Government snooping, backdoors and #necessaryhashtags

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

You were complaining about FF not giving you the option to turn JS off.

NoScript offers you the choice to turn off JS (by selecting all the relevant disabling options).

Therefore, NoScript offers you a capability that you currently do not have. It is not useless.

In fact, NoScript users would not have been impcted by the FF JS-setting stupidity at all, because with NoScript one must *enable* JS in FF generally [which FF now "does for you"], but NoScript overrides that by default except for user-designated sites where he wants JS to be on.

It is my experience that for most sites I visit, JS-off is preferable, but there is a handful where it is genuinely needed. NoScript also makes changing the site-specific settings on the fly easy, no deeply buried menus to access.

[kladner]

I greatly value three add-ons to FF: NoScript, Ghostery, and Adblock Plus. I use the "Temporarily Allow" function in NoScript a lot, unless I use a site a lot, and blocking causes content to be lost. Even then, the more scripts a site has, the less inclined I am to visit it.

Ghostery lets you say Yea or Nay to cross-linking, and block beacons.

Adblock does just what its name says. It, too, lets you Pause blocking, or Whitelist some or all of a site. I am rarely harassed by dancing animations in ads, though some blinking things still get through.

[ewmayer]

Cheap software helped Edward Snowden plunder NSA secrets

NEW YORK: Intelligence officials investigating how Edward J Snowden gained access to a huge trove of the country's most highly classified documents say they have determined that he used inexpensive and widely available software to "scrape" the National Security Agency's networks, and he kept at it even after he was briefly challenged by agency officials.

Using "Web crawler" software designed to search, index and back up a website, Snowden "scraped data out of our systems" while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official. "We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence," the official said. The process, he added, was "quite automated".

The findings are striking because the NSA's mission includes protecting the nation's most sensitive military and intelligence computer systems from cyberattacks, especially the sophisticated attacks that emanate from Russia and China. Snowden's "insider attack," by contrast, was hardly sophisticated and should have been easily detected, investigators found.

Moreover, Snowden succeeded nearly three years after the WikiLeaks disclosures, in which military and State Department files, of far less sensitivity, were taken using similar techniques.

Obviously NSA just doesn't "have the resources" it needs here - let's double their secret budget, I'm sure they'll put the money to good use.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Cheap software helped Edward Snowden plunder NSA secrets

Obviously NSA just doesn't "have the resources" it needs here - let's double their secret budget, I'm sure they'll put the money to good use.

ROFLMFAO... Snowden used "wget"; "free" (read: Open Source) software which anyone can download, audit, and use.

The NSA had their pants somewhere around their ankles, and trusted anyone within their network....

[cheesehead]

NSA is a bureaucracy; some things get left off its to-do list.

[retina]

Originally Posted by retina

My guess is that [FF] are getting greedy and advertising interests have paid them to ...

... do whatever they can to force advertisements into your brain. Click on the BS meter to visit the link:




I thought this thread was about snooping and spying. Who changed the topic?

[chappy]

http://www.dailydot.com/news/dan-mcc...t-nsa-lawsuit/


Show your support!

[ewmayer]

Glenn Greenwald's latest piece uncovers another internet conspiracy fact: How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

Note that First Look has also signed up a journalist-gadfly familiar to regular readers of the MET thread series.

[Xyzzy]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ecause-of-nda/

[Xyzzy]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...lubs-and-more/

[Xyzzy]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...way-worse-now/