It was wickedly funny when Anonymous hacked the computer system of HBGary after the CEO of subsidiary HBGary Federal, Aaron Barr, boasted that he “pwned” Anonymous and was going to expose their identities. Barr, it appears, was a publicity-seeking, fed-contract-seeking fool who got a grand comeuppance, and parent company HBGary was exposed as being the most laughably insecure “security” company on the planet. (So far.) But since Anonymous put its captured HBGary documents online, the story has gotten thicker and stranger, and the links revealed between the various Gary companies, the feds, and other powerful DC organizations are downright sinister.…
Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
News from Katherine Albrecht: You already know StartPage, a privacy-enhancing alternative to Google. But what if you just prefer the results Google gives, even as you deplore its snooping? You might want to give StartPage’s sister site StartingPage.com a try. Google results wrapped in Ixquick/StartPage privacy. Given a “trust mark” by EuroPriSe, the European privacy certification authority, which, according to Katherine, “… only awards its seal of approval after a service passes an in-depth, independent audit by legal and technical experts.”
The Swiss vote to keep their guns. Sounds as if their nannifying hoplophobes are just as bad as ours, though. NAFTA North. For “security” this time. Complete with more plans for biometric ID and tracking. Sigh. But don’t worry. The fedgov’s rushing to the rescue to protect our online privacy. I especially like the part about all those levels of government that are above the proposed law. Kevin Wilmeth, Rifleman Savant, gets it exactly right on Egypt. The future’s still dangerous (isn’t it always?). But the NOW has been magnificent. And zownds! — the Empire was irrelevant to it all.…
I’ve been working on a followup to last November’s blog “Defending Boundaries” (or, as I originally typoed it, “Definding Boundaries”). Will try to have that later in the week. But today I’ve accepted an invitation from a friend to go to the Big City. Not just the local Big City with the Wal-Mart (population 10,000 or so), but a real big city. Where I get to do something I’ve never done before — visit an Ikea store. Since I’ve always loved Scandinavian furniture, this could be dangerous — even aside from what friends assure me are the many other addictive…
Seems that Facfebook gets all the press when it comes to online privacy. But it’s time to put in a bad word for Etsy, too. Now, maybe you don’t hang out at Etsy, which is, after all, an arts & crafts bazaar that may be of limited interest to the techies and political types hereabouts. But it appears that Etsy might be interested in you, even if you’ve never heard of it. This week, Etsy members are all getting emails that say (as if speaking to extraordinarily stupid kindergarteners): “Right now it’s hard to find people you know on Etsy,…
How Egypt switched off the ‘Net. And how Egyptians — and hacktivists the world over — are routing around the damage. (ADDED: And here’s yet another way — thanks to engineers at Google and Twitter.) “Anonymous: A net gain for liberty.” Dmitry Orlov is interesting and the wording of the headline may be misleading. But why should anyone have to have faith in any human institution? How about confidence, suspicion, contempt, etc. based on performance? “What is a gold standard?” Interesting to see the mainstream financial media finally beginning to address the question without immediately tossing out words like “fringe,”…
Few days ago, for reasons that escape me, I got curious about the fate of Laissez Faire City. If you’ve been around a while you might remember LFC as a hopeful and apparently well-funded effort to build a libertarian community in Costa Rica. That is, a hopeful, well-funded, and unfortunately badly “mis-mangled” project that died aborning. Wanting to see if there were any shreds of it remaining, I googled it startpaged it duckduckgoed it and found, sadly though not surprisingly, that it has disappeared without a ripple. The ‘Net that Never Forgets has forgotten it. Even its Wikipedia entry simply…
MS Jordan posted in the comments section yesterday about Phil Mocek, the Seattle man just acquitted of four counts stemming from his polite refusal to show ID at the Albuqueuque, NM, airport. There’ve been a quite a few blips of info on Mocek, but this news story, with its video and links to earlier stories about Mocek, gives the best look I’ve found so far. Took the jury all of an hour. No surprise. As usual the police/TSA account of Mocek “shouting” and creating a disturbance turns out to be a pack of lies. And as usual, the “authorities” didn’t…
Hooboy. We’re never going to hear the last of this from the “guns as phallic symbols” hoplophobes. The first WikiLeaks revolution? I think the moral here is that, if the government of your country is reasonable and transparent (yeah, rare, I know), WikiLeaks can’t possibly hurt it. But if it’s already corrupt to the core (I mean more corrupt than usual) … Scanners. Detecting nothing. How come government mainstreamers only “get it” after it’s too late for them to do anything about it? The miracle of Wikipedia. Sometimes it’s just great to be reminded that freedom can work so brilliantly.…
Merry Post-Christmas! Happy Pre-New Year! I hope your holidays are being wonderful. Mine are — in large part thanks to you. So in the belated Christmas cheer department … Serious side: Teenager Jeremy Marks, one of the most cosmically abused victims of the “don’t you dare photograph police, you scrofulous peasants” scam, was bailed out by a good Samaritan in time to spend Christmas with his family. The generous Google engineer who got him out of jail also contributed some extra money toward a Merry Christmas. Silly side: Here’s the most ghastly Christmas special of all time. I doubt there’s…