shriekingviolet posted:

yeah no one involved in any kind of organizing should ever rely entirely on technology for security or privacy. all those technofetishist clickbait articles about how whatever new app or protocol is the cool new hip way for activists to evade the surveillance state exist to create false confidence in practices that will get you burned every time.
the "hacktivists" creating these tools at least come from (and keep up with) the same circles and often are the exact same persons as the consultants and analysts described above

like has already been said itt, this all agrees exactly with my experience as well, and people who really love calling themselves "hackers" with no trace of irony are absolutely convinced that e.g. Tor is completely secure and that the other tools they use are generally solid as well, and then you get "revelations" like the Heartbleed bug that the NSA knew about and may well have even introduced to the most popular cryptography code library, etc etc.

Tor is really simple: everyone participates by connecting to a bunch of other "entry nodes" (the node locations are published publicly) and then passing along encrypted traffic between each participant. eventually it exits to the normal, unencrypted internet on a semi-random exit node. the idea being that no one knows which traffic is yours or someone else's.

in truth it's all completely traceable if you either (a) can monitor all entry/exit traffic globally over the internet, (b) control more than 50% of Tor nodes, or (c) the encryption has a flaw. these things are still thought of by a lot of users to be practically impossible, but A is already done and B is quite possible.

and that's just tor. everything has holes. i would assume that nearly everything you've ever read or written online, whether you thought it was anonymous or not, is in an equivalent to google on US government servers and all anyone ever needs to do is type the right keywords to find you and then it's all there. deleting things is pointless. all you could hope to do is slowly shift your usage patterns into zero while creating some kind of entirely separate online persona with zero connections (credit cards, same passwords, friends, writing style, IP addresses) to the previous one, and you're probably not going to do that! so we can merely be conscious of the fact that everything is catalogued, forever, and we control nothing. we are sending every keystroke to the nsa.

hope everyone had a nice christmas!

daddyholes posted:

from earlier this year:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-21/russia-seeks-to-cut-dependence-on-ibm-microsoft-amid-sanctions.html

Russia’s parliament is preparing new rules in a bid to cut its reliance on foreign technology suppliers after U.S. sanctions against some of the country’s largest companies, a move that could hurt sales at vendors such as Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)

this was supposedly a response to a duma commission study that found that about 2/3 of the russian government was dependent on IT contracts with western companies. i don't know that this bill ever actually came up or was passed though. i looked on garant but i can only find the other big telecom law that year, which banned storing russians' personal information outside of russia. i wonder if this got squashed or if it ever existed.

on the part of the u.s., as of late 2014, the Bureau of Industry and Security (U.S. Dept. of Commerce) rules on exports of "military end-user" technologies were expanded so they restrict sales of IT goods and services to basically every government entity in Russia if the BIS feels like it. the same thing already happened with China in 2007 and they did it to Venezuela this year too. it's a very quick way to expand sanctions. watching the u.s. federal register for final BIS rules will tell you what the white house thinks it can do in these cases without anyone in congress complaining.

daddyholes posted:

or venezuela or china. you have to tell the u.s. government everything about it and then they tell you no.

actually they just make sure that they have all the MAC addresses on file and that all the hardcoded backdoors are functioning properly and then you can sell away

Petrol posted:

it gone https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/145578104

weird, well,thanks for the working link.

daddyholes posted:

Grand Jury (Darren Wilson, Barack Obama): Not very grand at all. ★★½

http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/topic/4762/?page=1#post-151566

drwhat posted:

yeah no one involved in any kind of so we can merely be conscious of the fact that everything is catalogued, forever, and we control nothing. we are sending every keystroke to the nsa.

hope everyone had a nice christmas!

That's why I'm making them pay by going to so many shitty web pages, this one excluded of course (lol). I lose my privacy, you have to read through robin williams conspiracies and stories about antarctic alien Nazis