71–80 of 158 posts
It's interesting to see people doing this as it's something I've been planning to try. I've backed the Lima project on Kickstarter which will hopefully become my Dropbox replacement: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brai... and the Mailpile project on Indiegogo which will hopefully work as my email frontend on a local server: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac... I'm p…
Nitpickers aside (yes, what they had they may still have or at least in digest form) this is a single instance of a tidal wave of people doing this. EU datacenters are doing quite well because of the NSA revelations. The economic impact of this could very well counteract any net plus the US had while they were able to spy at will. Likely it's not going to be the same parties that will end up footing the bill. The pra…
There's a lot of pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth going on right now in the blogosphere, but strikingly few people actually doing anything, and the actual movement looks more like a tiny ripple in an otherwise calm tide pool than it does a 100-story wave.
I suspect that until better, easier-to-use services come along than the ones being skewered in this post, most people are simply going to stay right where they are.
And once those services do come along, and attract a large enough user base, I'm pretty certain they will in turn attract agencies like the NSA (or whatever the local government equivalent may be, if not in the U.S.), showing up with hands out and secret court orders up.
If privacy was paramount to people, no one would be on Facebook (I'm certainly not, and haven't been for years). Yet, Facebook, much as everyone constantly complains about its blatant disregard for users' privacy, seems to be doing just fine, with its billion or so users and its $80 billion valuation.
The Internet is living, breathing, functioning proof that, at least to 99.9999% of human beings, utility > privacy. Unless the U.S. government starts skimming off the top of people's bank accounts, I don't think there's going to be much of a mass exodus any time soon - the motivation simply isn't there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More to the point, this is a problem of layers. It's not just where you decide to host. Most every national government is probably involved in data sniffing to one degree or another, major hubs are/can be bugged, and undersea fiber connections are especially vulnerable. This, in addition to all of the insecurities found in common consumer gear. There's probably a tidal wave of folks moving, but I agree: the move is n…
The method is significant. I don't really have any issue with NSA trying to MITM, hack phones and tap cables: as long as my endpoints are safe and I'm using encryption between them, they have to work for it, so only real baddies will be seriously targeted. What we cannot defend from is the liberal use of NSLs to subvert endpoints controlled by Google, Facebook etc, which make it way too easy for them to mass-dragnet,…
This technical barrier is getting weaker every year (or month or week?), we cannot be sure that encryption is still holding up, or at least: that it will always hold up. And besides that, endpoint security may be acceptable for real experts, but never for the layman (probable backdoors in Windows, MacOS - maybe even Linux OSes).
If we as a society decide to accept what the NSA does, then we accept the total loss of privacy - it's then just a matter of time. And without privacy, democracies will die and corruption will flourish.
To think that...
> only real baddies will be seriously targeted.
...is a grave mistake.
YET ANOTHER SELF-ABSORBED NSA BLOG POST.
I bet in all the ensuing conversation that covered how to use double blind file system encryption an GPG encrypted toast that no one said..."we should get involved in the political process and do something about this!"...because you're stupid and you just want to circle jerk about it...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> NSA basically killed cloud-computing. I don't think the current disgust will last too long. A lot of people will move, at some point they'll realize the grass isn't all that much greener on the other side. There is a definite activation energy required for such a move and I'm sure that the NSA debacle provided just that for a fairly large number of parties but in the very long term the difference will be small. (In…
Greenwald somewhere mentioned that there's material for months to come if I am not mistaken. So besides that he's doing a good job (agreed), I think Snowden simply provided a huge amount of information.
My armchair quarterback opinion, reveal the rest now and hope for a critical mass of outrage.
"My webhoster (WebFaction) receives mail for all my domains. My Synology retrieves mail every 5 minutes via POP (you can set this up via Roundcube on the Synology) and deletes it from WebFaction." but even if you can delete your mail from your mailhost after downloading it to your private machine, isn't the point that the NSA probably collected the email before it even hit your mailhost?
However, I think responses like this create tension between the companies agreeing to give their information, and the government. If google, yahoo, and facebook start to lose money they might potentially fight legislation like this going forward and may advocate in reverting these policies.
The problem is that all of your email conversations are with people who still use gmail. Game over.
Never surrender.
"Educate" your friends. Provide them with the facts/sources they need so they open their eyes.
Edit: Oh I see I've been voted down. I guess that makes my statement untrue.. My point was that outside the USA the NSA has free reign. Only inside the USA does the NSA have restrictions. Obviously they crossed some lines and we are still fighting for privacy around the globe. But moving data outside will not stop them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Greenwald somewhere mentioned that there's material for months to come if I am not mistaken. So besides that he's doing a good job (agreed), I think Snowden simply provided a huge amount of information.
If there really is months more worth of information I wonder if the public, US or otherwise (as we find more countries with intelligence agencies working as accessories), will experience outrage fatigue. I guess it will depend on how bad each revelation is but I could easily imagine a lot people picking the one revelation that really bothered them and then framing all others relative to that: "they're doing Y too? Wh…
That is already happening, even here on HN where people consider this off-topic because it is also mainstream news.
I suspected there was going to be a mass exodus. NSA basically killed cloud-computing. I don't think it will come back soon. And while on the subject, consider selling your Microsoft stock. How many enterprise customers will choose Microsoft products again after 2013?
I'm curious to know why you advocated just selling Microsoft stock when Google and Amazon and IBM also have cloud computing/services businesses. Will they not be affected?
Personally I doubt it - those backdoors have been known for years[1], and nothing happened.
[1] This report is dated 1999: http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5263/1.html