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Submission + - Ten Steps You Can Take Against Internet Surveillance

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Danny O'Brien writes at EFF that as NSA's spying has spread, more and more ordinary people want to know how they can defend themselves from surveillance online. "The bad news is: if you're being personally targeted by a powerful intelligence agency like the NSA, it's very, very difficult to defend yourself," writes O'Brien. "The good news, if you can call it that, is that much of what the NSA is doing is mass surveillance on everybody. With a few small steps, you can make that kind of surveillance a lot more difficult and expensive, both against you individually, and more generally against everyone." Here's ten steps you can take to make your own devices secure: Use end-to-end encryption; Encrypt as much communications as you can; Encrypt your hard drive; Use Strong passwords; Use Tor; Turn on two-factor (or two-step) authentication; Don't click on attachments; Keep software updated and use anti-virus software; Keep extra secret information extra secure with Truecrypt; and Teach others what you've learned. "Ask [your friends] to sign up to Stop Watching Us and other campaigns against bulk spying. Run a Tor node; or hold a cryptoparty. They need to stop watching us; and we need to start making it much harder for them to get away with it."

Comment Re:This is only possible at the moment (Score 2) 153

Keep in mind that to Google and Facebook, each user is a product, not a customer.

They do have business presences in most European countries to interact with their real customers, i.e. advertisers. It sounds reasonable to expect them to adhere to local laws in countries that they do business in.

Comment Practical impact? (Score 1, Insightful) 138

Taking Google's service as an example, how is the FBI to know whether john.doe@gmail.com is a U.S. citizen or not? When signing up for service, all Google asks for is the location, not the country of citizenship.

Even if John Doe accesses his email from a non-US ISP, he might well be a citizen traveling abroad.

Comment Re:Thankfully... (Score 5, Informative) 193

That's my thinking. If all you have to do is a quick rejig and recompile because the APIs are so close to the Android ones, then it's a near-zero effort situation. I don't know much about the new platform, but I thought I had read that it would support Android apps out of the box, so it may literally may be just pushing a button.

Not that there's a damned wrong with that. If Android compatibility or portability is good enough, then you already have thousands of apps ready to go and you don't need to put massive amounts of effort into convincing developers to support your platform (like Redmond is doing).

BB10 contains the Android Player, which essentially runs repackaged Android APK files (I'm don't know if the reason for the different package format is technical or not). This is different from the native APIs, but the user experience is quite seamless. I "ported" one of my apps to the Playbook, and it was not even a recompile - it is a package converter.

Comment Re:A long time ago... (Score 2) 109

Android already uses different Unix user IDs ("accounts" if you will) to isolate different applications from each other. This gives you better protection than a desktop operation system, because applications running on the same screen are more isolated from each other.

I'm pretty certain every app under this Toggle scheme will also run in its own context.

Comment Re:This is why (Score 2) 119

I buy the "decentralized" part, but regarding the non-US part: rojadirecta.com has been registered with godaddy.com (a US company for all that I know) since 2005. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume that they could have used a non-US registrar, and further assume that that would have made it more difficult to seize the domain.

Comment Some tips (Score 1) 680

Mod me redundant as this has been said already, but this is my personal strategy:

1. Cull photos. If you do serial shots take time before the 1st backup to delete the duplicates. Also, be strict to remove all shots that are not perfect technically, unless their composition or motive is really outstanding.

2. Tag photos. No point in having an archive of 20000 pictures if you can't find them.

3. Back up. As said elsewhere, external disks are cheap. Make sure you have multiple backup disks, and store them physically separate.

4. Use online services. A Flickr pro account is $25/year and allows you unlimited uploads. Backup everything to Flickr as private pictures in the original resolution, then share what you want via guest passes. It may take hours or days to upload a batch of photos, just let the computer do it overnight.

Comment Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score 3, Insightful) 279

Is this really specific to American Airlines?

I noticed on a recent transatlantic Delta flight that the fasten seatbelts lights were on all the time, but nobody seemed to care and the flight attendants certainly didn't enforce it. Or, are you saying that in the 7.5h on your flight nobody went to the restroom.

The baggage fees and nickling&diming for food are indefensible, but it seems they are standard practice in the airline industry these days.

I'd love to see an airline that treats their passengers better, but AFAIK all the major U.S. carriers are equally unfriendly.

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