Camaraderie, adventure, danger, the desire to prove oneself all play their part too, as with any army. And, perhaps more than most regular armies, love affairs gone wrong propel many into the arms of the Legion. – Robert Twigger in The Legend of the French Foreign Legion
The CIA didn’t break Signal or WhatsApp… despite what you’ve heard. The agency might be able to break into your phone, but files released today show no ability to intercept encrypted chats before they arrive there. There’s been one particularly misleading claim repeated throughout coverage of CIA documents released by WikiLeaks today: that the agency’s in-house hackers “bypassed” the encryption used by popular secure-chat software like Signal and WhatsApp. It doesn’t....
Free software is software that respects users’ freedom and community. It’s not about price. It’s libre, not gratis. With any program, there are two possibilities: either the users control the program, or the program controls the users. When the users control the program, that’s free software—they control the things they do with it, and thus it respects their freedom and their community. If they don’t have full control over it, then it’s user-subjugating, non-free proprietary software—the program controls the users, and the program’s owners control the program, so it becomes an instrument of unjust power for the owner over the users....
Facebook does not connect people together; Facebook connects people to Facebook, Inc. Encouraging individual sovereignty and a healthy commons Abstract: Facebook’s business model is to be the man in the middle; to track every move you, your family, and your friends make, to store all that information indefinitely, and continuously analyse it to understand you better in order to exploit you by manipulating you for financial and political gain. Facebook isn’t a social network, it is a scanner that digitises human beings....
By James Rickards - Daily Reckoning China’s problems are not entirely external and are not limited to the new Trump administration. China is now embroiled in an internal political struggle around the efforts of President Xi to make himself the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. President Xi’s first five-year term expires in March 2018. He is certain to be elected to a second term, but he has so far deviated from the script by not designating any potential successors for a smooth transition in 2023....
Google as a fortune teller Governmental control is nothing compared to what Google is up to. The company is creating a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation we should call surveillance capitalism. Is there nothing we can do? Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010. (Back then each company was worth less than 200 billion....
When I share stuff on Facebook… Public Friends and the CIA ✔ Only me & the CIA Only the CIA Close friends and the CIA See all lists…
… or why it’s useless to have the most secure crypto system in the world, when using non-free and untrustworthy tools and libraries to implement it. tl;dr: There is a “backdoor” in Signal nobody cares about, only Google can use it. – ~ larma/blog
From Reddit