Project Megaphone: Fight Surveillance With 9 Lines of Code | Hacker News Reader

Project Megaphone: Fight Surveillance With 9 Lines of Code

rally.stopwatching.us

41 pointssethbannon26 comments

Are the Facebook and G+ buttons some form of satire?

EDIT: Mass surveillance by any government is bad. Surveillance by NSA or GCHQ is bad. But the abuse of privacy coming from spammers and marketers and the walled garden of whatever social network are all far more harmful to the Internet than whatever GCHQ or NSA are doing.

Different people have different philosophies. Some people have stopped using FB and G+ because they know their actions will be monitored. I choose to share these links because I don't want to censor myself out of fear of surveillance. Both approaches are totally valid, and everyone can choose to share on social media, or not.

And the site uses https://github.com/tfrce/share-server so no user information/IP address/browser headers are shared with any third parties unless you click the buttons.

There's also "two clicks for better privacy" like Heise.de started and that Scheiner also uses on his blog. http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/ & https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy

> ...the abuse of privacy coming from spammers and marketers and the walled garden of whatever social network are all far more harmful..."

I'll take having a targeted ad for Sony cameras follow me from site to site over being a drone target.

At least the government is open again so they can see the rally.

I feel like the people who would want to go to this rally would already have loc services disabled..

It's geoip, so you don't need to have location services enabled to take part. And it's disabled on mobile.

and if someone cracks into the cloudfront account and modifies the js... not good...

Same applies anytime you use external javascript, no? Or in fact, anytime you use AWS to host your site?

That being said, I can totally understand why you might not want to add third party code to your site.

In that case, I think the best route is to take the html and add it to your site yourself. You can actually even host the js locally if you want. The call to our geoip server just returns json, so shouldn't be a threat: http://geoip.taskforce.is/

But if you want to host that part as well, it's open source too: https://github.com/tfrce/node-geoip-web

True, and this is why I am not hosting at AWS, and why I don't use third party javascript. (I have a few remnant adwords js blocks in some of my pages, but I am taking them out when I come across them.)

"...sound and fury. Signifying nothing."

What're you getting at? The full quote is "It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing."

I'm assuming something akin to what I posted some months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5921688

Is there an alternative you'd recommend?

Not particularly. In this case it was more of a clarification of somebody else's words than my own opinion.

Public pressure works to an extent, but it's dangerous to use it, because if you can't get a sizable number of people to show up it signals weakness.

There's also the much more substantive consideration that "public pressure", in the shape of a rally like this one, only works at all if there's a credible threat of meaningful action if the presented demands aren't fulfilled. There being no chance of that here, the upcoming rally is little more than a chance for the soi-disant protesters to get out in the fresh air and reassure themselves that they're Doing Something Meaningful.

It's not just a rally, we're also arranging a citizen lobby day for constituents to meet with their representatives and talk to them about why this is important: https://rally.stopwatching.us/lobbyday.html

Oh, well, that's totally different, of course!

Acknowledgement of powerlessness and healthy disengagement in favor of more worthwhile ways of spending one's time. I appreciate it's not for everyone, but I have to say it's done wonders for my peace of mind.

I have a hard time imagining anything worthwhile that could come from powerlessness and disengagement.

No doubt. Consider, though, that only disengagement is a choice; whether or not you have power is not up to you. (You don't.)

That's it exactly.

hells yeah.

nuff said.

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