People be going bananas right now. This clump of rock, mostly spherical, somewhat volcanic, with huge bodies of water, is completing yet another lap around its heat source which, thanks to Isaac Newton, can keep it in orbit. Or something.
And this is a big thing.
People down under go along with it all - it's originally an effort to scare away the demons of winter darkness. But they have summer down under right now. Aren't they the lucky ones.
Some of the people in the crowds at Times Square have been on location since daybreak. Standing there. They can't go away or they'll lose their place. Can they hold their pee for more than half a day, asks one commentator. Food and drink?
Our British Air booking agent told us what he could remember of Hogmanay - the ones he was pretty sure he'd attended. Don't book any flights right after New Year's, he told us - it's going to take me several days to get home. But I'll get there sooner or later.
FYI: Scots don’t eat their cornflakes with milk. They eat them with single malt.
Everyone stands shoulder to shoulder on Princes Street - you gotta have a long straw to reach your pint, he explained.
But look what we have here. It looks like an old copy of Xnews. Ten years old. Looks like it was perhaps never sent out. Composed back when Snowden was doing a runner to Hong Kong.
Whatever you're doing, we wish you the very best.
X N E W S - F R O M - R I X S T E P
What follows is an (at least) ten year old issue of Xnews. We’ve sprinkled in comments when necessary. Section headings such as '[0000]' were to make things user-friendlier for jumping back and forth, as we insisted on sending text-only.
PART ONE
[0000] 17 Years
This is the 17th year of Xnews. Yes you read that right. We've had more readers than PC World newsletters. But we've been away for a while. We seem to be back now. But we'll see how well things hold up. The world is still changing.
Anyway: it's good to be back. And it's good to have you back.
We'll start slow.
[0001] NSA Blowout
For those of you living in a cave without Internet access: things have been fine. For those of you who are connected and thereby able to read this: things have been not so fine.
The revelations of one Edward JOSEPH Snowden have shown us that nothing is sacred anymore. And that if we want secure communications, we have to encrypt. And even at that point we're not secure. We have to learn to stay under the radar.
1. The nine corporations outed in the PRISM leaks should be avoided at all costs.
AOL Apple Facebook Google Microsoft PalTalk Skype Yahoo YouTube
2. Don't count on there being only nine.
3. Choose a webmail provider *outside* the US (preferably outside North America). Do not choose anything in Sweden as their FRA will harvest your traffic and send it to the NSA.
4. Leave no data trails. Always encrypt with GPG/PGP.
[Try ProtonMail or Tutanota. We recommend not paying for a subscription, as you don't want any data trails. We've found Tutanota to at times engage in 'bait and switch'. The ProtonMail interface is mostly stable. Both offer on-disk encryption on their servers. Tutanota is in Germany, ProtonMail's in Switzerland, and word has it Langley can't get into Switzerland, whatever 'word has it’ means.]
Do not swallow the Schmidt mantra that if you haven't done something wrong, you have nothing to fear. Were that the case, the NSA wouldn't be scared either.
The danger is in having data out there. Period. Data that can at any time be used against you. By anyone. For any purpose. So stay under the radar.
[0002] Mavericks
The cat had exactly nine lives. Good riddance to the cat. The next version of OS X shall be named after a location in California where there were good surfing waves. One of the surfers to discover the area had a dog named Maverick.
The Top Gun jokes have begun.
We don't believe in getting hysterical about coming features and beta versions. Things change a lot before a final release and there's plenty of time to catch up once the dust settles.
We have however seen another trend we've tried to do something about already now.
https://rixstep.com/2/2/20130704,00.shtml
We love sheets. No question. To the clever eye they're proof of the superiority of OS X in a world where sheeple UIs still go the way of clunky Microsoft.
But we don't need to ruin perfectly good code and undermine legacy language definitions just because a few lacking programmers can't handle APIs that the rest of the world's had no issues with for 20 years. Apple engineers looking ridiculous.
[0003] MacKeeper
Do all those MacKeeper popups annoy you too? Here's the lowdown on the company behind it. And here's a file you can use to rid it from your system.
[The FTP embedded link is no more. No further info.]
https://rixstep.com/2/20130621,00.shtml
[0004] File Management Remedial
Here's a quick brusher-upper course in OS X/Unix file management.
https://rixstep.com/2/20130429,00.shtml
[0005] A Word from the Brunerd
Joel Bruner's a Macintosh Systems Administrator for a marketing conglomerate with 250+ Macs in his charge. His blog is found at https://brunerd.com. Here's a bit from Joel on 'cfprefsd'. It's scary stuff about the once so rock solid defaults system.
https://rixstep.com/2/2/20130225,00.shtml
[0006] The Haves and the Don't Haves
Unwarranted complexity also makes administration more difficult or even fruitless. And as personal computer users are ipso facto their own administrators, it makes their lives more difficult as well.
The following is a short review of how Unix file systems work.
https://rixstep.com/2/20130524,00.shtml
[0007] Guerilla CLIX
This one is still getting the hits 10 months on.
https://rixstep.com/2/20120907,00.shtml
[0008] Don't Mess With Defaults!
This is a real shocker. A real shocker. People don't dare change app settings.
https://rixstep.com/1/1/20130711,00.shtml
[0009] A Word From Our Sponsors
It's still the best. It will have to be. By definition. Redefines 'robust'. Unfortunately it's all alone on the platform.
Here's the *FREE* Xfile Test Drive. Note the real deal has a few additional features not found here. Such as the new 'sort by extension' option, rather radical for a Unix platform.
https://rixstep.com/1/20121229,00.shtml
PART TWO
[0010] More Serious Stuff
Seriously now. But hopefully not too seriously. Back to the NSA a second. What's going on, how do we have anything to worry about, what should we do?
First: are most of us in any immediate danger?
Judging from what Snowden's already revealed: no. But it is true that the NSA are collecting literally everything. They collect it and they store it. All of it.
[0011] Semantic Forests
Here's a piece on what the NSA do with voice communications. Note that this technology is already as old as the hills. It was uncovered by the Assange/Dreyfus duo back in 1999. Bruce Schneier comments:
'One of the holy grails of the NSA is the ability automatically to search through voice traffic. They would have expended considerable effort on this capability, and this indicates it has been fruitful.'
https://rixstep.com/1/20130614,00.shtml
Here's a link that explains a bit how it works. The first part is from the patent application for what would become known as 'Semantic Forests'. Skip instead to the part with the header '2. Semantic Forests'.
https://rixstep.com/2/20130614,00.shtml
So basically what they do - in addition to implementing voice recognition far beyond what Apple or anyone else can do today - is whittle conversations down to root forms of words, then collate and coordinate.
That old line by Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State comes to mind: say (or write) any of the high priority keywords and you get on their radar.
So you may be OK if you haven't done anything wrong. But as Snowden said, it doesn't matter. For if you get on their radar, they can come after you anyway.
[0012] What Do We Do Now?
Second: is there anything we can do about what's already happened?
The answer here has to again be 'no'. They already have the data. But considering they will continue to collect until shut down, it might be prudent to stop them at this point. It's therefore important to encrypt and stay off the main arteries of the information highways.
Most international traffic passes through North America. Most Russian traffic passes through Sweden. The NSA mostly have the main hubs in North America under control, and Sweden's FRA can now pass data on to the NSA, thanks to their 'Lex Orwell' (the so-called FRA law). The technologies are similar.
Then we have the UK's GCHQ's Tempora, currently the most comprehensive harvesting system anywhere. Then similar systems in France, Germany, who knows where.
Stay off the big information highways. Exit your browser regularly and get rid of all cookies. A good script for OS X is great to have. You should exit and restart Safari, then remove the remaining cookies, then exit and run the script.
These are the Safari locations you want to get to on OS X.
/var/folders/*/*/*/com.apple.Safari
~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/SafeBrowsing.db
~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage\ Previews/*
~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/*
~/Library/Caches/Safari/*
~/Library/Safari/Databases
~/Library/Safari/Downloads.plist
~/Library/Safari/History*
~/Library/Safari/LastSession.plist
~/Library/Safari/LocalStorage/*
~/Library/Safari/TopSites.plist
Run those targets against 'rm -fr' and send any burps to 2>/dev/null.
We have a script for Chrome as well, but we don't touch Chrome anymore: it's way too invasive. And Google are amongst the 'nine' known to collaborate with the NSA.
[0013] Staying Under The Radar
Third: how do we stay under the radar?
Are you on Facebook? GET OFF. NOW.
Get a webmail account you can trust.
A webmail account you can trust does not include anything from Apple, Google, or Microsoft. Or any of the 'nine'. Or anything that looks like a prospective target. You need to get out of North America. Find some small place somewhere.
You'll have to find the sites for yourself. If we suggest a good safe webmail site, the NSA might get wind of it, and then what will happen?
There are two ways to go about getting secure webmail.
Find a site that doesn't require an external verification.
Find a site that does require one.
You might find sites in category '2' are nicer to use. No worry: find one in category '1' first, sign up, then use it as reference for your 'nice site' in category '2'.
The important thing is there should be no data trails.
Encourage your friends to use the same scheme and same sites. Mail going from one account to another on the same site will rarely get onto the Internet. That makes you safer still.
And get GPG/PGP and send all your mail like that.
[You don’t need GPG/PGP if you communicate with others on the same secure server (with encryption). Odds are your mail will never leave their servers.]
[0014] Always Use Tor
Always use Tor for accessing your new webmail sites - especially when signing up.
[Or get a VPN.]
Some of these webmail services offer up your sender IP for no good reason, so be sure to send mail to yourself so you can see. And always use Tor to send the mail. No one will be able to trace you.
Opt out of static IP with your ISP if you can. Keep track of what your IP is. Some providers change the IP regularly. If yours never changes, then cold boot from time to time. And then check your IP again.
The following script will give you both your gateway and your public IP.
printf 'Gateway: ';netstat -nr|grep default|awk '{print $2}';printf ' Public: ';curl -s https://checkip.dyndns.org|awk '{print $6}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="<"}{print $1}'
[That server might not exist anymore but there surely are others.]
Perhaps make that into a CLIX command...
CLIX is free. Get it here.
[FFFF] Concluding
Have a good fun summer! Don't be paranoid. But don't be stupid either.
All the best,
Rick/John/Petra
----------------------------------------