How NSA’s Prism affects you, and how to protect yourself from being spied on | Hacker News Reader

How NSA’s Prism affects you, and how to protect yourself from being spied on

extremetech.com

54 pointsmichmaz15 comments

Nothing changed, because everything was already assumed. I still run my own servers (in Finland), which provide only strongly encrypted connections for private communication. From public cloud, I only use services which contain only 100% public information. My every social medium post is public, so what if someone snoops? Googling would already reveal almost same data.

Just for the sake of evaluation your stance on security - what about people with physical access to your server in Finland? Do you trust them? For your 100% public information - can't a Bad Guy assimilate what's found to formulate a pretty good picture of who you are, and use that info indirectly to achieve whatever further objectives the Bad Guy has?

Yes, but this is to avoid casual, non targeted wholesale surveillance and analysis which is what PRISM is. So would work to hide your local traffic from your ISP and avoid Gmail leaking all your emails. It would be better if it was hosted in Iceland instead of Finland because the EU has data retention laws and Iceland told the FBI to piss off when they showed up to seize wikileaks servers.

It's not Julien Assange, or blackhat on the run from the feds level security. For that you have dee.su live o/s or your own custom build, tunneling Tor through a mixmaster network like Jondonym to prevent easy traffic analysis and bitmessage or Nym servers with PGP for emails. In fact you probably would'nt even be using Xorg and all it's attack variables you would be using tmux shells w/lynx and running Tor in a chroot, using virtualized routing tables and behind a pf firewall. You would also be wearing a Roy Orbison wig and sunglasses everytime you moved your safehouse from one location to the next, and never use anything except hacked wireless for a one time connection nowhere near where you live or cameras.

Ironically enough, they exhort their users to install HTTPS Everywhere and yet it doesn't work on their site.

If you change the address in your browser to https:// it serves you the page using their CDN's (Akamai) certificate. HTTPS Everywhere and most browsers reject this because the extremetech.com site is not listed as one of the sites that the certificate covers.

I think that's a good sign. It suggests the writers here are not controlled by a corporate bureaucracy.

Using voice analysis to figure out who you are? Please....

Ironically Ghostery blocked 21 items on that page.

Lately if I see a post starting with "Unless you have been living under a rock", I stop reading.

Why?

Because it's a tired, overabused cliche.

But we are not grading an English essay are we? The content of the article was quite good for a "normal" non-tech person.

I don't think the content of the article was particularly good.

The advice on how to protect yourself from being spied on is essentially:

"stop using the internet; or use HTTPS - which is probably compromised anyway; or encrypt - which is probably compromised anyway; or use a VPN - which I will say next to nothing about"

It's just a rehash of points and opinions already better expressed elsewhere.

We don't wan to read an English essay either.

I dislike it particularly because of the implication of stupidity: "I believe only stupid people won't know this, but I'm going to tell you anyway".

In general it's poor form to assume readers know anything - consider (for example) a future lay-reader who is trying to find out this information.

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