On Mon, 9 Jul 2018 at 20:47:01 +0200
marc <marcxdv@???> wrote:
> Hello Jimmy
>
> > Today Linux is pretty much owned by the NSA, including it's developers,
> > not many educated eyes out there anymore to spot and report malware.
> > Things have changed.
>
> So there is a nice poster around with a grumpy cat saying
> "The NSA broke my internet, so I am building a GNU one". I
> understand the sentiment.
>
> However: Loads of eyes are looking at the kernel, and if
> I were to trust my intuition, I'd say that the back doors
> are more likely (or more numerous) in the processor,
> its microcode, the graphics card firmware and the ACPI
> nonsense.
>
> So: Coding a new kernel is probably one of the more expensive
> security exercises. Rebuilding from source is cheap, but it
> is unclear if it would remove the backdoors (keywords "On
> trusting trust", duckduckgo them, yandex it).
>
> However: The big security improvement you - Jimmy Johnson
> aka field.engineer@??? can make without requiring any
> special skills is to stop using gmail.
>
> Google has pioneered many of the major privacy abuses:
>
> - the overt scanning of people's mail via gmail
> - the gathering of access point data via its streetview cars
> (got them into trouble in France, the rest of the world
> didn't want to notice)
> - its worldwide web tracking effort via google anal itics,
> fonts.googleapis, doubleclick.nyet
> - the major spyware known as chrome and its associated
> corruption of mozilla
Plus running the same dirty tricks that in the past M$ played against
Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox and Opera to make it's own browser Explorer look
better: serving bad web pages based on the requesting client:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/07/08/2241237/firefox-and-the-4-year-battle-to-have-google-to-treat-it-as-a-first-class-citizen
"After years of requests, meetings, and to and fro, it has hit a
point where the developers of Firefox are experimenting by
manipulating the user agent string in its nightly development builds
to trick Google into thinking that Firefox Mobile is a Chrome
browser. Not only does Google's search page degrade for Firefox on
Android, but some new properties like Google Flights have
occasionally taken to outright blocking of the browser."
"Do no evil", right?
Yeah, sure!
Alessandro