One other point to add to the parent: Whatever you give up now, whether it's metadata alone or metadata + content, consider that this will be stored forever. It might be become easier/legal to probe into these several years down the line. If the govt's storage systems are incompetent, they might all even become public at some point.

It is /still/ worth protecting what you can.

Parent is modded funny, but is actually more insightful than funny:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_(horse)

Which is exactly what mailvelope (mailvelope.github.com) does (I'm in no way associated with them).

Here it is: http://mailvelope.com/


- works with Chrome, Firefox in development
- provides end-to-end encryption
- reduced the complexity of creating/setting up new keys etc. to a bare minimum. I've sent instructions to non-tech friends who set it up in a few minutes with some very basic handholding.
- is not mail client specific - all it does is encrypt a textarea, so you can get it to work, for instance, on google calendar in addition to yahoo mail or gmail or whatever
- uses its own editor so you can avoid using the web gmail provider's textarea (gmail, for instance, autosaves drafts)

Disclaimer: I am in absolutely no way connected with mailvelope. I'm just a very happy user.

And even if the arguments on the blog article are poorly made or outright incorrect, my personal hope is that it would initiate a more technically correct and interesting debate here that will help us all understand DDG and similar search engines better.

What's that? No, I'm not new here. I can still hope, can't I? :)

I agree that it seems to be a biased article with not much emphasis on quality. However:

1) Slashdot likely has a higher proportion of DDG users than the general population given the interest in privacy, security, and tech here.

2) Since there are very few DDG users in general (compared to google, etc.), it's difficult to find an opposing view to DDG's stance. An opposing view can be helpful in seeing where the problems lie, and what all a DDG user might want to be concerned about.

Hence, even though this blog might lack any credibility at all (and its misspellings and seeming bias don't help it any), it still holds some value here on Slashdot, IMHO.

This. And it gets even worse if you have a diagnosis that you don't agree with (much more common than you think). That stays on your centralized, global record forever too. It doesn't take much imagining to see the consequences.

Well summarized list! I've used LaTeX for years as well, and could immediately relate.

tex.stackexchange.com is helpful (wish it existed years earlier), and will hopefully become much more helpful. For instance: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/23650/when-should-we-use-begincenter-instead-of-centering

But I completely hear you: it's frustrating I have to constantly look up things on a forum (or ask the local TeX guru) even after years of advanced usage. BTW, I use https://code.google.com/p/latex-makefile/

And that passenger who was on all three ships when they crashed/sank, became a pro at handling ship sinkings:

"She had also made sure to grab her toothbrush before leaving her cabin on the Britannic, saying later that it was the one thing she missed most immediately, following the sinking of the Titanic."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Jessop

Shouldn't that be number two?