http://www.idkfa.com/v3 idkfa: syndicated http://www.idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=5165&msg_id=5183 To those interested: "Opting out of PRISM" The site is somewhat misleading, given that using the listed software does not save you from PRISM's tap into the fiber controlled by the world's major ISPs. However, it does give a good idea of how there are software and service alternatives to what is commonly available/used. Much of the software and services I use are on their "unsafe" list (even the Linux distributions and open source projects). Personally, I'd love to experiment with some of these. Part of idkfa's latest charter was in response to Facebook's questionable privacy practices. And as evident from my attempts to get people away from texting, I'm not above trying to change the entrenched way people use technology to address some form of paranoia or technological elitism. It'd be interesting to see what the distributed, self-hosted social networking products are like. However, finding one that would address my specific requirements would be difficult, and breaking people out of their routines would be next to impossible. kaiden@idkfa.com (kaiden) Indiscernible from Magic Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:23:50 -0800 http://idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=5165&msg_id=5183 http://www.idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=5165&msg_id=5165 Regarding PRISM, and the "whistleblowing" of Edward Snowden, exposing the NSA in their ability for warrantless surveillance: This sort of thing is, of course, fascinating to me. It at once affirms my paranoia, my distaste for "the cloud," and my overall fear of government-sponsored computer espionage. This item is not new, however. This type of technology has existed and been in place since 2007 (and likely long before). While acknowledged in court, it had failed to find any significant public attention (discarded at one point in the interest of security, I think). The conversation about the legality, ethics, etc., is a lengthy one, and probably one I'm not really equipped to argue. However, I can comment on some of the interesting technical pieces. For instance, this diagram: As the horrid PowerPoint rounded box says, traffic on the Internet follows a least cost path. The cost of a path from one point on the Internet to another is a metric measured in time, error rates, and manual overrides to determine which paths will be taken given a source and target. For example: you're an Internet router, and you have a choice among routes A, B, or C. A is fastest, so it usually wins out over B or C. However, if A goes down (fails), it chooses among B or C until the cost metric for A can be established to be cheaper than B or C. This makes the network failure resistant, meaning that it can route around failures without human intervention. The above example works when you replace A, B, and C with names of countries (or continents). A small African country wants to route a packet to Latin America. To route this packet, it looks at the metrics for the routes it has available. For the diagram above, it has the choice among a 343 Gbps link to Europe, 11 Mbps link to North America, and 40 Gbps to Asia. However, the metric for cost is for the full path, not just the "ways out." It will take into account the kaiden@idkfa.com (kaiden) Indiscernible from Magic Mon, 10 Jun 2013 04:22:09 -0800 http://idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=5165&msg_id=5165