> If a cop is arrested under accusation of dealing drugs on the side, it doesn't suddenly send a chill through the law enforcement community that works to take down drug dealers.
How do you know that it doesn't? White hats are counterintel agents effectively. If a counterintel agent is arrested for doing something that could be deemed as part of his job, why wouldn't it 'send a chill' through the community?
1. IPhone is closed source and any kind of rootkit can be installed by Apple/NSA secret court system. I suggest not using a smartphone if you are serious about security.
2. Good but difficult to anonymize
3. Good
4. Google Chrome is a botnet effectively and users lose their expectation of privacy there. Should switch to Firefox and use Chromium (Not Chrome) as a backup. Ideally Tor browser though.
5. Why? It's great for sharing encrypted files. Certainly if you trust Apple, why not trust Dropbox?
8. Signal transmits metadata that Google/Apple and by extension NSA/FBI/CIA/DEA know about now. Use something else that protects your anonymity and is secure. Something like cryptocat/Pidgin OTR is better.
9. You can use email to send encrypted information.
10. Unnecessary. Good strong password is good enough and you don't have a centralized password storage app. Another benefit is avoiding all the frustration that comes with using it when you are on someone else's computer.
11. Commercial AVs are better than Microsoft's native solution as repeatedly shown on independent tests. If you are tech literate, you're probably fine with the native solution or no solution at all.
12. Good idea. Best not to have a smartphone at all.
13. That's crazy. Just know your email app. Attachments should be read only and if your software is updated, it's very very unlikely you'll be compromised. If the email isn't signed and you are worried, use an alternative app to open common document formats. PDF.js for PDF, Libre Office for documents.
IPhone is closed source and any kind of rootkit can be installed by
Apple/NSA secret court system. I suggest not using a smartphone if you are
serious about security.
I absolutely disagree. While you are correct that in theory an iPhone can have rootkits and other backdoors installed on it by the NSA, in practice, I've found that the average user's computer can be compromised far more easily than their smartphone. Remember, we're not dealing with security professionals. We're not even dealing with people who can use PGP to secure their e-mail. We're dealing with rank newbies. In such a situation, it's far better for them to take incremental steps today to secure themselves (e.g. by using Signal to communicate, rather than e-mail) than it is for them to spend a year learning about encryption and having PGP key signing parties before they can set up a secure infrastructure.
Comments like these are why I have a deep frustration with the "security community". It's letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
It's a silly argument anyway, as in the famous xkcd comic, technology probably isn't the weakest link. And if a state really wants to snoop on you in particular, they will.
Meanwhile, as mentioned elsewhere, Android is vulnerable to several key-extraction techniques and the speed of security updates depends on which model you have.
Literally every other phone on the planet is vulnerable. Even some garbage flip-phone you got at Wal-Mart thinking it's not smart and therefore secure is likely a joke for anyone to crack into. That software hasn't changed in years. It's full of unpatched holes.
I lived in Soviet Union as well during the collapse. I think there is a lot of propaganda from the west that makes you think it wasn't Gorbachev's fault.
People were happy, had children and believed in their country and made progress in art and science. Then one person who possibly had good intentions "gave everyone freedom". You can't just do that without consequences. It should have been a very gradual transition similar to how it is in China. Instead the country got completely destroyed. Every single thriving industry collapsed and people's savings were worth nothing basically overnight. Police stopped enforcing laws, gangs appeared all over the place, everyone started doing drugs. It was a disaster.
Gorbachev was almost immediately hated throughout the country.
If USSR economy was in free fall, how come GDP per capita was about 2x smaller in Soviet Union compared to USA in 1989 while income distribution was much more even?
Russians - may be, All the other oppressed and occupied nations - no.
Cant vouch for other but almost every Estonian secretly hoped for freedom and despised Russians. When our chance came we acted swiftly.
Soviet Union was just another form of Russian Empire and a way to try to control the world.
> I lived in Soviet Union as well during the collapse. I think there is a lot of propaganda from the west that makes you think it wasn't Gorbachev's fault.
The Soviet Union, when Gorbachev took over, had spent itself to the brink of collapse in a decades long military spending competition with the richest nation on the planet and it's rich allies, and papered over that with propaganda, which was itself weakening after some notable and hard to cover up setbacks.
Gorbachev pulled back some of the veil of propaganda simultaneously with (and as part of) trying to engineer a soft landing. It's true he largely failed, but I doubt anyone could have done much better (an authoritarian might have managed to paper over things longer and direct blame at external actor when the bottom eventually fell out, and by doing so remained more popular at home -- at least, among Russians if not the rest of the people under Soviet rule.)
I think much of the perception that things were his fsult is a result of pre-Gorbachev propaganda (mostly Soviet, but also Western propaganda about the strength of the USSR that served to shore up support for the Western side of the spending war.)
I don't disagree with US not having freedom, but I don't think the nordic countries should be up there either.
For example, you can't publish news in Sweden/Finland/Germany that can be interpreted as anti-feminist or has an anti-refugees sentiment.
This soft pressure is hard to quantify because as a journalist you would lose your job and be accused of various things if you attempted to publish something like that.
Where did you get such information? I don't know about anti-feministm, but I've seen plenty of anti-refugees articles both in Swedish and German. Moreover, Pegida (openly anti-refugees and anti-islamisation) is an officially registered association in Germany.
As someone who has never been to Korea, I don't understand why this chaebol structure is bad.
Korea has one of the best R&D stories worldwide, one of the most innovative places in the world, one of the best life expectancies worldwide, and amazing tech everywhere. All while having few natural resources and having gone through an extremely destructive war relatively recently. Korean middle class is much larger than that of U.S. and lower class much smaller.
Whenever I come across Korean engineers, they're always very knowledgeable and hard working.
Korean manhwa is arguably more innovative than the Japanese counterpart.
So guess my question is: what is not to like?
Even if it were a Monarchy, if the results are pretty good why not just leave it the way it is?
> Whenever I come across Korean engineers, they're always very knowledgeable and hard working.
Emphasis on "hard working". Like, "come six days a week at 7 am, go home at 11 pm" hard working. There's a large variation, but such a condition can still be found in many places.
> Korean manhwa is arguably more innovative than the Japanese counterpart.
And Korean comic artists probably make 1/10 of what Japanese ones make.
Of course if you just consume the products and culture of Korea, it seems great. (And cheap!) Not so great when you are the one working in these conditions.
* Yes, these brutal conditions played a role in rapid industrialization, so one might argue that they were a "necessary" sacrifice to escape poverty, but those days are gone and now such a condition actively harms the country. South Korea's firtility rate is 1.24 as of 2015, because many people don't have time to love, get married, and raise kids. (I'm serious.) At this rate, soon the country will be filled with 70+ year olds, and then the economy won't sustain itself: the whole country will collapse like a deck of cards.
One korean shipping company went bankrupt. You could then no longer ship things to Europe for several weeks.
So now your economy has single points of failure. Samsung failing would cause massive failures. Markets are not rational, and crises of confidence will kill.
From a corporate governance standpoint, being the son of the CEO does not make you the right future CEO.
Having huge conglomerates might help with coordination, but not for competition. Samsung the smartphone company will feel obligated to use Samsung the construction company , even if Hyundai might meet the requirements better.
Having only large corporations that can throw their weight around is basically a planned economy. That works well when the people running them are good. Sometimes planning works!
But you now are placing your bets on the skills of a couple dozen people not being bad at their job.
If these companies were split up, then suddenly an economic crisis requires a much larger amount of people being stupid.
This isn't impossible (2008 is a good example of interests not being aligned), but personally I prefer that to a quasi monarchy.
Then there is the fact that the client acts as a browser that fetches information from the web automatically without blocking trackers itself. This is leaking metadata and actual data.
Is anyone so incapable that they would not know how to enable the secure features?
Most people don't care about secret chat. This is for people who care. Granted, they don't have secret chat on Desktop which makes the whole app useless in general unless you only use phones for communication.
I had depression from doing poorly in graduate school.
I felt inadequate and useless. You can call it temporary sadness, but I constantly contemplated suicide and nothing helped.
No matter how much I studied, I still didn't get new concepts as quickly as others and needed to study all the time which sometimes wasn't enough. Once I failed the qualifying exams, I quit and got a software engineering job where I'm doing really well and have plenty of money.
Now I'm really happy and never have such thoughts, so for me it was a matter of fixing a condition where I kept failing.
How do you know that it doesn't? White hats are counterintel agents effectively. If a counterintel agent is arrested for doing something that could be deemed as part of his job, why wouldn't it 'send a chill' through the community?