RaoulDuke

I like lists, I often am presented with a list of things to choose from, prioritize, sort elements of it without necessarily the right to reject the inclusion of something in the list I am given.

So here is an unfiltered list of tools and systems you can use to improve your privacy starting by decentralized communications and cryptography.

1) http://sci-hub.tw/

If you are ever stuck with academic research, want to avoid running into plagiarism or read useful material to take your research one step further this website will charm you.

Founded by an academic in search for the right material and became a gold mine for researchers around the globe.

Peer to peer piracy killed the black market, where academic papers used to be sold 30 dollars a piece through shady deals.

Now they are given for free without anyone benefiting from it. A cyber Robin Hood platform redistributing knowledge.

Years ago I handed over an organic chemistry encyclopedia to my doctor friend, to complete his work leading to composing a successful Alzheimer drug.

I found this encyclopedia, solving a catch 22 problem for him.

My friend did not have the time, to travel for several hours to Paris during the libraries opening hours. If he took that time then he could get the wonderful opportunity to pay a fee of a few hundred dollars to borrow any books that were available from that collection for a period of seven days.

Considering he planned to work for another 2 years on his research that would have drained all resources from him as the university he worked for did not have such detailed reference material for him to read.

Through E-Mule a generic peer to peer software somewhat similar to the torrent systems used today I was able found the material in a blink of an eye , as soon as he first described me his problem.

Unfortunately, we also stumbled upon some videos of Syrian beheading leading my friend to an outburst of laughter as he happened to be Syrian himself.

My friend then realized how clueless he was about the Internet and how useful, but also how troubled the Internet was Users promoting knowledge, while others promoted hate in the same cyberspace.

The deep web is more or less associated with dark web, but the separation of concerns allowed for true gems of websites offering the right kind of information to the community.

Sci-hub is a brilliant example of the power that the Internet enables people to have.

The power of knowledge, The knowledge that is not indexed by Google, where only brave navigators can find their way.

2) Asymmetric email encryption is known as S/MIME

Your cloud email including Office 365 cloud email allows for a personal cachet, a wax seal you can add on top of your message.

For your Google system or local good old desktop email client Acquiring a digital certificate is easy and free, launching Certbot can be done in many ways. The easiest is in a container on your laptop (assuming you installed docker which is a cross-platform container system) go to your command shell and type:

docker run -it —rm —name certbot \ -v “/etc/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt” \ -v “/var/lib/letsencrypt:/var/lib/letsencrypt” \ certbot/certbot certonly

If you want more control and need to generate millions of them for your IoT network, the kit is very extensive.

https://letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/

Now you can always purchase a ready-made one, but the principle remains the same.

I would not be surprised if there is not already a smartphone app on the Apple store that does it for you.

Long story short, you create a file and load into your email system. Pretty straightforward, and all your emails are now encrypted with your own additional encryption key.

3) Anonymity hardware such as the Anonabox

https://www.anonabox.com/

In today's world, software is not strong enough to safeguard information, hardware offers additional compute power, ease of use and little need for configuration.

In the previous post I pointed out how using Linux software one can have a personal cloud platform with secure data.

The plug and play box is a simpler way to access sensitive information Like the one, I shared in my very first post around the NSA leaked documents published by the Washington Post and filtered by the European Union.

With thousands of accidental interceptions, no matter how diligent can anyone be for you to simply give up your right to anonymity.

With this solution, you can protect your loved ones so that years in the future no government will have a record of the books you browsed on Amazon, or where did you last fly for a vacation.

Oh and you can pay and view the latest “Who is America” show on ShowTime which is also mysteriously filtered out.

In Europe lot of digital TV content is filtered seemingly favoring the good old cable and local taxes applied despite the decrease of the audience hooked on the airwaves watching the local public TV service.

In Ireland the tax man taxes your TV screens, not the content displayed on them so why would the content be filtered?

This brings me to the last link,

4) Be crazy but get paid for doing so. https://www.yours.org/

Claim back the Internet, focus on the content, not distractions.

Own your content.

You can run it on your own infrastructure like mentioned with Freedom boxes in hardware or software mode.

With yours.org or similar services, you can simply hook up on the existing network allowing to monetize your own data getting directly paid based on its quality.

No need to make the 0.01% even richer thanks to your data stored in their data-centers feeding in their advertising partners.

Don't simply give out the dollar worth photograph of your breakfast to a social advertising platform for free.

A few years ago people still believed that protesting on Facebook about Facebook selling or owning their data would prevent that from happening. Ignorance can be amusing to observe.

The market of personal data is very aggressive.

So aggressive it gave space to personal information poachers like Zuckerberg to monetize your life. Reconsider your understanding of the “Terms and conditions” that applied with sharing your data, knowing that 3rd party apps would read your data bypassing those agreements.

Zuckerberg never lost any money, not even after the scandal, his net value actually grew.

It is the people who trusted and invested in Facebook that started losing money following this scandal.

For the general public, you and me, Mary Sue and Bobby Lee there is only one simple economic model.

Online presence on traditional social networks makes any individual a de facto product for sale.

Don't be a target for advertisement, or a cash cow for Facebook.

Move on to new networks, discover the real value of your online activity by taking control of it.

The ethics behind scientific experimentation are purely good whenever the motivation is either academic or aiming at revealing something unethical and evil.

I'll aim to stand by this statement by demonstrating some tools and techniques that will enable you to claim back your privacy on the Internet. Before the story, you should right away get a grip with Firefox. A browser that does not belong to a corporation, as much as you may like Chrome for being fast or Safari for being kewl, the advertisement blocking policies and possibilities of those browsers are dictated by corporations.

Firefox is the swiss knife of browsers allows you to bypass all sorts of mechanisms that will spam you with advertisements.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/

Another nice add-on is this one for extending proxy functions, as Firefox is somewhat limited

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxyproxy-standard/

For those of you feeling this is not enough, there is the ultimate option the Tor browser.

https://www.torproject.org/

Quoting Linux Torvalds, collaboration as a community in today's digital age “makes all of us modern artists”. So let's allow ourselves to adopt new ways of using software, software designed for you to use privately.

Zuckerberg grabbed all this free software, like Linux to build a multi-million new industry by monetizing social advertisement.

That may sound like an oxymoron, someone building a financial empire over a ton of free software...

Perhaps it was megalomania or abuse of the devops principles that lead Facebook to fail not only fast and early but also repetitively.

There are public records of motivational speeches, probably taken out of some early hackathons, where Zuckerberg orients the team to aggressively deliver with the motto of “Move fast and break things”

Agreeing to implement backdoor was one of the things he broke.

The trust of the public would be forever broken when recently it came to light that there exist internal systems allowing anyone in Facebook to read anyone's profile.

They also had carefully invented such a thing as the “Sauron” alert to cover them from internal litigation.

The “Sauron” alert is designed to warn a Facebook employee when his profile is accessed.

Too bad I can't buy this “Sauron” alert feature as a service as a member of the general public accessing that network.

Taken from popular culture, the Eye of Sauron is part of a greater evil taking many forms over time and is of such gargantuan dimensions that it can theoretically see everything by hanging out in the sky.

Well, it's fiction so whatever works for entertainment. In reality that's pretty sickening of a reference for an organization acting as a news platform, and indirect surveillance tool.

Technical people in our industry describe a back door, as a vulnerability voluntarily designed for data access purposes.

Keep in mind that unmasking people's data on Facebook can be done to a small extent using proxies and exploiting vulnerabilities that may not have been understood by the designers of Facebook.

That's due to the customized version of HTML Facebook uses, called surprise surprise FBML to match their almost imperialistic approach having created a monopoly around social networking...

During the Facebook hearings, questions where finally answered The type of backdoor that existed, and where such all-seeing eyes existed in the organization.

Some of the backdoors were designed for PRISM, Facebook being a small subset of data under a greater all seeing eye such that government agencies act as.

During the NSA hearings a few years ago, no public answers were given claiming some conversations were deemed as classified consequently not revealing public how the surveillance model was used.

Zuckerberg was unable to play this card of top-secret conversations.

He turned various shades of pink before his cheeks became totally red when asked how cookies serve marketing purposes collecting the Internet activity He oriented the senator to his technical team seemingly claiming little or no knowledge of the mechanisms.

Similarly when 3rd party applications running on Facebook violated the terms of privacy, and no control or shutdown was enforced on those applications Baffling excuses that to me sounded like :

“My dog ate all the data, not me”

The rhetoric began to sound different as the interrogation was circling him

“It is not really my dog, I found it on the Internet and fed it data.”

And the answers keep getting weirder and weirder.

When questioned around sanctioned for anyone involved in releasing those 3rd party application to the public via Facebook, with an a la carte “all-you-can-eat” data buffet of information, Zuckerberg's voice broke down and froze.

Not being able to produce sounds, after a few seconds of silence the senators got directed to his technical teams for details while Zuckerberg plunged in comfortable silence.

There is no real catch, It's a free market, and anyone patient to read the disclaimers would understand straight away.

What Facebook failed to do is to protect the public from 3rd party application that would have a disclaimer canceling other disclaimers.

Selling data to political campaign advisors via those 3rd party applications surfaced as an unhealthy caveat in Facebook's noble mission to “bring the world together” ...by running the advertisement bots accessed by political organizations.

Admittedly the Trump campaign went the whole nine yards in terms of massive amounts of data collection, using harsh discriminative advertising and swinging the election having successfully discovered a fistful of nihilist citizens that would not have voted at all to vote for him.

The Obama campaign used the same technology, in a slightly lighter fashion finding the next possible voter through the social network, asking a friend that was psychologically conditioned to accept the content shared and susceptible to vote for him

Even when Facebook had the gained knowledge of the Cambridge Analytica breach, via the 3rd party applications they failed to alert the public of that concern.

More important than participating in mass surveillance programs anti-terrorism programs.

Truly the 50.000 people employed as content reviewers by Facebook, have been proven inefficient, as they fail to stop censorship from political bias resulting in pages being taken down for no good reason.

Meanwhile, Internet trolls keep multiplying

New pressure came to light as in the summer of 2018 the FBI asked Facebook to implement a backdoor in their messaging app.

The root cause of this problem ,that enables goverment agencies to collect private data is the centralized nature of the data ,the information exchange model of social networks, as well as their unscrupulous economic models.

Last year just before the revelation of the scandals, I found myself a victim of data representing me, on Facebook out of context with someone's arm leaning over me.

I had not uploaded that data myself and had no possibility to remove it.

That information caused my last relationship to implode.

The data was obsolete and meaningless at the present time but the bias and jealousy generated by that information about my past being available online resulted in hatred.

This incident fueled my interest in finding a decentralized and alternative network such as https://sociall.io/

This is a new type of social media where data is theoretically not for sale considering most of it is based on a peer to peer architecture. It also provides encrypted data.

Which brings me back to my original post, calling out for more encryption.

The decentralized Internet is close to the pure idea of the cyber communication in its early days.

Older efforts like Diaspora https://diasporafoundation.org/ were launched in the past, was set back following the suicide of one of the main developers and founders Ilya Zhitomirskiy.

He died at the age of 22 from helium asphyxiation, during the inception and growth period of what would become the anti-facebook platform in terms of business model and technical transparency.

His surrounding confirmed he was under a great amount of pressure.

Last but not least, for your own experimentation with a cleaner Internet I would prompt you to try out the Freedom box.

https://freedomboxfoundation.org/

It is a simple tool, design to secure data, communications and search strings you may use, host personal blogs bypassing censorship capable of enabling political change.

In our world, everyone has accepted or chose to pretend they don't understand that social networks store data of shadow profiles along with real profiles often giving a skewed perspective of who we are.

Following the new European regulations such as GDPR salty fines were served to Google accounting for 5 billion dollars fine.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was scrubbed off with a 600k fine Under recent regulations that would have cost them about 2 billion dollars instead.

So next time you share data on such traditional centralized social platform, ask yourself is there a good reason to do it?

For your information, your intellectual property to end in a sea of data lakes

Data lakes are the jargon for king size data-center and yottabytes of Instagram holiday snaps stored in raw format.

Raw data of people posing as some famous Renaissance paintings surrounded by advertising A.I maggots mining information.

Once those maggots are ready to breed they infest your cookies, and keep coming like spam egg bacon spam and oh you know the drill by now.

Your computers and smartphone micro-probe your life moments in the name of marketing. Originally cookies were designed to solve a problem, such as remembering data within a website to make navigation easier.

3rd party cookies typically can act across sites, when operated by advertising networks, that track habits.

Deleting cookies will never be enough, so why not make the problem disappear and surf the internet differently without being monetized on your every click.

Think before you post.

Will you provide information useful to the community, or will you become information for sale yourself?

The lack of purity and integrity that governs social media, cost a second dive in terms of IPO and stock market value
With no control over Myanmar's hate speech outbreak on Facebook where the Buddhists were made life threats to the Muslim community, as well as citing Hitler as a solution to their problems.

Facebook, a global corporation had only one Burmese speaker working for them back in 2014, at some stage none, then two.

They now employ more than sixty with most of them based in the Dublin headquarters, the situation is still way out of hands in terms of hate speech in Myanmar.

There are 18 million active Facebook users in Myanmar out of a population of 50 million. The effort put to stop the haters using a handful of people is meager effort from such a renowned multi-million dollar marketing business offering to “connect the world”.

Accenture also got hired as a subcontractor in Kuala Lumpur to keep the costs low enough to fight hate speech based simply on reports as there is are not enough resources to control such hate speech.

Why? Simply because Facebook is the only form of the Internet known to the local population and its lack of filters perhaps the only solution for the local Muslim community of Myanmar is to use the deep web and onion routers to keep their anonymity and subsequently their lives.

Stopping them is not a task for humans, this requires automation and artificial intelligence which allegedly has been introduced after the scandals surfaced.

AI is effective against the propaganda that Daesh is posting detecting 94% of it with an accuracy of 99.995 %, within Facebook.

It catches 98% of the porno or nudity on Facebook.

Yet Zuckerberg claimed he would not use A.I to detect hate speech unless it was 99% reliable. That is a double standard.

Sure, the data patterns in linguistic nuances to identify hate speech will make the algorithm matching them less efficient.

It's not a good enough excuse not to use A.I to prevent hate speech when you are happy enough to filter all the porn that is bad for the digital marketing trade.

The Berkeley University has created a machine learning system people can use a reference data source.

That's found on https://www.adl.org

The United Nations, in September 2018 described Facebook as having enabled and facilitated the unrest and rising tensions in leading to loss of life of the Rohingya people.

Stalked to death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PtvIr2oiaE

Quantum computing is seen as science fiction and to an extent as implausible.

The same was true for other technologies. Tales of Jules Verne about silent and undetectable submarines or trips to the moon eventually emerged into our reality.

Such as space rockets that millionaire philanthropists can play with exploring outer space, or nuclear submarines owned by the major military powers used as Queens on a global chess grid.

Instead of speculating on the potential failure to implement a technology that is quantum computing, my approach is to embrace the research done and the existing results.

Two decades ago, quantum computing was a decade away.

This still stands true today, reminding me of one funniest piece of dialogues written in the post-Tarantino cinema industry.

Turkish: What's happening with them sausages, Charlie?

Sausage Charlie: Five minutes, Turkish.

Turkish: It was two minutes five minutes ago.

The above brilliantly demonstrates that human impatience prompts for fast results, and that's one thing the quantum computing has yet to deliver.

So far the only quantum computer prototypes that exist are bespoke solutions, with known faults and limitations.

Blogging or electronic gonzo journalism is a technology I seemingly missed out for almost a decade since it's inception.

I've never written a blog post prior to this day, I have however published my writings using traditional print houses.

My inspiration for a story came today 17th of November 2018 for two reasons. I had forgotten about the deadline, I realized I was late, on the day of the celebration of the uprising against of the military junta in Greece following the protests of students of Athens Polytechnic school which was harder for me to ignore.

It was a historic day for Greece, sending a message on the end of censorship and repression of thought in the country for seven years.

I, therefore, decided to start this blog series on Internet privacy and encryption, using a theoretically untraceable blog platform for one reason.

The Fear of trace-ability leads back to my original educational background, journalism that is.

I recall the top independent Greek journalist Sokratis Gkiolias being assassinated by several gunmen in 2010 that rang on the doorbell of his apartment block.

Semi-automatic rifles fired sixteen bullets of which fifteen hit their target.

Gkiolias was investigating and about to publish a report on corruption. This was achieved using digital networks to collect citizen information from local investigators, sometimes involving whistle-blowers disclosing such documents demonstrating private or government corrupted deals.

While his involvement was hardly a secret, nor it would be difficult for someone to find this address, a confirmation of his identity linked to the blog was made public only following his death on the Google Blogspot named “Troktiko” which translates in “Rodent”

The challenge the blog had was to reach a bigger audience than the traditional media had, and they succeeded with the help of SEO experts.

Over sleepless nights the ever growing blog became a threat to the real-life version of the Ministry of Truth that traditional Greek media was.

Some journalists got fired from their jobs in traditional media accused of collaborating with Gkiolas later joining the blog officially.

They wrote online and kept contact between them exclusively over email or Skype, as traditional cell were suspected to be wiretapped.

Journalists that had gotten a comfortable “corporate” type of job, exercising the wrong kind of journalism in mainstream Greek media saw that the views started exceeding 10 million clicks per day, leaving the major news portal of mainstream media of in.gr with 6 million clicks. For those unfamiliar with Greek demographics, the population is about 10 million people living in Greece, and about 10 million in the diaspora.

The site owned by the top press group “Lambrakis group”, running two of the most reputable newspapers got surpassed by a rogue journalist.

The life of Sokratis was claimed by a so-called ultra leftists terrorist organization called “Sect of Revolutionaries”.

However, following a cross investigation on shooting in a nightclub of Aya Napa in Cyprus, the ballistics reports show that the same weapons would have been used by a group of hired killers serving some local gangland interests.

Confusing at least.

This correlation was brought to light by a Greek magazine a few years after the events. The published story also shows there are no records of collaboration between the Greek and Cypriot police on the matter.

Gkiolias was caught asleep. Thanks to a make belief call of distress about his car being on fire.

In Greek, the word “Έξυπνος” ex- hypnos describes intelligence by the subtraction of sleep (hypnos) thus one being awake and alert.

Traditional Greek media still tend to repeat, word by word, a police report without investigating themselves.

The recent assassination of an antifascist artist Pavlos Fissas in 2013, was originally credited to football and hooligan violence, according to of course to a police report.

This report ran on TV for several days. Eventually, another investigation confirmed links to elected members of a neo-fascist party later convicted for his murder.

Troktiko Blogspot was an outsider since it investigated before reporting.

Too bad Gkiolias did not encrypt his online activity and identity.

So let's look back at the emerging technology that is quantum computing.

The estimate of what quantum computing can deliver seems to vary depending on how you measure those results.

Is it the democratization of the technology? Or the simple reality of it?

The first cloud offering of quantum computing over SSH from IBM is a sign that the technology has hit the market and is present.

In today's world most emails are sent without personal encryption , and even if someday PGP encryption is understood by mainstream audiences quantum computing will already be able to break this encryption.

Sending a message with a truly random key is a concrete advantage to enable the next level of digital privacy.

In the late 90's the NSA made attempts to introduce regulations on encryption in the booming software industry providing 40bits encryption algorithms.

It's alarming to see, this was simply to ensure the NSA's activities could not be eavesdropped on.

Large financial deals were revealed by Edward Snowden involving the RSA software company making back-doors available to the NSA over a 10 million dollars contract.

After cryptographic systems reached 256bit algorithms we then find out that without encrypting the handshake(TLS) communications stand no chance of being secure.

More recently messaging platforms like Telegram which offer a different type of personal encryption and message volatility, have been accused to be used by terrorists and consequently blocked by some governments including the Russian Federation, China, and Iran after the refusal to give the master encryption keys away.

The common practice of tech giants is usually the opposite.

They stand as proud collaborating patriotic vigilantes.

Apple, Facebook, Whatsapp, Google and other social media platforms acting as Agent Smith offer legal pipeline accessing to your data.

Authorities are demonizing and banning encryption technologies while still not being able to stop terrorist attacks.

Because they spy on everyone but fail to listen.

The simplest of examples :

The DGSE (French external intelligence services) received a telephone call from a foreign embassy Morocco, of which one of the 2015 Paris attacks perpetrators held a passport from.

The call was notifying the French that one of their “dangerous” citizens transited to Greece via Turkey.

The information was discredited as Casablanca isn't an official ally.

Internal intelligence, missed out on this information and the opportunity to keep track of the perpetrators.

None of that information related to the perpetrators was encrypted, yet terrorists went through Europe without being tracked at all, and only used traditional GSM burner phones.

This proves that digital encrypted communication is not key to the success of a terrorist attack, and yet authorities try to prevent the public from using them.

Regardless if you are transmitting sensitive material or not, encryption is elementary to protect your intellectual property and privacy.

Quantum computing as a service allows software developers to access an API which can provide truly random keys for encryption.

Any encryption system that ever existed, has initially been deemed as un-hackable.

The NSA had already scheduled to build quantum computers to that effect, some documents were sent to the Washington Post.

The European Union has blocked content related to this so unless you use an encrypted VPN network to fake the origin of your Internet connection you are restricted from reading information online found in this article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-seeks-to-build-quantum-computer-that-could-crack-most-types-of-encryption/2014/01/02/8fff297e-7195-11e3-8def-a33011492df2_story.html?utm_term=.cde9d266624f

I am a subscriber of the Washington Post, and I can't read their sources. Why banning or prohibiting such information is considered an acceptable policy? What if I anonymously decide to reproduce this information in Ireland? Will it be considered illegal yet ethical considering information on public affairs is expected to be made public?

Today cryptography is a race comparable to the space race or arms race.

Having myself been active in the computer industry long enough to be considered a senior analyst, I can safely testify that most organizations or individuals seldom consider encryption or secrets and passwords management as a must.

It's proven that is only a matter of time for a system to be hacked whether that was called Enigma or plain old SSL

The aim of this blog post is to prove my ability in a computer class and invite developers to kick-start they quantum experience by hooking up on a public API and to help the general public understand the advantages and the ease of using encryption.

The fact that we know little about practical implementations of quantum computing is simple.

The ones that had the funds, research capacity in terms of human resources and infrastructure have not revealed how they achieved computing in 49 to 72 quantum bits or qubits.

The challenge of this technology is not about the spy game. We safely can guess this will be the primordial use of quantum computing in the years to follow

Famous scientists like Dyakonov seem disenchanted by quantum computing as it would most certainly fail to allow progress in medicine.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/the-case-against-quantum-computing

Let's look at the differences between traditional computing and quantum.

A bit represents zero or one.

A qubit represents a one a zero or any superposition of the two

The superposition allows a combinatoric power that amplifies the combinations needed to reach the result of a calculation.

Instead of linear electronic wiring, using quantum mechanics we short-circuit the calculation by guessing our way to the solution.

This achieved with equipment capable of firing photons, controlling electromagnetic radiation and keeping the main CPU at a temperature just about around absolute zero.

Way colder than space! Yikes.

The worse part is that this information lives for about one second. It's getting better, it used to be just a few hundred microseconds...

Damn, this stuff seems as hard as writing information on magnetic tapes and capturing the airwaves to make a microphone recording hardware.

The main weakness of quantum computing is that they are neither fault tolerant, nor big enough to compute accurately using known algorithms.

Traditional encryption involving VPN tunnels, SSL encryption or two-factor authentication failed to protect banks from making cyber heists.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/mastermind-behind-eur-1-billion-cyber-bank-robbery-arrested-in-spain

This leads to my conclusion if you can encrypt your data and preserve your anonymity, do it using different keys for each task.

There are many guides on how to encrypt your mobile phone, that's the best place to start it is your most vulnerable device compared to a laptop or desktop.

I will close this story by linking to a more useful and tech-friendly site describing the steps needed to encrypt your mobile data.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjex48/how-to-securely-get-rid-of-your-devices

Encrypting your phone ensures your address book cannot be easily leaked even if lost or stolen.

It's not enough to avoid promoting your ideas, or lifestyle on non-encrypted networks or worse on social media that sell data to political campaigns.

We've forgotten that privacy is a human right, modern humans are led to believe they can become fashion stars or public celebrities by posting online whatever they eat, see or feel.

I hope this post was informative and will motivate you to encrypt your digital messages, one way or another.