Nicholas Sanders linuxfiend@identi.ca

I'm so fed up with sites so full of JavaScript nonsense that I can't even access basic functionality with something like abrowser, even after allowing all scripts to run. This modern web can take a long walk off a short pier. #getoffmylawn

Random comic from the Archives

I spent more time trying to get an audible.com audio book playing than it took to listen to the book. I have lost every other piece of DRM-locked music I have paid for.

http://xkcd.com/488

(startrek) % Is truth not truth for all? -- Natira, "For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky", stardate 5476.4.

I want to say they're benefiting from it somehow and/or want to go back to mideval times of lords and slavery.

In light of recent #NSA news about back doors, let me make some armchair general observations.

As for the NSA asking companies for back doors.

• Probably any major email provider or ISP has been contacted by the NSA and asked for a back door. Possibly other organizations than just the NSA.
• Some companies no doubt agreed, especially those who made money by agreeing, like probably some major phone companies.
• Some companies probably didn't agree except their lawyers said they had to.
• Probably major Linux organizations have had similar requests made.
• If your ISP or email provider has not commented on NSA spying, particularly after you've asked them specifically about it, it probably means they've been complicit in some way. Every company that hasn't been complicit gets an automatic boost in their reputation with all the privacy nuts. (And by privacy nuts I mean to include the majority of Americans, since the majority of Americans value privacy.)

As for #NSA responses and future steps.

• The NSA has learned that they can lie and nothing bad happens.
• Therefore making new rules is pointless, because the NSA will ignore them and lie about it.
• Making new rules could become pointful if the NSA were largely gutted or restructured. But the NSA is very powerful, so this is hard to do.
• Regarding lying about spying, ditto for politicians.

As for spying and abuse of the system.

• Snowden had access and threw away his life as he knew it to reveal secrets.
• Others had as much access.
• Even the NSA doesn't know who has access. That's how many people have access.
• Surely somebody has gotten some information from the NSA's giant data gathering machine and used it to either (a) make money or (b) blackmail people in order to (a) make money or (c) gain power in some fashion. There are (or at least were) too many people with too much access and there's too much money to be made to imagine otherwise.
• If you think the previous point is silly, ask yourself this: Do the greedy shady people outnumber the whistleblowing population?

As for future steps.

• The goal for me, and for most of us, was never to stop all spying or all observation. That's impossible and kind of pointless.
• The goal is to make the excessive and bad spying expensive, either in cash or in resources, and therefore not feasible. As such, using crypto of any kind is a good start, and using better crypto is a good follow-up.
• Decentralization is also very good.

Na das ist mal eine Ansage von #Crympycat