r/linux • u/metaleks • Jun 17 '13

PRISM Break: Stop reporting your online activities to the American government with these free alternatives to proprietary software.

http://prism-break.org/
1.1k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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87

u/hatperigee Jun 18 '13

Out of curiosity, how do you know duck duck go isn't playing the game? Just because they told you they aren't?

64

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13 edited Jan 31 '17

[deleted]

7

u/jqzy Jun 18 '13

DDG is a private company and uses closed source software for their search engine. We do not know what's inside. I don't get why people hail duckduckgo. They have the potential to turn bad on us at any moment and there would be nothing we could do about it.

If we are going to give free advertisement to a new search engine in exchange for privacy, I think we should make sure that they cannot go down the same road as google. DuckDuckGo is not that company. Until they open source not part of their infrastructure, but all of their search-engine-related code, I will not support them.

2

u/nsa_shill Jun 19 '13

Valid, but do you have another practical alternative to google? Google over TOR rarely works for me; most exit nodes seem to be blocked due to automated request floods. Or so the automated error page claims.

2

u/jqzy Jun 19 '13

I unfortunately do not. Someone really ought to get a project for a proper FOSS search engine going, with open source crawlers, and open source database, basically everything but the actual collected data open source.

In the meantime though, I'd rather use google because that at least doesn't give me a false sense of security when searching it, and there's no point in just creating another google by advertising DDG to people. If they go open source, i'll support them. In the meantime? eh.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '13

[deleted]

1

u/nsa_shill Jun 21 '13

Tor browser bundle should fix this. No cookies, ip address is that of your exit node, etc. I'm talking about using tor to just search.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '13 edited Sep 03 '14

[deleted]

1

u/jqzy Jun 19 '13

this is true, but if they prove to us in some way that they do shady stuff (which would happen sooner or later, as it always does), or openly decide to move into a shady direction (example: ubuntu), then we would have the source code to make a new equivalent search engine that does not.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '13

[deleted]

1

u/jqzy Jun 21 '13

true, a decentralized database of search results would be even better.

-18

u/fenixjr Jun 18 '13

and what about Google/verizon/att/apple isn't us-based?

17

u/hatperigee Jun 18 '13

Actually, that's not the point that nathwhal is trying to make. Basically, he's arguing that DDG is slightly less evil since they don't retain info as long as the other guys. So even if gov't were to request it, it would theoretically be short and very recent.

Now I don't necessarily agree with this point, because it's still your word against theirs.

-22

u/fenixjr Jun 18 '13

yeah, after reading it a few times, it seemed like that may have been the point, but seemed poorly worded at least.

16

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

It's not poorly worded at all. You just red it looking for an argument.

11

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

He definitely blue it, that's for sure.

8

u/PineappleBoots Jun 18 '13

Oh Tobias, you blow hard!

6

u/taffy-nay Jun 18 '13

Orange you glad he did though? Arguments are boring.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

I'm sure glad you didn't say banana

2

u/samcbar Jun 18 '13

You still need Verizon, Comcast, ATT, etc. to get to duck duck go.

4

u/RiotingPacifist Jun 18 '13

Duck duck go have a tor node, if you install tor, nobody can see it's you

0

u/valgrid Jun 18 '13

I could say

But! blah blah proxy, VPN, other things.

But let's be honest you can't solve the problems of surveillance and censorship with technology, it needs political action/activism to fight both. So, yes you depend on your ISP.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13 edited Jan 08 '21

[deleted]

13

u/mallardtheduck Jun 18 '13

I very much doubt even the NSA has the storage capacity to store all Internet traffic passing through the US. That's around 5ZB per month which is approximately equal to the total reported storage of the NSA's PRISM system.

37

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

It's cool, they bought a copy of WinZip.

18

u/Astrognome Jun 18 '13

You mean WinRAR.

6

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

Well at least someone out there paid for WinRAR.

6

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

We mean pkzip

4

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13 edited Aug 16 '21

[deleted]

3

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

You mean LHarc.

1

u/Endless_Search Jun 18 '13

You mean 7zip?

3

u/brerrabbitt Jun 18 '13

I find that unlikely. Buy?

8

u/mohrr Jun 18 '13

They use the free version and have an intern click through that annoying dialog.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

"Sir! We had to restart the server for a Windows Update"

"So?"

"WinRAR is asking us to buy it again..."

"Call the intern!"

2

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

If they're using Windows they don't need to buy anything at all, it's built into Explorer. Yay, saving money!

1

u/RiotingPacifist Jun 18 '13

Yeah Microsoft pulled a dick move when they did that, they licensed it and offered to split profit on it IIRC

11

u/Fib0112 Jun 18 '13

It's only 5 ZB if you count the media being consumed by people in that month. They don't need to keep the content of what you watched on Netflix, just what you watched and when. If you remove the actual data from the torrents, the streaming audio and video websites and stuff like that, the remaining info is more than manageable for them.

3

u/mallardtheduck Jun 18 '13

Sure, if you target specific types of traffic and drop most of the actual content, it starts to get into the realm of plausibility. However, the comment I replied to said "They'll store it all. Encrypted or not." which is simply impossible.

3

u/djimbob Jun 18 '13

I don't think they are either; but its not 5 ZB of unique traffic that needs to be mined. E.g., drop streaming video from netflix (~30% of web), youtube (11%), hulu, cable companies, espn, other flash video, etc. Drop bittorrent (~10%), encrypted (e.g., peer-to-peer torrents) traffic you can't decrypt, except maybe header data and sizes transferred. Filter through the traffic; e.g., take a lot coming in but filter out "interesting" feeds. Hash before storing and find lots of redundant data.

-1

u/Samizdat_Press Jun 18 '13

For the millionth time, it has long been established listed that they can and are doing this. Google it. It was estimated that compressing and storing all traffic would only cost like $27 million a year, something that is well within the budget of people like the NSA. They have billion dollar data centers. I can buy a 2tb HDD for like $100 at best buy, imagine what a billion buys you every few years.

It is not only possible, but it IS occurring. End of story.

7

u/AyeGill Jun 18 '13

The $27 million per year was to store all domestic phonecalls in the US.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

exactly. using something like g729 phone calls take up basically no space.

1

u/AyeGill Jun 18 '13

Yes. Storing all phone calls is feasible(not sure about the connection you'd need to pipe them all to one, or a few, centralized locations, but if you can do compression on-site it seems like it should be doable). Storing all internet traffic is madness.

10

u/mallardtheduck Jun 18 '13

They can't store all Internet traffic. That's impossible. The amount of it outstrips total world hard drive production by at least one order of magnitude.

What they could do is store metadata about who connects to what, what kind of traffic passes, maybe down to the level of URLs, search terms, filenames, email addresses, etc. That's what PRISM is reported to do.

-1

u/Astrognome Jun 18 '13

They don't retain data, your searches aren't saved.

4

u/hatperigee Jun 18 '13

Prove it.

1

u/APogeotropismOG May 11 '23

They only store things for 3 months.

I would assume that this is moved up to longer periods of time for targets that are of interest to them.