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As a governmental spy organization, why wouldn't you just put surveillance on the search engine that is used by people that have "something to hide" (in their m
by VMG 11y ago
As a governmental spy organization, why wouldn't you just put surveillance on the search engine that is used by people that have "something to hide" (in their mind) and also put a gag order on the operators of that service?
- meesterdude 11y agoshhh! But you're right. AFAIK, that's still well within the governments legal bounds.
- robotkilla 11y agohave been wondering the same about US based VPNs
- stordoff 11y agoI've been wondering the same about ANY VPN - it doesn't that unreasonable that a Government agency would be able to manage servers overseas.
- dmix 11y agoHow many of those 'privacy' VPNs ever conduct proper security analysis of their servers for modern malware, for ex. conducting memory forensics? Most have servers in data centers in 10+ different countries, so I doubt they are all closely monitored nor capable of keeping their keys closely guarded. Most VPNs like to advertise the 'military grade encryption' or 'no logs' nonsense, I'd rather see them post results of security audits, ideally conducted by outside firms.
- zorked 11y agoVPN are a scam business run by offshore companies in budget datacenters with the cheapest possible employees. It probably doesn't matter because 99.999% only want to access Netflix in another country. Out of the remaining 0.001%, most are just people from repressive countries dodging their country's porn filters.
- sesutton 11y ago>It probably doesn't matter because 99.999% only want to access Netflix in another country. If they are giving people the service they want then how is it a scam?
- zorked 11y agoThey are not providing the security they promise.
- revanx_ 11y agoIt sounds like you have something against VPN providers... There are loads of trash VPN providers, but there are a lot of genuine ones that really care about privacy activism and provide an honest service.
- tiatia 11y agoAnyone using Astrill? I would really be interested in an app-armor profile for their app.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sugarfactory 11y agoThat's why we need a truly decentralized search engine so that there's no one to trust and to have power therefore no way to pressure someone.
- tiatia 11y agohttp://yacy.net/ http://yacy.net/?
- bobajeff 11y agoHow about one that can do multi-term queries at a decent speed while at a large scale while still giving good results?
- tiatia 11y agoI assume this should increase with the number of users? no?
- jerf 11y agoBeware the delta between promises and reality. I started out thinking "theory and reality", but, even in theory, adding a ton of very slow, latent, and unreliable data sources to your query doesn't produce a fast result.
- bobajeff 11y agoNo. I don't believe Yacy will reach exceptable performance as it scales. I encourage people interested to look at "Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval: An Overview" in order to get a better understanding on what technical challenges distributed search engines like Yacy have yet to overcome and the paths researchers are taking to overcome them.
- asdfaoeu 11y agoExcept they aren't dropping cookies on your machine so it'd be harder for them to track users and that's something that can be verified externally.
- falcolas 11y agoBrowser fingerprinting is unique enough that they can likely track you without sending a single persistent byte to your machine.
- logn 11y agoYes, but you can also use DDG without CSS or JS, https://duckduckgo.com/html/ https://duckduckgo.com/html/
- sangnoir 11y agoYou can still be fingerprinted by HTTP request headers alone. You can test the number of identifying bits your browser generates at EFF's Panopticlick[1]. It's scary. https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=no https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=no
- geomark 11y agoThat's pretty cool (from a technical point of view, not cool from a privacy point of view). It says my particular configuration of browser plugins is unique among 1,827,392 browsers tested. Taken together with all the other unique things means I'm unique among 5,482,178 browsers tested. Shouldn't there be a way to hide most of that so you would be far less unique?
- sangnoir 11y agoYou could manually set your user-agent string to a more polular one (IE on Windows 7?). There are several browser extensions that allow you to set UA string manually for Chrome and Firefox. However, an adversary can also fingerprint your OS/patch level based on packet structure[1][2] - which can't be easily changed. This will add more identifying bits. 1.http://nmap.org/book/osdetect-fingerprint-format.html http://nmap.org/book/osdetect-fingerprint-format.html 2.http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles-tutorials/intrusion_detection/Operating-System-Fingerprinting-Packets-Part1.html http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles-tutorials/intrusion_d...
- mark_l_watson 11y agoI care deeply about privacy and security (in two months I am starting a series of classes at my local library on these topics) but in all honesty the only way we are going to have privacy from government agencies is through a political solution. Using encryption certainly helps but not enough people use it, and I am not hopeful that they will. On the other hand, there is a lot we can do to protect our privacy from corporations. I do simple things like using duckduckgo, using a private email service that I trust, only using chrome for social media access, and setting Firefox to be as secure as possible and drop all cookies every time I close it.
- AtmaScout 11y ago> I do simple things like using duckduckgo, using a private email service that I trust, only using chrome for social media access, and setting Firefox to be as secure as possible and drop all cookies every time I close it. I read the comment prior to the username and thought your description of browser use sounded familiar, then checked the name and wasn't surprised that it was your blog where I saw this recommendation. Do you still use Ghostery with Firefox and Fastmail for email? I really enjoy your blog btw.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoThanks! I still use Fastmail. I am looking at alternatives to Ghostery.
- jacquesm 11y agoThey've still got nothing to hide. That they have something to hide is in your mind, not in theirs.