Comment Re:Trust No One (Score 1) 171
In other words, don't use any technology unless you developed it yourself, smelted the raw materials yourself, &c.
How much do you trust the evidence of your senses?
Comment Re:Whonix is another alternative (Score 1) 171
Note that the above Whonices are vulnerable to Heartbleed, so you'll need to do an apt-get update/apt-get dist-upgrade once you've imported the VMs into VirtualBox.
Comment Whonix is another alternative (Score 1) 171
Magnet links:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:A031805E690BB0E03114A8FEB52485517218D3CE&dn=Whonix-Gateway-8.1.ova&tr=http%3a%2f%2fannounce.torrentsmd.com%3a6969%2fannounce&ws=http%3a%2f%2fwebseed.whonix.org%3a8008%2f8.1%2fWhonix-Gateway-8.1.ova
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:AB89247534553946C500EDF3A78E9C30F9C956ED&dn=Whonix-Workstation-8.1.ova&tr=http%3a%2f%2fannounce.torrentsmd.com%3a6969%2fannounce&ws=http%3a%2f%2fwebseed.whonix.org%3a8008%2f8.1%2fWhonix-Workstation-8.1.ova
And here's the magnet link for Tails v0.23 for good measure:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:B7EE06A2568630EED830CFFBF45B6BFD5DE796D4&dn=tails-i386-0.23&tr=http%3a%2f%2ftorrent.gresille.org%2fannounce
Comment Re:Well, If the NSA Can't Crack It, Ya Right (Score 3, Informative) 171
I've been seeding the 0.23 version since it came out. Here's the magnet link:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:B7EE06A2568630EED830CFFBF45B6BFD5DE796D4&dn=tails-i386-0.23&tr=http%3a%2f%2ftorrent.gresille.org%2fannounce
Snowden Used the Linux Distro Designed For Internet Anonymity 171
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "When Edward Snowden first emailed Glenn Greenwald, he insisted on using email encryption software called PGP for all communications. Now Klint Finley reports that Snowden also used The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) to keep his communications out of the NSA's prying eyes. Tails is a kind of computer-in-a-box using a version of the Linux operating system optimized for anonymity that you install on a DVD or USB drive, boot your computer from and you're pretty close to anonymous on the internet. 'Snowden, Greenwald and their collaborator, documentary film maker Laura Poitras, used it because, by design, Tails doesn't store any data locally,' writes Finley. 'This makes it virtually immune to malicious software, and prevents someone from performing effective forensics on the computer after the fact. That protects both the journalists, and often more importantly, their sources.'
The developers of Tails are, appropriately, anonymous. They're protecting their identities, in part, to help protect the code from government interference. 'The NSA has been pressuring free software projects and developers in various ways,' the group says. But since we don't know who wrote Tails, how do we know it isn't some government plot designed to snare activists or criminals? A couple of ways, actually. One of the Snowden leaks show the NSA complaining about Tails in a Power Point Slide; if it's bad for the NSA, it's safe to say it's good for privacy. And all of the Tails code is open source, so it can be inspected by anyone worried about foul play. 'With Tails,' say the distro developers, 'we provide a tongue and a pen protected by state-of-the-art cryptography to guarantee basic human rights and allow journalists worldwide to work and communicate freely and without fear of reprisal.'"
The developers of Tails are, appropriately, anonymous. They're protecting their identities, in part, to help protect the code from government interference. 'The NSA has been pressuring free software projects and developers in various ways,' the group says. But since we don't know who wrote Tails, how do we know it isn't some government plot designed to snare activists or criminals? A couple of ways, actually. One of the Snowden leaks show the NSA complaining about Tails in a Power Point Slide; if it's bad for the NSA, it's safe to say it's good for privacy. And all of the Tails code is open source, so it can be inspected by anyone worried about foul play. 'With Tails,' say the distro developers, 'we provide a tongue and a pen protected by state-of-the-art cryptography to guarantee basic human rights and allow journalists worldwide to work and communicate freely and without fear of reprisal.'"
Jenny McCarthy: "I Am Not Anti-Vaccine'" 588
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Jenny McCarthy is claiming she has been misunderstood and is not anti-vaccine. In an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times, McCarthy tries to ignore everything she's been saying about vaccines for years and wipe the record clean. 'People have the misconception that we want to eliminate vaccines,' McCarthy told Time magazine science editor Jeffrey Kluger in 2009. 'Please understand that we are not an anti-vaccine group. We are demanding safe vaccines. We want to reduce the schedule and reduce the toxins.' But Kluger points out that McCarthy left the last line out of that quotation: 'If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f--king measles.' That missing line rather changes the tone of her position considerably, writes Phil Plait and is a difficult stance to square with someone who is not anti-vaccine. As Kluger points out, her entire premise is false; since vaccines don't cause autism, no one has to make the choice between measles (and other preventable, dangerous diseases) and autism. Something else McCarthy omitted from her interview with Kluger: 'I do believe sadly it's going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe,' said McCarthy. 'If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it's their f*cking fault that the diseases are coming back. They're making a product that's sh*t. If you give us a safe vaccine, we'll use it. It shouldn't be polio versus autism.' Kluger finishes with this: 'Jenny, as outbreaks of measles, mumps and whooping cough continue to appear in the U.S.—most the result of parents refusing to vaccinate their children because of the scare stories passed around by anti-vaxxers like you—it's just too late to play cute with the things you've said.' For many years McCarthy has gone on and on and on and on and on and on about vaccines and autism. 'She can claim all she wants that she's not anti-vax,' concludes Plait, 'but her own words show her to be wrong.'"
Comment Re:And the cry goes up from ten thousand admins, (Score 2) 151
Perkele!
Comment Re:My 2 cents (Score 1) 869
Do you always stick up for people who can't argue their way out of a wet paper bag? The fallacies themselves made the argument too stupid to be worth responding to.
Comment Re:Just out of curiosity (Score 1) 107
This place has more than its share of doctrinaire libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, so I guarantee you'll be hearing from somebody.
Comment Re:My 2 cents (Score 1) 869
Comment Re:My 2 cents (Score 2) 869
Which of course excuses Americans from changing anything, amirite?
Study Rules Out Global Warming Being a Natural Fluctuation With 99% Certainty 869
An anonymous reader writes "A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back 500 years in order to determine the likelihood that global warming was caused by natural fluctuations in the earth's climate. The study concluded there was less than a 1% chance the warming could be attributed to simple fluctuations. 'The climate reconstructions take into account a variety of gauges found in nature, such as tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments. And the fluctuation-analysis techniques make it possible to understand the temperature variations over wide ranges of time scales. For the industrial era, Lovejoy's analysis uses carbon-dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels as a proxy for all man-made climate influences – a simplification justified by the tight relationship between global economic activity and the emission of greenhouse gases and particulate pollution, he says. ... His study [also] predicts, with 95% confidence, that a doubling of carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere would cause the climate to warm by between 2.5 and 4.2 degrees Celsius. That range is more precise than – but in line with — the IPCC's prediction that temperatures would rise by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius if CO2 concentrations double.'"
Comment Re:Terrible article (Score 1) 723
It was a
Comment Re:Misleading title... (Score 1) 641
Pffffft. It's not even Dice, this place was like that before Dice.
TCP/IP Might Have Been Secure From the Start If Not For the NSA 149
chicksdaddy writes: "The pervasiveness of the NSA's spying operation has turned it into a kind of bugaboo — the monster lurking behind every locked networking closet and the invisible hand behind every flawed crypto implementation. Those inclined to don the tinfoil cap won't be reassured by Vint Cerf's offhand observation in a Google Hangout on Wednesday that, back in the mid 1970s, the world's favorite intelligence agency may have also stood in the way of stronger network layer security being a part of the original specification for TCP/IP. (Video with time code.) Researchers at the time were working on just such a lightweight cryptosystem. On Stanford's campus, Cerf noted that Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman had researched and published a paper that described the functioning of a public key cryptography system. But they didn't yet have the algorithms to make it practical. (Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman published the RSA algorithm in 1977). As it turns out, however, Cerf did have access to some really bleeding edge cryptographic technology back then that might have been used to implement strong, protocol-level security into the earliest specifications of TCP/IP. Why weren't they used? The crypto tools were part of a classified NSA project he was working on at Stanford in the mid 1970s to build a secure, classified Internet. 'At the time I couldn't share that with my friends,' Cerf said."
