Licensing fees is a tiny cost compared to the ongoing expense of maintaining MS servers.

Current laws and corporate objectives are aligned against your privacy. You have the right to protect yourself, whether or not the law protects those rights. You need to make sure that your email, telephone, web browsing and Internet chat is encrypted and anonymous. All the tools are available to protect, all you have to do is install them. And as a responsible citizen who does not like crime, you should do so. Because you need to protect yourself and your family from those who wish to do you harm. Leaving yourself open to easy monitoring by your government agencies also leaves you open to monitoring of criminal elements. In other words, not protect yourself makes this country weak. After all... you are not a terrorist or a criminal. So there is no reason for you to have all your privacy be an open book for your government to verify that you are not.

You need to do this yourself. The government will not do it for you, because the free information that collect on you makes their job easier: namely, to get re-elected. And corporations will not do it for you since there is a profit motivation for collecting personal information from you to sell to others.

Come on America. Dont let our country remain in danger simply because your government and business are not protecting you. As a minimum step, install PGP email encryption. Do it now!

My signup to slashdot was only 3D, the first 2 dimension was username and password, and my email address was in the 3rd dimension. Some forms have much higher dimensions and involve string theory.

I would just like to know why google blocks so many of my search requests while using TOR? Often it will not even let me type into a captcha in order to prove I am human to continue. Is Google worried about the fake top level SSL certs that were handed out improperly and that I may be using an old browser without an updated blacklist and redirected to false search results by a deviant TOR exit node??

because if google wants to be the monopoly search portal, which I think it should want to, then they should support users who do not wish to broadcast to the world which search terms that are entering into Google's search forms.

When I search for GOSSIP using https, google directs me to a results page that has GET data in the url. One of the entries in the get request is: "q=GOSSIP". Im not sure, but I dont think that GET data embeded in the URL is encrypted, just the content of POST requests and the response data from the server. Maybe I am wrong, but I think this shows that it is non-trivial to see exactly what you type directly to search in the https://google.com/ homepage.

You buy bitcoins on the street for cash using a site like localcoins. Then you pay for the VPN using the bitcoins. There is no trace.

If you are supper paranoid, you use TOR to access the Internet through wifi hotspots while using a different MAC address on your wireless card and signup for the VPN service using a tormail account.

Despite the ledger of bitcoin transfers being apparent, there is no reference to those transactions to you individually. So it is private.

Are you saying that burning wood does not release carbon into the atmosphere? You believe that carbon inside of wood is the same thing as what is released when you burn it? You should rent a cabin with a fireplace, close the flue and light some wood. See if your opinions change about the environment inside the cabin.

That is a problem we know how to fix. We cannot synthetically create gasoline and we cannot use it without polluting. Even if some areas are forced to increase coal burning to meet demand, we know how to upgrade this over time.

Your mindset does not account for "free energy". The pollution cost of a hydro, solar or wind installation is essentially zero. So any loss of electricity during the production, delivery or usage does not count the way it would for a combustion engine. When you run a combustion engine, it will pollute all of the burnt fuel regardless of how efficient the engine is. I mean that one litre of gas used in an economy car is likely as polluting as 1 litre of gas used in a large SUV regardless of how far each vehicle travels. Even if the delivery of electricity was found to be less efficient then a combustion engine (which I doubt)... the enviromental impact of such loss is not comparable when electricity is produced in a "green" way.

Even if you get your electricity from the grid I think electric is more environmentally friendly. The electric grid is supplied by central stations that produce electricity on mass and divide it between customers. In a car, every individual produces electricity with their own tiny engine. Even if the electric companies produced electricity using gasoline, I think it would be more efficient due to the size of the engine they can create. They wouldnt be generating electricity from a bunch of small car engines as we are.

Furthermore, there are many existing ways to produce electricity in completely environmentally friendly ways. In my neighbourhood, we have water flow and hydro to do the job. Creating a demand on electricity now will give reason for other areas to invest in solar, wind or hydro to meet demand. Even if the transition is equilevent in environmental damage... we are far better moving to electricity now as it has a path to a green future. There is no known mechanism for putting solar panels on the roof of your gasoline car or using the output from a personal wind turbine in order to fuel up a gas car.

Finally... its way cheaper to run your car on electricity then gasoline. The only cost right now is sticker price and eventually battery replacement costs. These costs do not have anything to do with environmental cost of fueling the motion of the vehicle. So on a purely cost basis, you know that electricity is better on the environment then gasoline is. The cost of running my electric vehicle is 1/10th the cost of running it on gasoline. Do you believe that my electric vehicle is 10 times more polluting then my gasoline vehicle? So think for a minute where that cost savings is coming from. It is coming from the fact that it takes less energy to supply locomotion to my electric vehicle. If you doubt this, then you do not believe the free market system is working. And this is not even counting all the subsidise that governments tend to apply to the oil industry.

So your gas car does not have a battery?

I realize an electric car will have a larger battery. But right now, the total amount of batteries in gas cars is far greater. And if battery production is so terrible on the environment, where are the enviromentalist who say: get rid of cell phones, tablets and laptops?

Maybe we should start running cell phones on gasoline to save the environment? Seems like a joke because of all the noise, stink and pollution. But one day when we have a fully electric economy we will look back at a time when we polluted our own streets with fumes, noise and the stink of gasoline and wonder what we were ever thinking. Of course there are problems to overcome, but moving the pollution from the individuals and isolating it to concentrated collected industrial complexes will allow us to better control the amount of pollution we create and control its release into the environment.

I am not even begging to get into all the other waste built into a gasoline vehicle. The gasoline engine requires oil, antifreeze and transmission fluid... much of which can be eliminated or reduced in simple electric motors. A gasoline car is a production hog... its main purpose is to get you into recurring expenses of repair and refueling it. The car companies are largely dependant on this cycle of constant cash flow. An electric vehicle can be made where the electric motor resides in the wheel wells. In this case, the car largely becomes a simply suspension chasy that carries your batteries and some wires to connect your controls to the motors and batteries. There is far less waste in the production of such a car.

The probability that NSA can/will put a back door in a protocol standard: LOW

Probability that NSA can put a back door in open sourced software: HIGH

IMO: most attacks against encrypted systems are keyloggers. This would be the most appropriate attack vector against any encryption software. The keylogger would likely be installed by software other then the encryption software. Device drivers would be an ideal candidate. The printer drivers are large and complex and installed on every computer regardless of whether you have a printer connected or not. If I was the NSA, I wouldn't spend all my time trying to hide malicious code in areas where encryption specialists would be looking for it. I would hide it in the background and simply track keystrokes to gain direct access using their passphrase.

Backdoors do not care about standards. They are applied to implementations. Although AES has not been proven to be mathematically hard to break, so far it seems good. But if the NSA wanted a backdoor into AES, it certainly wouldnt go in the standards section. It would just join the open source group on a AES implementation and then provide useful updates and bug fixes while also introducing a new vulnerability. This scenario is entirely plausible as I see this happen all the time during the regular course of application development in business. Programmers mean to fix things and do so, but in the meantime it produces some unexpected consequence. Often times the problem with the changes are not discovered until well after the code has been verified by multiple programmers and put into usage.

The question of whether NSA has a mathematical solution to reversing the AES process in linear time is probably: NO.

But the question of whether NSA could place a backdoor into some software implementations of AES if they wanted to is most likely: YES.

Who knows whether the NSA wants to backdoor AES anyways. Because all they need is a passphrase to access the data directly and in linear time. I think the most direct attack route would be keyloggers. If I wanted to keep my data out of reach from NSA, I would be more concerned about the software running in the background and the hardware Im using while I type my passphrase into the computer.

Inflamitory remarks get more readers. I cant imagine many people feel this way, so people will tend to read articles like this simply to understand where such remote opinions come from. Im not going to bother reading it, so I can not debate the issues around it. I will simply say that I believe the Internet provides massive educational potential for the majority of people living in poor countries. That alone makes me feel that those who do not like the Internet come from a priveledge society and may not have empathy for the majority of citizens on this earth.

Some people like coke, while others drink pepsi. The important thing for freedom lovers is for everyone to drink the same cola brand. Because true freedom can only be achieved by picking A and rejecting B or vice-versa. Its clear freedom is just a 50/50 coin toss away.