9 ms·

Very nice. Nothing new here, but this is a great summary to share with people who are less familiar with internet architecture and want to get up to speed with

• devoply 10y ago
  If it were legal you could call it unconstitutional. The point is do not want. But really Google is so much worse than the NSA. We can't do anything about Google though. He's like an uninvited guest to every party. And now we have Microsoft to contend with as well.
  • late2part 10y ago
    We implicity permit Google to have our info. We have not given informed consent to allow our government to take this data. Therefore it is an unreasonable search and seizure of our property.
    • newsat13 10y ago
      This is incorrect. Most people don't realize this. Do you consent your car to store all your location information in the cloud? What if TV started storing all things you watch in the cloud? Tomorrow, if all the car/tv manufacturers started doing this, what choice do you have? No, the option is not "do not use cars/tv". And tbh, I don't even think 80% of the population is cognizant about what is being collected and what it's used for. This is the reality and they have "accepted" it as-is. This is the situation we find ourselves with email (all email providers mark any other email as spam).
      • Fnoord 10y ago
        > Tomorrow, if all the car/tv manufacturers started doing this, what choice do you have? No, the option is not "do not use cars/tv" Supply & demand. If there is demand for dumb TVs and dumb cars, this supply will (eventually) be met. Vote with your wallet. Also, do not forget the second hand market for cars. This one's huge. There's still TVs and cars available which are dumb. There's still laptops available without Intel ME. > This is the situation we find ourselves with email (all email providers mark any other email as spam). What are you on about?
        • hartz 10y ago
          If you run your own mail server, it's hard to get email deliverability to the inboxes of people who use the Big 3 (Gmail, yahoo mail, Outlook.com). This makes using these privacy-invasive email services a much easier decision
          • sliken 10y ago
            Problems seem more to do with the age of the domain, rather than the size.
        • Karunamon 10y ago
          > If there is demand for dumb TVs and dumb cars, this supply will (eventually) be met. Such demand will never rise to substantial levels. The moment your solution to a problem requires the general public to (change their behavior/become educated about something), your solution is unworkable. If the general public regularly changed their habits out of principle, Windows would have been displaced by Linux in the 90s and the banana and diamond industries would be dead or dying. It doesn't work that way, and it's unrealistic to assume it ever can.
          • Fnoord 10y ago
            > If the general public regularly changed their habits out of principle, Windows would have been displaced by Linux in the 90s and the banana and diamond industries would be dead or dying. My argument has never been that the general public at a whole changes something out of principle. Some of us may, most will not. Sadly you're right on that account. My argument was that if there is a demand for a product this will (eventually) be met by supply. I don't know anything about the banana industry. I do know that Windows is from the former monopolist Microsoft. I was there when the Halloween documents got released into the wild. The diamond industry is a former monopoly as well (De Beers). The diamond industry furthermore has the advantage of tradition. However according to [1] "Synthetic diamonds sold as jewelry typically sell for 15-20% less than natural equivalents, but the relative price is expected decline further as production economics improve." A-ha we got incentive right there: a price of 15-20% of the natural counterpart which is going to drop further over time! What makes you believe this competitor is irrelevant, unable to compete with natural diamonds? I see the exact opposite. So we have two incentives now: the principal, ideologic one (sadly usually doesn't fly; we agree there) and a money one. Diamonds lose their value the moment they're bought. There's no second hand market for them. It is a stupid investment. If you can save 80-85% on a stupid investment that seems like a pretty good incentive to me. > It doesn't work that way, and it's unrealistic to assume it ever can. If we're talking about monopolies, no, but those monopolies stay monopolies due to lack of government intervention and because the wheels of justice grind slowly. Microsoft eventually got what they deserved by courts, and they failed to compete with the successors of the PC which ran the 'children' of Linux and macOS (Android and iOS). Microsoft even had to change their business model, giving away Windows 10 and focusing on advertising instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#Gemstones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#Gemstones
  • Fnoord 10y ago
    > We can't do anything about Google though. Yes, we can! Don't use Google, or use certain settings in the applications which enhance your privacy. The default settings are not always the best settings for the user. Don't use Google Search. Use a search engine which respects your privacy such as the scraper DuckDuckGo (DDG). Don't use Gmail. Use an e-mail provider which doesn't scan through your e-mail. Where you got IMAP access. Use a device where you can use GPG. Or use alternative methods of communication. Don't use Google Maps. Use a maps application which respects your privacy such as OpenStreetMap or (arguably) Apple Maps. Don't use Google Fit. [...] And so on, so forth. Ask yourself the following: do I really need this? The answer is often: "not really." You have the option to use neither. If the choice is Android or iOS you pay more for iOS devices but your privacy generally suffers less. [Ignoring the option of dumbphones] there's a third option: don't take your phone with you. It is a choice to take your Android or iOS device with you. Among others, Bruce Schneier wrote about this in his book Data And Goliath.
    • smokeyj 10y ago
      But you can't avoid google analytics..
      • Fnoord 10y ago
        Why not? There's loads of options. Some examples include uBlock, NoScript, /etc/hosts
      • chimeracoder 10y ago
        > But you can't avoid google analytics.. That's the easiest to avoid. Ghostery, or a simple edit to your /etc/hosts file. The problem is that tracking is much more pervasive, and there are many more ways you can be tracked that are much harder to block than Google Analytics.
        • smokeyj 10y ago
          What about for iOS? Sure there's more pervasive methods, but I doubt any are as ubiquitous as GA. My ghostery plugin shows GA for nearly every website I visit.
  • ergot 10y ago
    > But really Google is so much worse than the NSA Google is one of the many tentacles of the NSA. Worth reading 'How the CIA made Google': https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... Also noteworthy: 'DARPA director Regina Dugan takes job as Google senior executive': http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/13/business/la-fi-tn-from-darpa-to-google-regina-dugan-20120313 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/13/business/la-fi-tn-fr...
  • Esau 10y ago
    Commercial surveillance is a problem, no doubt, but the problem isn't just Google - any held commercial data is susceptible to government snooping. Which is why people just blindly throwing their data into The Cloud annoys me.
• tptacek 10y ago
  Why does the USG need global surveillance capability to fabricate damning traffic?
  • jMyles 10y ago
    Hey buddy. You never responded to me in the other thread. :-) Strictly speaking, it's not a requirement. But it gives incredible cover. It makes everyone think, "well, it's possible - they know everything that goes on." In other words, absent this sort of mass vacuuming, the individual targeting of a dissident might seem much more suspicious.
    • tedunangst 10y ago
      Conversely, even the myth that the NSA reads all traffic also lends credibility to that theory. They don't need to read all traffic, they just need HN commenters to say they do.
    • tptacek 10y ago
      Don't normal people already sort of assume that? What's in doubt isn't the potential for the USG to learn these things, but the credibility of their unverified claims that they actually have learned them. I seriously don't see the connection between global surveillance and the USG's ability to lie convincingly: they can already lie convincingly. Later BTW: I felt like I responded to what you asked in other comments on the thread, and by the time I saw your comment, many other people had already responded. Nothing personal!
  • nullc 10y ago
    Why is it that you so predictably respond denying or apologizing for the government's unlawful surveillance (or, now that it has been proven, harassing people who are up in arms about it) in almost every related thread on Hacker News? To answer the question: A lie with a grain of truth is inherently much more powerful, since research will seem to confirm it. Massive surveillance allows for the construction of the most convincing fabricated evidence with the minimum possibility of being shown to be a fabrication. It also, if needed, provides a plausible vector for the discovery of private information which is under the exclusive control of the forger and set outside of the domain of public inquiry or evaluation and, by practice, more or less excluded from the rule of evidence.
• mixmastamyk 10y ago
  > this is a great summary to share with people who are less familiar with Unfortunately, the people I know who need to read this the most consider "aclu" is a dirty word.
  • ch4s3 10y ago
    Sadly many of the people protected by the ACLU have been convinced by marketing and propaganda that the ACLu wants to destroy America.