Private computing - your own homebred solution
LoopyByteloose
Posts: 12,537
Hi all,
GMail once again sent me a list of 6 people that it wants to know if I care to become friends with... people I've never heard of except for Linus Torvalds. And I am getting personal invitations that are robotically generated from people I do know for all sorts of time wasters and distractions.
In sum, the internet has gotten to be more and more exploitive of the people I know and the so-call social networks I do retain. So I have become more and more private. I don't join in and sign up anywhere near as often as I used to. I refuse to become a member of Twitter or Facebook on principal. And I regret having tried to participated in the last presidential election as my candidate now has lock his funding radar on my email box for perpetual appeals to my pocketbook.
So with all this presumptious promotional behavior, how to youall set limits. For instance, GMail offers me 10.1Gbytes of storage and I just won't use any of it. My Yahoo has similar features, but I refuse to fill out details of personal preference or to put my personal world on a calendar. And I certain would have Yahoo Finance track my investments.
Anything of real importance that is in a computer is on a computer that is turned off most of the time, and backups are done by me and not stored on 'the cloud'.
I haven't gone bonkers and begun to encrypt email, but the day may come if China takes over Taiwan and that is the only choice I have to preserve privacy. But for now, I rather think that having my email not encrypted tends to just bury in amongst the parade of endless drivel that the world puts on the internet.
What are your observations and how to you keep your 'private computing' private? Do any of the Parallax gadgets offer a way for yo to do so?
GMail once again sent me a list of 6 people that it wants to know if I care to become friends with... people I've never heard of except for Linus Torvalds. And I am getting personal invitations that are robotically generated from people I do know for all sorts of time wasters and distractions.
In sum, the internet has gotten to be more and more exploitive of the people I know and the so-call social networks I do retain. So I have become more and more private. I don't join in and sign up anywhere near as often as I used to. I refuse to become a member of Twitter or Facebook on principal. And I regret having tried to participated in the last presidential election as my candidate now has lock his funding radar on my email box for perpetual appeals to my pocketbook.
So with all this presumptious promotional behavior, how to youall set limits. For instance, GMail offers me 10.1Gbytes of storage and I just won't use any of it. My Yahoo has similar features, but I refuse to fill out details of personal preference or to put my personal world on a calendar. And I certain would have Yahoo Finance track my investments.
Anything of real importance that is in a computer is on a computer that is turned off most of the time, and backups are done by me and not stored on 'the cloud'.
I haven't gone bonkers and begun to encrypt email, but the day may come if China takes over Taiwan and that is the only choice I have to preserve privacy. But for now, I rather think that having my email not encrypted tends to just bury in amongst the parade of endless drivel that the world puts on the internet.
What are your observations and how to you keep your 'private computing' private? Do any of the Parallax gadgets offer a way for yo to do so?
Comments
Also if china takes over, I doubt you have much to worry about. After going back and forth between USA and china so much I think, for the most part ( besides 90% of their country being very poor ) our lives don't differ all that much day to day. My wife's mother, wants to see something on youtube, she can. I allow her remote access to my computer state side, and she can do whatever she wants.
heres a link check it out. Incognito linux...
Well, neither Gmail or Yahoo have very good track records within China. Google was pushed out and Yahoo gave in to the authorities. Besides, I suspect that one of prime reasons that government have supercomputers is to crack encryption fast and easy.
Do you really believe the NSA doesn't have the means to do so and that China is the only country that might?
Still, therer is a relentless push to offer up more and more personal data. All the stores and supermarts I frequent in Taiwan have discount cards with bar code or telephone number being the identifier. My neighborhood supermarket offers enough of a discount via their card to manage to have as much as 95% of their customers purchased linked to sales by their identity. They know how often I shop, when I shop, what I regularly buy, and so on. In order to be private, I have to spend quite a bit more.
If I were not to make purchases on a predictable basis, a thief could presume I was traveling and my home was empty. We are just leaving huge trails of data wherever we go for others to exploit.
Most likely your are referring to a penetration attach which much different.
If China takes over where he is living ( IIRC they enforce encryption laws that say what you can and cant do.. IE they have to be able to look at whatever they want.) I highly doubt encryption is going to save you.
Might want to research that a lot more, before you invest yourself into a solution that will be illegal to use in the first place.
In south Korea they banned porn, they pay people to browse the internet all day looking for illegal porn sights to bust. ( its probably the most coveted job in South Korea).
WHat I am getting @ is if south Korea has these types of resource imagine what China has..
http://dailycaller.com/2012/12/10/south-koreas-porn-fight-like-shoveling-in-a-blizzard/
All the stuff I put on the cloud is stuff I WANT everybody to see.
The only stuff I buy is really cheap, and the topics I discuss are so boring, that nobody notices. Having propforth in the subject line prevents most people from further reading.
Cyber camouflage.
I add Ghostery to stop all the trackers - it's amazing when you go to a site and see 9 or 10 trackers peeking out from under the covers!
"Having propforth in the subject line prevents most people from further reading" OMG!
Regarding personal data, I find it highly entertaining to supply a mixed data set. Just vary all the parameters a lot. They can sift through the noise, and it's a job creation activity, right? lol
You know, I run my stuff largely generic. I don't use AD blockers and things and I really don't have a big issue with pop up and what not. Perhaps it's the sites I visit. Sometimes, when I choose to take a trip through the darker corners of the net, I just fire up a VM, do it, then return to snapshot when I'm done. Nothing will remain of that visit. So they get a stream of data that has no root. Useless other than for aggregate metrics, which are fine anyway. Nobody cares about those.