----- Forwarded message from Giles Coochey <giles@coochey.net> ----- Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:39:46 +0100 From: Giles Coochey <giles@coochey.net> To: list@lists.pfsense.org Subject: Re: [pfSense] NSA: Is pfSense infiltrated by "big brother" NSA or others? Message-ID: <525675E2.4090707@coochey.net> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8 Reply-To: pfSense support and discussion <list@lists.pfsense.org> On 10/10/2013 09:38, Thinker Rix wrote:

On 2013-10-10 01:13, Przemysław Pawełczyk wrote:

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On Thu, 10 Oct 2013 00:05:22 +0300 Thinker Rix <thinkerix@rocketmail.com> wrote:

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Well, actually I started this thread with a pretty frank, straight-forward and very simple question. That's right and they were justified.

Thank you!

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BTW, you pushed to the corner the (un)famous American hubris (Obama: US is exceptional.), that's the nasty answers from some.

Yes, I guess I have hit a whole bunch of different nerves with my question, and I find it to be highly interesting to observe some of the awkward reactions, socioscientificly and psychologically.

I have been insulted, I have been bullied, I have been called to self-censor myself and at the end some users "virtually joined" to give the illusion of a majority an muzzle me, stating, that my question has no place at this pfSense mailing list. Really amazing, partly hilarious reactions, I think. These reactions say so much about how far the whole surveillance and mind-suppression has proceeded already and how much it has influenced the thoughts and behavior of formerly free people by now. Frightening.

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Thinker Rix, you are not alone at your unease pressing you to ask those questions about pfSense and NSA.

Thank you for showing your support openly!

I too was surprised to see some activity on the pfsense list, after seeing only a few posts per week I checked today to find several dozen messages talking about a topic I have been concerned with myself - as a network security specialist, how much can I trust the firewalls I use, be they embedded devices, software packages, or 'hardware' from manufacturers. There are many on-topic things to discuss here: 1. Which Ciphers & Transforms should we now consider secure (pfsense provides quite a few cipher choices over some other off the shelf hardware. 2. What hardware / software & configuration changes can we consider to improve RNG and ensure that should we increase the bit size of our encryption, reduce lifetimes of our SAs that we can still ensure we have enough entropy in the RNG on a device that is typically starved of traditional entropy sources. This is so much on-topic, I am surprised that there has been a movement to call this thread to stop, granted - it may seem that the conversation may drift into a political one, with regard to privacy law etc... however, that is a valid sub-topic for a discussion list that addresses devices that are designed and implemented to safe-guard privacy. -- Regards, Giles Coochey, CCNP, CCNA, CCNAS NetSecSpec Ltd +44 (0) 8444 780677 +44 (0) 7983 877438 http://www.coochey.net http://www.netsecspec.co.uk giles@coochey.net _______________________________________________ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5