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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011·

Does switching to Ubuntu really help you that much? Unless there are secret NSA backdoors in Windows/OS X. Hell even under Ubuntu they could just backdoor my nvidia drivers.

I would really struggle to recommend using Tor as a "daily driver" for web browsing as well. Unless we want to go back to the 56k web.

Most of the others (bitcoin,social networks) rely on network effects anyway.

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There aren't backdoors in OS X and Windows that are specifically designed by or for the NSA, but since we can't see about half of the source (at least in OS X) then they can exploit any backdoor that may be present without our knowledge.

Ubuntu fares a bit better, but with the proprietary blobs, you never know.

I'd be curious how much work has been done to reverse engineer OS X / Windows. I can't believe that nobody has done it. And how successful these would be at finding potential backdoors?

Only a Donald Knuth-level computer scientist would be able to reverse engineer OS X to assembly, and try to figure out any backdoors from it.

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

I'd recommend VPNs that route out of the US.

Depends how much you trust your VPS provider. I don't think it would be illegal for the NSA to just hand over a bundle of cash to $randomRussianVPSProvider in exchange for access to their logs.

Hell, for all we know half of these companies could be the NSA.

US is not the culprit here. Any government can pass a law that allows them to scan data in their country.

Use nouvaeu! Works better than the nvidia driver for basically everything but performance (I know, a silly statement, but I have an extremely convoluted xorg.conf file because Nvidia's proprietary driver in Linux is nearly worthless without a good EDID. (Even though it works perfectly in Windows/OS X)

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