Apostle to the Hackers

[lilmissnever]

It's summertime, which means now is the season when I go to hacker conferences. In July, I went out among the open source hackers in Spain. August is the time for Black Hat, DEFCON, and BSides in Las Vegas. My co-workers have gone off to OHM to camp with hackers in the Netherlands. And in a few weeks, I will visit the hinterlands of Columbus, Ohio

Comments

[elusis]

strong encryption for ordinary people is our only hope.
No kidding. I have been so "arg, ow, my head, someone is WRONG on the INTERNET" this week because the Smugly Superior Geek Squad is out in full force, talking up each others' arses about how all that needs to happen to make up for Lavabit et al. is for everyone to just roll their own mail server. Which of course they don't really think everyone will do, but by "everyone" they mean "everyone important," and the rest of us plebes can just live or die by the ol' "if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide" prayer. STABBING PAINS BEHIND MY EYES, ugh

[ilcylic]

I am considering writing a post about how therapists should be concerned as hell about this shit because if someone searches up a bunch of therapists who are all on Kink Aware Professionals and then they start dialing a bunch of them, it's pretty safe to guess that they're a kinky person with some kind of mental or relationship problem, except that I don't want to freak potential clients out.

Metadata. That shit will fuck you up.

Or get the therapy field any more in a Luddite frenzy about how we should all be keeping records in shorthand and only correspond with clients via snail mail using flash paper and heiroglyphics, and any of us who give out email addresses are just begging for a HIPAA lawsuit etc.

I dunno. I kinda wouldn't mind the therapy field being a bit more Luddite, so that when the FedGov wants to roll all the records into a huge database they at least have to do all the data entry themselves.

[elusis]

Most of us aren't anywhere near the kind of electronic record keeping that hospitals and doctor's offices are being incentivized to switch to. I'd just like to be able to use email to say to a client "can we meet half an hour earlier?" or "here's that book I mentioned" without a bunch of Cassandras predicting jail time over it or whatever.

[lilmissnever]

I have pretty much told all of the Roll Your Own Mail server squad to die in a fire. And I'm saying this as someone who administered mail servers professionally for half a dozen years. I think that this is an option that people should have, and it's certainly better if we make it easier for people to do this, but it's only going to fix a very small subset of the larger problem, which is secure communications for non-technical people.

I actually talk a lot about doctors and teachers and therapists as vulnerable groups that need to be concerned about keeping their personal lives away from potential Googling patients and students. A lot of people in Internet Freedom Land think about the government as part of their threat model, but they forget that this isn't the only threat out there.

[frandroid]

Apostle to the Hackers

And thy livejoernal be thy gospel.

[lilmissnever]

This is actually one of the places where my preaching is minimal. I am a bore at parties.

[ilcylic]

Whoa. Now I have a picture of the headsquid in Leia-buns.

[lilmissnever]

I do not have enough headsquid at this time. It's more of a headcuttlefish.