz wrote: post #160
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I see no feasible way to reduce the power and authority of the militarized aspects of our government(s). I partly think it's because people are asking for the wrong things. People say things like "stop NSA surveillance" which is vague and impractical. What needs to happen is to hit them where it hurts: Reduce total defense spending to 50% of what it is now. That should be the demand from everyone. Money is power. If…

If you want them to have less power, you need other powerful entities to tell them to stop abusing their powers. Boycott the tech giants and you'll see it happen. it's way more effective than any protest or online petition.

Isn't that another way of saying, "rule of the strong" instead of "rule of law"?

Re: Prism Break

#187

Post by hosh »

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #93
h2s wrote: post #76

While I understand and sympathise with the compulsion to resist surveillance in this practical, technological way, I think it might be the wrong reaction to the information. It's typical of techie people to seek technical solutions to social problems, and this is one such case. It may well be possible to mitigate their ability to watch you by wearing enough tin-foil hats. Even if you succeed, all you've achieved is t…

I'm starting to think people should begin to create "crypto-selves". I've seen a lot of talk saying essentially "get off facebook! get off gmail!" But that's a lot of persistent effort even for fairly technical people. Plus even in secure, anonymous environment interacting with your real life friends, purchasing your favorite books on amazon etc will reveal who you are anyway. In non-web life we have private and publ…

The root problem isn't the surveillance state. As long as we keep fighting and have conflict over resources and past wrongs, we're locked into this feedback loop of an arms race. Information and intelligence are a key advantages in conflicts.

We want our conveniences, we want our privacy, yet we don't want terrorists. We want our iPhones, our cars, and our comforts, and we don't want to see the price exacted from the rest of the world.

Surveillance seems like a very big problem, but only because it is so personal. It's distracting us from the real problems of the world, and that is pretty much every one of us are selfish, adding fuel to conflicts. We're crazy.

Re: Prism Break

#188

Post by SODaniel »

Spideroak.com - online backup and sync with zero-knowledge client side encryption should be represented in cloud services in my opinion, though since we are not yet 100% open source I understand the arguments against it.

We are however very close to opening nimbus.io and crypton.io open-source secure and private storage APIs based on our storage infrastructure.

Re: Prism Break

#189

Post by alttab »

The only way you can truly guarantee you haven't been rooted is to at least trust your compiler. Even if you have the compiler's source code, how are you compiling it...?

Re: Prism Break

#190

Post by shmerl »

antocv wrote: post #153
sdfjkl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jitsi supports ZRTP and Jingle (experimental).

Ive tried it, it sucks and crashed too many times, bugs reported, but gave up. Jitsi also doesnt run on our phones last time I checked. Basically we have these smart-phones, awesome hardware, good devices, but we cant use them to talk confidentially with our friends.

Lot's of clients are stuck because they use Telepathy:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16891

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29904

Libpurple doesn't seem to move either: https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/11221

Those are major libraries which are used on the desktop and mobile, and that's probably the reason why you don't see actual clients with ZRTP support.

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