Shuttleworth Pronouncements, Proclamations, Palaver and Privacy Integration

I see Mr. "I'm Special" Shuttleworth is at it again.

He seems to enjoy being in the limelight.  And, if you take pictures of him on stage with pictures of him in the backdrop with his name emblazoned -- all the better.  His ego fulfillment is unabashedly on display.

Seriously, I have taken jabs at Canonical Ltd., MS and his community of psychophants in the past and, quite frankly, enjoy doing it.  This is a small society which has little effect on the quality of Linux on the Desktop.

Ubuntu purports to offer new technology paradigms, but, in reality, is in opposition to anything but its own bastardized notions of innovation.  Left-handed doo-dads instead of right, global menus (Mac emulation), broken scrollbars, subverted Wayland code (Mir) all designed with a solitary purpose -- to wrest control from and drive a wedge into the open source community and advance a cause with no clear purpose.

Canonical Ltd. continues to 'spend' down MS IOUs as it capriciously plots its vision of the future that nobody quite understands.

Yesterday, "the King" made another one of his "Brilliant Man!" pronouncements.  Paraphrasing his overly verbose Here be Dragons post:  "Erahhh, gee, this whole invasion of privacy thing is getting out of hand -- I think I need to say something about it -- lend the appearance of having lofty thoughts at least and maybe I can buy some time while I actually come up with some new bright ideas -- Oh a fellowship! -- yes, that's it -- let me throw them a bone -- token gesture".

News Flash, Mr. Shuttleworth.  True Internet Privacy is attainable.  The technology used to protect your Distro, GnuPG, is viable and pivotal to 'the solution'.  It just needs to be made more user friendly with some help from the open source community with Apps that approach usability like Enigma.  Enigma isn't getting the love it could use, in fact, it has gone stale and lost support.  Still, we are not without recourse.

No, Google's End-toEnd encryption is not the solution.  That endeavor is 'reinventing the wheel'.  Google wants to port GPG to Javascript.  Bad Bad Bad.  Improve upstream OpenPGP.  What is needed is a true Desktop-Integrated Privacy App.  It should be transparent and drop-dead easy to use.

Much as we have come to expect of Microsoft Office or LibreOffice, we should provide the means for obtaining iron-clad Internet Privacy as a matter of right.

This is the true mandate.

So, please.  Mr. Shuttleworth.

Pronouncements, Proclamations, and Palaver are not needed.  Start by putting together a list of 'draft actionable items' for discussion that can become the final framework upon which to move forward in the Open Source Community, collectively, without divisiveness, or proprietary twists of any kind. -- Dietrich

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RetroShare: An Essential Privacy Tool Introduction

RetroShare shown running on my Fedora 20 LXDE Desktop

Maybe you feel defeated?  You have that sense of helplessness?

Yout think, "Don't fight it.  We can't win against them.  There is no privacy on the Internet."

Give up?

No.  Don't give up.  Fight back.  There is an easy tool, now, today, at your disposal, which as far as I am concerned is not difficult to install and immediately use that will assure 100% privacy on the Internet.

What tool?  It's shown above running on my desktop.  It's called RetroShare.

You see, the NSA is perfectly happy you use Google's tools, including Drive, Gmail.  They are clear text and there's no difficutly in their getting to that repository if they choose to do so.

On the other hand, the NSA is not happy about tools like RetroShare.  So much so, in fact, they cannot invade your privacy space on Retroshare.  They cannot penetrate the encryption.  Enjoy privacy on your own terms with RetroShare.

RetroShare is a mature product in continual refinement since 2006.  The feature set is robust.  To learn more, check out their wiki, FAQ, and screenshots.

So, go ahead and try RetroShare.  If you get on-line, give me a shout.  I'm here.

RetroShare is open source and free.  Download here.


Watch my screencast: RetroShare: An Essential Privacy Tool

-- Dietrich

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Feeling Paranoid? Take Your Meds: RetroShare

by Dietrich Schmitz
(Originally published: August 12, 2013)

Feeling paranoid? Take your meds: RetroShare

It's therapeudic!

RetroShare is not circumventable by the NSA or any other agency.

Enjoy fool-proof privacy-assured communication with your dear and closest Friends and Family, including chat, audio/video calls, spamless-email and file sharing.

RetroShare is a peer-to-peer encrypted, decentralized (cannot be taken down like MegaUpload) system where you choose only those you deem to be 'known' friends with whom to explicitly share your Friend-to-Friend (F2F) RSA 2048-bit encryption key.

The NSA 'hate' RetroShare. It's open source and free and replicated on mirror servers around the globe so agencies cannot block its use by the general public who wish to maintain their 'right to privacy'.

Versions are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD Unix.

Privacy. It's your right. Own it with RetroShare.

Website link:

http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

Be safe. -- Dietrich

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• Never Again

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An Unmet Need: Privacy Integration on the PC Desktop

by Dietrich Schmitz

I had a nice chat (Google Plus) today with +Aaron Seigo regarding RetroShare.

He came to the realization as I have that really, thus far, there isn't any form of integrated privacy control built into any computing Desktop system.

Should there be?  We both agreed that the answer is a resounding 'YES'. (Image credit: Wikipedia.org)

It begs the question:

Should privacy software become an integrated feature, much as having a Microsoft Office or LibreOffice?

It also begs the follow-on question:

Is Internet Privacy-mandated software for general utilitarian email, chat, file sharing, voip, needed?

I submit that we are now confronted by the PRISM effect which has revealed that surveillance is ongoing with the assistance of ISPs, software vendors and the like.  Whether the assistance given to the U.S. government is voluntary or involuntary (National Security Letter) is a separate matter.

Has the government run 'rough-shod' over U.S. and foreign Internet users' privacy rights?

That question will be answered eventually and history will show whether privacy truly matters.

But in the meantime, the PRISM story has galvanized public reaction both domestically and internationally and spurred action by national concerns to begin moving their current tenancy on U.S. Cloud ISPs to off-shore safe-haven equivalents.  The general public are left without a solution to the dilemma that presents:

To what extent should I conduct my personal activities on the Internet?

This question will continue to linger and create fear, uncertainty and doubt unless an effort is undertaken to immediately shore up the general perception that Internet privacy is 'non-existent' with exception to a few limited use cases relegated to corporations and technology elite.

At least, with Federally mandated privacy laws in place, e.g., enacting an email encryption standard would have for example manifold benefits.

For one, folding the aged clear text MIME rfc standard into a layer of GPG encryption would ensure email is readable only by its intended recipient(s).  Email encryption is already being used by a small minority of corporations who must secure their correspondences.

But, there is nothing in the way of designing and implementing a 'turn key' drop-dead simple application to which the general public can avail themselves.  To date, the only application on the horizon which approaches the needed degree of usability I have found is RetroShare, and, it has the best opportunity for being further enhanced so as to become more user-friendly and a candidate for Desktop integration, since it is written in trending Qt and is ported to Windows, OSX, Linux and BSD versions.

If such a Federal mandate were legislated, it might also offer financial assistance to developers to defray their cost to create and/or modify software applications so as to become compliant.

Presumably, such a mandate would have to be on a phased schedule to come into full implementation over perhaps one or two years.  And with those dollars such software would be then made available as part of a larger privacy integration package on the Desktop.

The other perhaps as important benefit of such a mandate is that with open standard GPG keys for the sender and recipient, the currently abused/exploited MIME rfc spec sender id field could no longer be 'forged' by spammers.

ISPs could under Federal guidelines for handling email on Mailer daemon transfer agents shunt 'non-compliant' email off-line entirely if the sender's GPG key were not signed by the recipient.  The U.S. postal service could also have their own GPG postal key which by default all users would sign to receive USPS-routed email.  But as with ISPs, the USPS would also not forward email unless the sender's subkey was signed by the recipient.  That would result in a reduction of spam approaching zero and save billions of dollars spent annually on anti-spam software measures and labor expense.

Extending this idea further, having privacy integration in the Desktop ought to include support for other Internet-related activities:  Chat, file sharing, Voice over IP.

So, you begin to see that software such as RetroShare does have a large potential to be adapted for general public use to enforce mandated privacy measures for access to the Internet.

I hope that this post spurs additional feedback and moves the agenda forward for implementing standards of privacy for all who use the Internet.

-- Dietrich

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Privacy. It's Your Right. Own It With Zero Knowledge Application Framework

by Dietrich Schmitz

It's really time to stop having our Internet Privacy rights trifled with.  And SpiderOak's new Crypton Zero Knowledge Application Framework (ZKAF) could not have come soon enough, a toolset for developers world-wide to employ in encrypted data storage applications.

The idea behind ZKAF is that a developer need not understand cryptography to write applications which need to implement ZKAF to the underlying data store's hardware.  The framework guarantees that stored data will never be accessible to anyone other than its owner who is the only authority that can unlock it.

Third parties will simply be unable to access such data without the permission of the owner.  And, the premise of Zero Knowledge is that the Cloud ISP which is providing storage service using ZKAF can prove 'plausible deniability'.

Possessing absolutely no knowledge of what is being stored on their hardware drive infrastructure relieves them from any responsibility for what gets stored and also contingent liability (recall the MegaUpload Dot Com website Government seizure).  That type of seizure cannot happen with ZKAF.

This puts third party commercial or governmental agencies at a distinct disadvantage in not having any choice but to go straight to the owner of the data requesting access.  Citizen's taking advantage of ZKAF-enabled Cloud storage can invoke their right to privacy and leave those agencies to take legal action in public court to challenge why such access should be granted.  

We used to be a country where a court ordered warrant meant something and was first obtained before a search and seizure in a citizen's home or on their private property could be performed.  With 9/11, that effectively went out the window with the Patriot Act and National Security Letter which are unconstitutional at best.

Isn't this really the way things should be?  Isn't it time for Americans to fight back and reclaim their right to privacy?

Assert guaranteed privacy in the cloud. Insist that your Cloud ISP employ ZKAF for their storage service.  Accept no other standard.

Internet Privacy.  It's your right.  Own it with ZKAF.

God Bless America.

-- Dietrich

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Google Drive Gets Failing Grade on Privacy Protection

by Dietrich Schmitz

Never mind that Google reneged on their promise to bring a native Google Drive Client to Linux.  It really doesn't matter to me at this point.  We have much bigger fish to fry.

You see, Google is as much complicit as any other ISP in cooperating with our beloved U.S. government in handing over your private data without a warrant.  The government waltzes in simply cherry picks whatever they are looking for unimpeded.

This is flouting our privacy rights and, with each successive day, more and more of our constitutional rights are being dismantled in the name of fighting terrorism.

"At what point do we stop taking away our rights?", is an open question everyone should be thinking about.  Because, the latest news regarding disclosure of the NSA's Prism project confirms just how far 'out of hand' things have progressed with the overreach by our government into our private affairs.  Seeing such news, one wonders where we will be in five years.  I fear the erosion of our rights will continue unless these projects are abandoned.

Your only recourse in fighting back to hold off these intrusions?:

ENCRYPTION

Folks, I cannot stress this enough.  There is no other option if you plan on storing any personal data on the Internet other than encryption to keep prying eyes from reading it.

And, I feel obligated to tell you that NONE of your data stored in Gmail or Google Drive is encrypted.

In fact, Google will not offer an encryption service in the interest of protecting your privacy.  Why?  Because, it will render their 'parsers' useless in parsing through your data for advertising purposes, their main 'cash cow'.

This stands as being a gross conflict of interests and Google has overtly chosen to make profit a higher priority than protecting your privacy.

I give Google a FAIL on their moral ethics and stance on privacy.  

The bottom line?: Don't use Google Drive or Gmail if you don't want your data seen by third parties.  

-- Dietrich

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• Reclaim Your Internet Privacy. Encrypt!
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• Google Drive

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Reclaim Your Internet Privacy. Encrypt!

by Dietrich Schmitz

I've written about Retroshare and how to surf anonymously with secure shell in response to the recent outcropping of news flooding the Internet with stories concerning the ongoing practices of our beloved National Security Agency.

There is no shortage of media information and disinformation. You can sort through it and build opinion by consensus across different sources and their relative reliability for giving factual information verses sensationalism.

When it comes right down to it, most everything you do on the Internet is out in the open, or, by explicit or implied consent from you, being shared in some fashion in the name of monetization.

After all, nobody is in business to lose money and if their isn't a good business model for capturing profit then there's no point in being a Capitalist.

In the final analysis, regardless of who you are, what you do on the Internet will be exploited for profit in some fashion as long as there is information to be mined from the stream of data that your activity provides.

To illustrate a point, take Google Drive for instance.

Drive has become a cornerstone of Google's product strategy and the data you store there is in plain human readable clear text. In other words, it is not encrypted.

In fact, Google will not offer a service which encrypts your data.

After all, if your data were encrypted, and you and only you have the private key to unlock it, all of Google's profit from sharing your social activity will cease to exist because they no longer can parse your activity when in an encrypted form. Yes?

This is fundamentally at conflict with your best interests.

I believe that nothing short of your using strong encryption will keep away prying eyes from seeing your personal information.

Encryption is a lock and, when used judiciously, will ensure that your right to privacy on the Internet is upheld even against the NSA.

I have written about how email is fundamentally broken. The government has no interest in it changing since it is clear text and they can read it with impunity and without your knowing along any point it travels across intermediaries to its recipient.

In coming days, I will provide information about what you can do to protect your Internet privacy including useful encryption tools and services.

I hope you will be here to follow along. Remember that encryption is a lock and the only sure fire way you can keep your personal information private--as it should be.

Reclaim your Internet privacy.  Encrypt!

-- Dietrich

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