The Dudeism Forum

Google hit by $7m Street View fine in US



Google has agreed to pay a $7m (?4.6m) fine for collecting people's personal data without authorisation as part of its Street View service. In a settlement with 38 US states, the internet giant agreed to destroy emails, passwords, and web histories.

Better look outside that window, Larry; Google is about to fuck you in the ass! - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21762545

DB Note: and if you think this information was not passed on to the feds, you REALLY better look outside your window! Also, why is no one going to jail for massive violation of state and federal law?

Quote from: DigitalBuddha on March 13, 2013, 07:16:12 AM
DB Note: and if you think this information was not passed on to the feds, you REALLY better look outside your window!

True. Any who are not sufficiently paranoid to already know of it might become sufficiently paranoid after reading a bit about the NSA Utah Data Center. There's really no way to prevent Uncle from grabbing all of your email, phone calls, web traffic, or any data that commercial enterprise willingly or under duress delivers to them. Encrypt the shit out of it, and it's safe today -- but as cryptanalysis improves, the messages you've already sent and that they've already stored will become open to them. All currently widely deployed encryption algorithms are either already too weak or will soon enough become too weak, because the algorithms can be parallelized. What that means is that throwing more hardware at the problem of cracking the encryption significantly reduces the time required to crack it because you can have many processors working on chunks of it simultaneously. Algorithms that were considered strong enough five years ago can be cracked by plain old citizens without massive budgets who can leverage the integer math processing power of commonly available PC graphics cards.

If I have something I want to keep private for more than several months, I use encryption algorithms that don't parallelize well, or at all. I don't expect to keep the NSA out of my ass, but that's not my goal anyway. My goal is to keep random fucking criminals out of it.

Quote from: RighteousDude on March 13, 2013, 02:39:48 PM
True. Any who are not sufficiently paranoid to already know of it might become sufficiently paranoid after reading a bit about the NSA Utah Data Center...

As I have frequently said:

Quote from: meekon5
Better to be Paranoid and no-one being bothered about you, than not being paranoid and finding they are really out to get you!

Quote from: meekon5 on March 13, 2013, 02:50:03 PM
As I have frequently said:

Quote from: meekon5
Better to be Paranoid and no-one being bothered about you, than not being paranoid and finding they are really out to get you!

I like to paraphrase a line from the movie Strange Days: The question isn't whether you're paranoid, it's whether you're paranoid enough. Most are not because they suffer the delusion that somebody somewhere has got their back, when in fact as far as the world is concerned your back is just a handy place to store knives. I don't spend my days being worried about black helicopters, chemtrails, or any of that sci-fi/fantasy shit that so many go on about, but I am aware of the real threats that exist.

One fine summer afternoon I found myself in a data center of a three-letter agency where I'd gone to do some work. I wasn't there five minutes when some techno-spook who wanted to show off asked me, "So, who do you want to know about?". It offended my sense of decency, as it would anyone who's burdened with such a thing, but it led to an interesting conversation. Those butt pirates simply buy shitloads of information from industry because there's a lot to be gleaned from it and no subpoena or search warrant is required for them to just go out and buy it. They also do a lot of warrantless wiretapping, but are (at that time were) careful not to use any of it in court where it would be thrown out anyway and would make them look bad. So they'd snoop shit out and annotate it as not admissible in court, and when they found something interesting they'd claim a confidential informant or some such plausible horse shit was involved, get their warrant, and just wait around for the next communication fuckup to occur. All the stuff they snooped out that wasn't interesting was kept anyway, no matter how mundane, because it might become interesting later. Maybe "Oh shit, the cat just puked on the carpet again" was a code phrase or something, and maybe the boring housewife who uttered it was really a criminal mastermind who'd so far avoided raising suspicion.

And that occurred in the seeming lull between the end of the Cold War and the start of the Global War On Terror or whatever the fuck Bronco Bomber has renamed it as.

Quote from: RighteousDude on March 13, 2013, 02:39:48 PM

Quote from: DigitalBuddha on March 13, 2013, 07:16:12 AM
DB Note: and if you think this information was not passed on to the feds, you REALLY better look outside your window!

True. Any who are not sufficiently paranoid to already know of it might become sufficiently paranoid after reading a bit about the NSA Utah Data Center. There's really no way to prevent Uncle from grabbing all of your email, phone calls, web traffic, or any data that commercial enterprise willingly or under duress delivers to them. Encrypt the shit out of it, and it's safe today -- but as cryptanalysis improves, the messages you've already sent and that they've already stored will become open to them. All currently widely deployed encryption algorithms are either already too weak or will soon enough become too weak, because the algorithms can be parallelized. What that means is that throwing more hardware at the problem of cracking the encryption significantly reduces the time required to crack it because you can have many processors working on chunks of it simultaneously. Algorithms that were considered strong enough five years ago can be cracked by plain old citizens without massive budgets who can leverage the integer math processing power of commonly available PC graphics cards.

If I have something I want to keep private for more than several months, I use encryption algorithms that don't parallelize well, or at all. I don't expect to keep the NSA out of my ass, but that's not my goal anyway. My goal is to keep random fucking criminals out of it.

Fuckin' eh, man...those are good words, dude!

Quote from: meekon5 on March 13, 2013, 02:50:03 PM

Quote from: RighteousDude on March 13, 2013, 02:39:48 PM
True. Any who are not sufficiently paranoid to already know of it might become sufficiently paranoid after reading a bit about the NSA Utah Data Center...

As I have frequently said:

Quote from: meekon5
Better to be Paranoid and no-one being bothered about you, than not being paranoid and finding they are really out to get you!

Say what? Paranoid? What have we got to be paranoid about?........



Maybe this...

Quote from: DigitalBuddha on March 14, 2013, 12:31:15 AM
Say what? Paranoid? What have we got to be paranoid about?........

Hmmm... living in a nation in which the pigs bust you without much worry about whether you're the right guy or not because the prosecutor will figure it out, evaluate the prosecutors based upon how many convictions they get, and evaluate judges by how "tough on crime" they are, what could possibly go wrong?

Quote from: RighteousDude on March 14, 2013, 08:07:41 AM

Quote from: DigitalBuddha on March 14, 2013, 12:31:15 AM
Say what? Paranoid? What have we got to be paranoid about?........

what could possibly go wrong?

They could make porn illegal! 

Quote from: DigitalBuddha on March 15, 2013, 12:27:34 AM
They could make porn illegal! 

They already got online poker, the bastards. It was cool having a hobby that paid, and it brought money from overseas into the local economy, too. What could be wrong with that?