There are actually several things you can do if you do not like the massive government spy-programs. The first thing you should do is to look into how you can pay nothing or as little as you can in taxes. Most countries have laws against not paying taxes but you are screwed anyway: Most "free" western countries have passed laws against financing terrorist organizations and criminal networks the last decade which means that it is illegal to pay taxes - so you are screwed anyway.

The second thing you can do is to make it as hard as possible for them to gather information. Use Tor, do not use Facebook or other In-q-tel/CIA products, use ixquick/duckducktogo/etc instead of Google and so on. Do not make it easy for them.

The third and probably most important thing is to talk to your friends and family about privacy and why it matters. Try to make them care. I know this is hard to do if the people in question watch television but do try. Western governments are out of control because a whole lot of people (almost all people above 50) love automatism and fascism and think people who think that they should not be forced to have a camera in their living-room by law are nuts.

Grandparent got downvoted to -1 for stating the plain obvious: "Don't be naive. It's so easy to do it without warning. " (..) Remember, it's not just a single hacker, but government that controls whole traffic, that can impersonate not only any domain but any ip they want, they control BGP."

This is ./ so it is to be expected that such true and damning information was swiftly downvoted. I see the reply to that also got downvoted even though it calls the simple truth "shit": "Sorry but you are full of shit, no mystical routing, ip rules or firewalls can remove the warning. The only way to get rid of the warnings are to either get ahold of trusted certificates or to have pwned the client box so you can control the client/MITM connections"

Did you still miss that it is the GOVERNMENT of a major country we are talking about here? Now go take a good hard look at that default list of "trusted" root certificates shipped with all major browsers. And no, using Firefox or Chrome will not help you here.

https is and always was broken by design. It is, and never was, safe against a government adversary and it never will be. You can stick your head in the sand and think "my government lovs me" (that must be why false-flag terrorism is common, why the US has flouride in the water and so on) but that won't change the simple fact that any government agency can simply make a phonecall and get a valid certificate for any damn domain they want and you're none the wiser if you are a target.

I am in the EU. Thank you US Government for giving me permission to hack into servers in your country, them being overseas from where I am an all. I'll get right on that.

1) Post your BTC addresses and say you will kill everyone even remotely famous various places
2) Hope that some BTC dust settles in some of your addresses
3) Watch complete idiots take this seriously and report it as news

Even thinking such threats is anything but lame attempts at making a small profit is utterly ridiculous - it is just as stupid as thinking that an init system should handle everything from systemlog to dhcp.

I see nobody has mentioned that if they for some reason suspected/knew that server was the SR server (how? that is another question) then getting access to PHPmyadmin might have been almost as good as getting root access to the box.. http://www.cvedetails.com/vuln... The screenshot in the article does not indicate exactly what version of PHPmyadmin was used, so we do now know if they used a known security hole or not to get at it. And we can only guess how they knew that they should visit that IP in the first place. It could of course be that someone (NSA?) scanning the internets for /phpmyadmin/ found that it was exploitable and looked at what was there and noticed it was the SR. Who knows. One thing we can know for sure is that anyone who has a public-facing webserver can grep for /phpmyadmin/ in their log (regardless of what is actually there) and see dozens and dozens of access attempts daily.

Full-time paid employees will always win "edit wars" and be able to put themselves in administrator positions on sites like this. This is why most articles on Wikipedia contain propaganda and fiction instead of facts. If evidence that a government/media story is added on Wikipedia then it is quickly removed and also removed from the edit history (many are not aware that the edit history on Wikipedia is as heavily censored as the articles). It is plain obvious that most of what is on Wikipedia is completely wrong, this should not surprise anyone. That the US government and most governments in the "free" western world employ a large number of "internet trolls" has become "public knowledge" the last year but it has been going on since the Internet came about.

Two firefox extentions I use now:
"Old default Image Style"
"Classic Theme Restorer"

All they do is restore previous behavior and give back features that have been taken away (like the statusbar). It's really sad that you now need extentions to get previous sane behavior back. And it's also a bit sad that the MemoryRestart extention is still a must since the memory leak problems that's been in Firefox since forever are still present and seem to get worse, not better, each release.

You don't need Google Voice or Skype. There are plenty of dirt-cheap SIP providers out there. Cynnagenmod and a few phones with stock Android has a working SIP stack (I know some phones have it disabled, for those there are SIP apps). I personally don't have a SIM-card in my phone anymore. That is mostly to avoid the tracking involved with using those, your personal preferences may vary. I do not get to make phone calls when walking from place to place but I do get to call others who use SIP free and the rest cheap when I am places (almost everyone has a wifi and most local public places also have one, there's even wifi on local busses here).

Thank you for dhcpcd. I don't really notice that I use it but I'm glad it's there every single time I boot.

And this is why we love Gentoo. Also, it does not use systemd. :)

> How long until all of the software packages that BSD wants to use require so much work to retrofit to use a different init mechanism that they just throw in the towl and accept defeat?

Keep in mind that *BSD is not alone. There are other GNU/Linux distributions that avoid it. Gentoo are among the distributions working on things like eudev (so you can keep on using udev without systemd).

> Whether you love, hate, or are ambivalent about systemd, I think you have to accept it at this point.

No, we do not. The systemd bloatware has infected a huge number of GNU/Linux distributions at this point and it has become integrated with all sorts of things on those distributions. It has become as good as impossible to avoid on the distributions that has adopted it. Luckily you are WRONG, you see resistance is NOT futile. The obvious solution is to NOT use the distributions that have submitted to the systemd world order. Gentoo and Slackware are good alternatives to Fedora, Arch and now sadly even Debian. US Department of Defence subsidiary RedHat can force their NSA-backdoored systemd on some but they can't and won't fool us all.

Their "solution" is to genetically alter trees. It seems nobody here read the article close enough to catch that. A problem with this solution is that plants tend to spread their genes in unpredictable ways. Those "round-up"-ready genes the inventors of Agent Oragne (Monsanto) put into their seeds has already spread into the wild. If your farm is next to a farm using Monsanto sees then it's very likely that your natural seeds will be invested with these genes. The same is true here. Those "super" new trees will eventually end up spreading their fancy modified genes into natural trees. THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING.

Blue Coat is mostly optional. What Google is doing is far worse, with Blue Coat you know that the censored websites exists and are blocked. Googles censorship of sites with content they don't think you should know is something you don't notice: It just looks like those sites don't exist.

> 2014
> Optical disc
lol, really? get with the times

yeah I got suckered into collecting CDs back in the day. I learned my lesson when I bought a "CD" and put it in my cd-player and it broke it (well, just locked the tray and I had to open it to remove the disk) and I noticed it wasn't a Compact Disc(tm) but something the same size with "copy protection". I skipped the DVD thing entirely. Buying a blueray player or disc never crossed my mind, that came along long after I got used to getting my media from the internets. I don't think it matters if they present some fancy new disc with 300GB or 300TB, I won't be buying no optical media again and no fancy talk about size or whatever will change that. It's too late.