http://www.truste.com/blog/2015/01/05/majority-consumers-want-own-personal-data-survey/
All posts by Rufo Guerreschi
Report on EU digital sovereignty attempts: “like the location of data storage and routing, it is not the location of production and supply chains that guarantees protection from surveillance or espionage, but the actual security standards.”
http://www.newamerica.org/downloads/Technological_Sovereignty_Report.pdf
Frank Rieger: ” It is impossible to live in a complex society without violating a rule here and there from time to time, often even without noticing it. If all these violations are documented and available for prosecution, the whole fabric of society changes dramatically. The old sign for totalitarian societies – arbitrary prosecution of political enemies – becomes a reality within the framework of democratic rule-of-law states”
Frank Rieger:” a democratically legitimated police state, ruled by an unaccountable elite with total surveillance, made efficient and largely unobtrusive by modern technology. “
Ordinary people gut feeling know better about meaningfully safe crypto solutions than “experts” and journos?!
http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-1010361.html
“[people] Or they think the intelligence agency experts are already so many steps ahead of them that they can crack any encryption program.”
Morozov on digital sovereignty: ” Note the crucial difference: Russia and China want to be able to access data generated by their citizens on their own soil, whereas the US wants to access data generated by anybody anywhere as long as American companies handle it.”
“Every piece of technology we’ve used in the last twenty years has probably been backdoored at birth by the NSA”
Selected Quotes and video from Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev
Love is not something you do, love is what you are.
When it is no more about you, you can live your life and do your life in total abandon; because there is nothing to gain nothing to lose.
Death is a cosmic joke. If you get the joke, when you fall on the other side, it will be wonderful. If you don’t get the joke, when you are here you fear the other side, and when the other side comes, you just don’t know what it is about. If death becomes a laughing matter in your life, life becomes an utterly effortless process – there is no need to restrain yourself in the process of life; you can live your life absolutely, totally.
When your spiritual practice is based on hope and fear, you won’t attain to anything. Do your spiritual practice joyfully, not with the hope of making it or the fear of not making it. Just do it joyfully.
If you can bring love into your breath, into your step, into every act that you do, not towards anybody or anything; if you can just bring the longing to merge with everything around you, then creation will lead you on to the creator.
When your happiness is dependant upon what is happening outside of you, constantly you live as a slave to the external situation.
Do not try to live by morals, ethics, slogans. These are all very poor substitutes for awareness. Be counscious and aware, you will see life the way it is.
Whenever you are happy, the real source of happiness is within you. It bubbles up. It is just that you are looking for an external stimulus to make you happy.If you are rooted in reality there will be no fear.
The fear is simply because you are not living with life, You are living in your mind.
The greatest crime that you can do to humanity is to teach your children that suffering is a part of their life. You have taken away the possibility of them being joyous human beings.
Life is far beyond meaning, Life is beyond meaning and that’s why it is so beautiful.
Man needs entertainment simply to hide his madness. If he was perfectly sane, he would not need entertainment. He could just si and watch this bamboo grow. He does not really need entertainment.
Once the stillness comes into your life, then the mind also becomes absolutely still. When your mind becomes still, your intelligence explodes.
If you are truly a seeker of Truth, Truth can not hide from you. It is in the Lap of truth that you have happened. Most people who claim to be seekers are only seeking security, solace, or the fulfillment of their desires.
The moment you make a conclusion, as to what should be at the other end, you are no more a seeker you are a vested interest.
A humanity which has done nothing for its inner well being – how can it create external well being? How do you expect it to work?
Because you do not know how to keep your systems in balance, because you can’t handle reality, you succumb to positive thinking. You want to skip the negative and just think positive. What you pursue will not be the strongest point in you. What you try to avoid becomes the basis of your consciousness. Positive thinking can have some psychological relevance, but no existential relevance whatsoever.
A genuine seeker, a person who develops an urge within, will always find his Guru. He may find it in a man, in a woman, or he may find it even in a rock. He will definitely find it somewhere, there is no doubt about it.
The world is trying to do so many things. We’re trying to go to the moon, to Mars, but, fundamentally, I feel the most important thing is human consciousness, the quality of life here. How happy we are here simply depends on how we are within ourselves.
Every human being is a unique human being.
You being too involved with your mind and emotion means you are too enamored with your own creation, you have no time for the creation of the creator.
If you look at the organization, capability and the certainty with which a simple ant is conducting its life, you will see you are quite stupid.
Wanting to be special is a sickness, it is taking a huge toll on life. In trying to be special, people are doing all kinds of ridiculous things.
In relinquishing the limited, the unlimited becomes yours, But the price is, what is YOU does not exist anymore.
When who you are and what you are is not decided by any external forces, then you are in dignity.
If you are not half hearted, if you are a full blooded involvement with everything that you are doing you will see every simple thing is a miracle.
When you become meditative, you will see, your intellectual capabilities will increase many times more than what it is right now. Not because meditation makes you intelligent, but because meditation clears up the mess, the muck that’s gathered on the glass of the flashlight. As your meditation deepens, it just clears up the muck more and more and the flashlight becomes more and more powerful. It shows you things more and more clearly.
Once you know how to be aware, once the neccessary awareness – to be away from your own body, to be away from your own mind – has come to you, don’t even bother about your karmas. Just see how to deepen this awareness.
Every human being is capable of living absolutely blissfully within himself. They have denied themselves this because they never looked at themselves.
What you can do and what you cannot do outside is always a question of capability. But when it comes to the inside it is just a question of willingness.
The past experience of life is ruling you from within. Unless you break this karmic grip there is no such thing as freedom in thought and action.
If you really pay attention to life, life will blossom within you. If you do not pay attention, you are somewhere else, then life could go wrong.
If you know that you are stupid, you wont attach too much importance to your thought. You will start looking at life and your intelligence will flower.
You claim that you love somebody, but if they dont fulfill your needs, you wont love them. I dont call this love, I call this mutual benefit scheme.
Without working on human consciousness, trying to change social or national or global realities means there is no serious intention.
In reality there is only Now. If you know how to handle this moment you know how to handle the whole eternity.
“Cyber Security Needs Its Ralph Nader” makes a case of why we necessarily need an ICT standard (public or private) for highest-assurance ICT systems and devices, , and a related of form of remote attestation, albeit extremely-secure and user-controlled. The rational is that people will be able to modify their cars, but if they want to drive their cars in the same road as others, they should be obliged by law, and by technology were possible, to run safe-enough cars.
http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/cyber-security-needs-its-ralph-nader/a/d-id/1317690 via
Sony hack. (1/3) Cyber crime attribution is extremely hard, and very easily falsifiable by those having the most access to vulns lowest layers of SW/HW techs. (2/3) Extremely small evidential claims (let alone evidence) produced so far for “conclusion” (FBI statment) that North Korea is behind (3/3) It’s the same gov that claimed (provenly falsely! ) Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The New Scientist on the Sony hack: “The [publicly known] evidence is [incredibly far from sufficient] not sufficient for one government to charge another with an attack – there has to be a higher bar.”
text in brakets is mine, the rest form article below:
Wired today:” Indeed, much of the funding for Tor comes from grants issued by federal agencies like the State Department that have a vested interest in supporting safe, anonymous speech for dissidents living under oppressive regimes.”
Everything Is Broken: ” We often point out that the phone you mostly play casual games on and keep dropping in the toilet at bars is more powerful than all the computing we used to go to space for decades. NASA had a huge staff of geniuses to understand and care for their software. Your phone has you.”
Misuse of data on the server side can be meaningfully prevented by devising user-controlled organizational processes…
… ensuring that:
-sw and hw actually running are those supppsed to be and have been audited extremely relative to conplexity
-access to servers require physical entrance in a hosting roon whose access is conditional to 5 randomly selected users acting as citizen-jury in guarantee of the legality AND constitutionality of access. The will be able to launch a scorched earth procedure with plausible deniability in case of forceful abise attempts.
The latter would protect from insider as well as state abuse, while maintaining access for constitutional intercept.
We are planning that at the User Verified Social Telematics project.
EFF Dir. on The Economist say the truth about the still very sorry state of crypto:”we might have a chance to protect everyone else who isn’t being targeted for surveillance”
“Rather, we might have a chance to protect everyone else who isn’t being targeted for surveillance,
The Limits of software-only crypto, the feasibilty of meanigful privacy and a Plan B
The latest article by Julian Assange on the New York Times contains very true and insightful analysis, such as:
It is not, as we are asked to believe, that privacy is inherently valuable. It is not. The real reason lies in the calculus of power: the destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else,”
and
At their core, companies like Google and Facebook are in the same business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency. They collect a vast amount of information about people, store it, integrate it and use it to predict individual and group behaviour, …
It contains however what I believe to be very wrong and dangerous representations of the level of privacy assurance that an individual expect by downloading the right software and buying a new cheap laptop. He says:
If there is a modern analogue to Orwell’s “simple” and “democratic weapon,” which “gives claws to the weak” it is cryptography, the basis for the mathematics behind Bitcoin and the best secure communications programs. It is cheap to produce: cryptographic software can be written on a home computer. It is even cheaper to spread: software can be copied in a way that physical objects cannot. But it is also insuperable — the mathematics at the heart of modern cryptography are sound, and can withstand the might of a superpower. The same technologies that allowed the Allies to encrypt their radio communications against Axis intercepts can now be downloaded over a dial-up Internet connection and deployed with a cheap laptop.
In fact, the best free software or proprietary (but verifiable) software crypto solutions have this shortfalls that prevent them to provide meaningful assurance:
- Are currently way too complex and non compartmentized enough, relative to auditing effort,
- Do not protect from vulnerabilities in critical part, of both the laptop and USB keys used, that are introduced during design, fabrication or assembly. It is true that some low-cost low-volume laptops out running less common, low-volume and low-performance CPUs may be free from malicious backdoors, but it’s very hard to verify. And the user experience is terrible
Solving such 2 core problems needs extremely-resilient user-accountable organizational processes around certain fabrication and assembly phases, as well as critical server-side components, if any, but also for the standardization, update and auditing processes themselves. In this recent post Cyber-libertarianism vs. Rousseau’s Social Contract in cyberspace, I further argue on the failed assumption of Assange’s approach, that I define cyber-libertarianism, and why solutions can only be non-territorial group based.
Such organizational processes, in turn, have a high degree of geolocatization, and therefore can’t be manage “in the hide”, and so could effectively be made illegal in and/or compromised surreptitiously.
We have a plan to solve all of the above with the User Verified Social Telematics project.
What we propose, may still not deliver meaningful privacy. We expect however that, once it is realised, it’s assurance level will be estimate-able with sufficient precision.
If even UVST, or other similar attempts, fails, then one possibility we would be bound to test, experiment and evaluate would – before it is too late for freedom and democracy – would be to “flip privacy on power” through sousveillance, by designing a new form of democracy that sacrifices privacy in order maintain freedom and democracy. We’d promote constitutional and legal changes in which instead (almost all) privacy protections would be replaced by mandatory and enforceable all on transparency for all, especially those in power.
After more in depth analysis, such possibility may not work at all. There are in fact many unanswered tech questions, however, about the organizational, policy and tech provisions that will give us sufficient assurance that the powerful are NOT communicating privately (steganography, “code speak”, etc.) while the weak are all naked out there.
To ensure transparency of the power, therefore, it would probably require much of the same extremely-resilient user-accountable organizational processes and techs, that are need to try to achieve meaningful privacy …
Who Should Own the Internet? – NYTimes.com
Assange :” It is not, as we are asked to believe, that privacy is inherently valuable. It is not. The real reason lies in the calculus of power: the destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else,”
“At their core, companies like Google and Facebook are in the same business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency. They collect a vast amount of information about people, store it, integrate it and use it to predict individual and group behavior,… “
In 2009 NSA top execs dissenters proposed a “system to quickly send queries to the telephone companies as needed”
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/acc54fc0c64c4c3eae29b8ac380cc065/ap-exclusive-snowden-debate-inside-nsa
“To address their concerns, the former senior official and other NSA dissenters in 2009 came up with a plan that tracks closely with the Obama proposal that the Senate failed to advance on Tuesday. The officials wanted the NSA to stop collecting the records, and instead fashion a system for the agency to quickly send queries to the telephone companies as needed, letting the companies store the records as they are required to do under telecommunications rules.”
With CivicRoom of the User Verified Social Telematics project, we’ve devised a system that would allow for such needed, legal and constitution function for criminal and national security investigations but in such a way that its constitutional would be under the citizen-jury like bodies controlled by the users, through extremely accountable service providing organizations.