freedom.press, also the firstlook/intercept...

[Lodewijk andré de la porte]

2015-10-04 5:36 GMT+02:00 grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com>:

> Perfection is "hard", and must be a "lifestyle" of minimization
> and excercises and engineering, both in real life and in the mind.
>

But this is exactly the problem!

Most people are not at (info)war. Most people are trying to live another
kind of lifestyle entirely, and see not how invisible orgs can abuse them.
All that care about infosec can only say "stop having fun, stop using
features, start putting effort into something that you can hardly even
imagine".

I think the best "for the public" angle is sovereignty, control and
actionable freedom. Politicians whose internal memo's and private lives are
not secure will function much worse; even when not blackmailed their
adversaries have a strong upper hand - affecting sovereignty. The same
applies to companies.
Control over your life and how you behave, no silly timewasting DRM, no
involuntary updates or changes, no "accept all" or misleading "opt-in", no
aggressive tie-in strategies, options other than
voting-with-your-feet/wallet.
And wrt actionable freedom - privacy isn't just for nefarious business,
it's also just for keeping people out of your hair. If you like long
showers you might prefer not tweeting it, lest your eco-buddies will look
at you with little frowns. Maybe you really dig that groovy lavalamp -
doesn't mean everyone should know it. And perhaps you'd rather not scribble
your teen-girl-pop-rock-addiction? Best not speak of heavy subjects -
people prefer lightweight, fun, enthusiastic, positive talks.

In that vein, I have determined Android smartphones to be something I do
want to have. It has been getting worse and worse for years on end. iOS is
worse still, but now seemingly only marginally so. Having just lost my
personal pictures (which are really not that useful for anyone but me) is
painful, and I wish I just accepted the cloud backup feature. I did not see
why it should not be encrypted locally, but the applications for doing so
manually did not inspire trust, and seemed like a big hassle besides (was
still gonna). Basically, I recommend using automatic cloud backups for
images, and remembering that GOOG/TLA's are watching (which they are
anyway, on your Android smartphone).

How hard is it really to, upon boot of a physical local storage server,
> to remember to concatenate 12'th line of the 12'th page of the first
> 12 books on your bookshelf?
> Or to at least write the fucker down so that phrase remains
> airgapped (though obviously final key still present in core)?


I'd first need a stable bookshelf. Housing has been in flux somewhat - for
a while now. I may have written something down. Somewhere. Also, I thought
I would remember, and did, until I did not use the password for some months
(it was running smoothly and needed no reboots). So, harder than it seemed.
I have also used grids and patterns to hide passwords, so not every
onlooker would immediately see them - but it's possible to brute force them
so there's no real comfort.


Sorry for always being so verbose. Brevity kills clarity.
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