Reset The Net

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Rakuen Growlithe
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Reset The Net

#1

Post by Rakuen Growlithe »

Today is the one year anniversary of Snowden's reveal of the massive NSA spying operations. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has declared today to be Reset The Net. They provide a number of suggestions for improving your own privacy and security and making it harder for governments, hackers and criminals to spy on you. Some of these are really simple. There are tools like HTTPS Always which ensures you use encrypted versions of sites when possible. They also provide advice for securing apps that you write or sites you run. ZAFur could switch to using https connections for example. I do think that everyone should give it a look and at least know what people are talking about and why.
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Re: Reset The Net

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Post by ph3-der-loewe »

reflum,

I've been working for years on this (improve my own setup and tell people about that, e.g. in workshops). It's a really hard task as most people don't seem to want to think when using a computer which makes it very easy for others to do all kinds of random bad things. Also users seem to have a much to big trust into the Internet and Vendors in general. E.g. most people I have meet don't understand basic concepts of why it's important to run software you can trust on hardware you can trust but think 'ah, I will download this unsigned binary from a random page I found yesterday, all will be fine with it!'.

There are many small and easy steps to improve your security including how easy it is to spy you. I think it would already be good if more people would be aware of those. The thing about the 's' at the end of HTTPS was already noted (not that this little letter automatically means everything is fine, it just means it isn't worse :). There are many more such simple things, e.g. do not use the same password for multiple services.
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