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Does switching to Ubuntu really help you that much? Unless there are secret NSA backdoors in Windows/OS X. Hell even under Ubuntu they could just backdoor my nv

by jiggy2011 13y ago

Does switching to Ubuntu really help you that much? Unless there are secret NSA backdoors in Windows/OS X. Hell even under Ubuntu they could just backdoor my nvidia drivers. I would really struggle to recommend using Tor as a "daily driver" for web browsing as well. Unless we want to go back to the 56k web. Most of the others (bitcoin,social networks) rely on network effects anyway.

gasull 13y ago
I'd recommend VPNs that route out of the US.
- neology 13y ago
  US is not the culprit here. Any government can pass a law that allows them to scan data in their country.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Depends how much you trust your VPS provider. I don't think it would be illegal for the NSA to just hand over a bundle of cash to $randomRussianVPSProvider in exchange for access to their logs. Hell, for all we know half of these companies could be the NSA.
kunai 13y ago
There aren't backdoors in OS X and Windows that are specifically designed by or for the NSA, but since we can't see about half of the source (at least in OS X) then they can exploit any backdoor that may be present without our knowledge. Ubuntu fares a bit better, but with the proprietary blobs, you never know.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  I'd be curious how much work has been done to reverse engineer OS X / Windows. I can't believe that nobody has done it. And how successful these would be at finding potential backdoors?
  - kunai 13y ago
    Only a Donald Knuth-level computer scientist would be able to reverse engineer OS X to assembly, and try to figure out any backdoors from it.
  - neology 13y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
drivebyacct2 13y ago
Use nouvaeu! Works better than the nvidia driver for basically everything but performance (I know, a silly statement, but I have an extremely convoluted xorg.conf file because Nvidia's proprietary driver in Linux is nearly worthless without a good EDID. (Even though it works perfectly in Windows/OS X)

gasull 13y ago

I'd recommend VPNs that route out of the US.

neology 13y ago
US is not the culprit here. Any government can pass a law that allows them to scan data in their country.
jiggy2011 13y ago
Depends how much you trust your VPS provider. I don't think it would be illegal for the NSA to just hand over a bundle of cash to $randomRussianVPSProvider in exchange for access to their logs. Hell, for all we know half of these companies could be the NSA.

kunai 13y ago

There aren't backdoors in OS X and Windows that are specifically designed by or for the NSA, but since we can't see about half of the source (at least in OS X) then they can exploit any backdoor that may be present without our knowledge. Ubuntu fares a bit better, but with the proprietary blobs, you never know.

jiggy2011 13y ago
I'd be curious how much work has been done to reverse engineer OS X / Windows. I can't believe that nobody has done it. And how successful these would be at finding potential backdoors?
- kunai 13y ago
  Only a Donald Knuth-level computer scientist would be able to reverse engineer OS X to assembly, and try to figure out any backdoors from it.
- neology 13y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

drivebyacct2 13y ago

Use nouvaeu! Works better than the nvidia driver for basically everything but performance (I know, a silly statement, but I have an extremely convoluted xorg.conf file because Nvidia's proprietary driver in Linux is nearly worthless without a good EDID. (Even though it works perfectly in Windows/OS X)