<story><title>How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour</title><url>https://medium.freecodecamp.com/tor-signal-and-beyond-a-law-abiding-citizens-guide-to-privacy-1a593f2104c3#.ng2gfv9yj</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>njharman</author><text>The article is very slightly more nuanced but the conceptss the title purports is &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;DANGEROUSLY INCOMPETENT&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; for any security expert &amp;#x2F; discussion &amp;#x2F; context.&lt;p&gt;1) idea that security is something you check off and be done with is dangerously wrong. Security must be continuous, must be updated, reviewed, etc.&lt;p&gt;2) idea that you can &amp;quot;encrypt&amp;quot; [secure] your entire life is ludacris and leads to many dangerous security misconceptions. You don&amp;#x27;t even have control of your entire life, let alone ability to secure it. Most the data on you is owned by others and not even available to you to secure.  &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;The world is not private or secure&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;.  Everyone needs to know and think about this when they are tweeting, sexting, talking shit about future president and then being surprised when SS comes to investigate.&lt;p&gt;3) idea that security is either on&amp;#x2F;off, a binary, that you can be secure or not. Is False and leads to extremely poor security choices, over&amp;#x2F;under securing. Nothing is secure. &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;There is not such thing as SECURE&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;. Things lie on a gradient of security from easy to break to impractically difficult. Things on the impractical to break technically end are still broken due to social engineering, externalities (power consumption of cpu), poor practices surrounding item, etc. Security is making the effort required to get an item greater than the value of getting the item.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour</title><url>https://medium.freecodecamp.com/tor-signal-and-beyond-a-law-abiding-citizens-guide-to-privacy-1a593f2104c3#.ng2gfv9yj</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>schoen</author><text>[Copied from my comment on a duplicate post -- there seems to be random tracking junk at the end of the URL that prevents these from being detected as duplicates!]&lt;p&gt;I appreciate how practical these tips are and I hope people will follow them.&lt;p&gt;I have two quarrels with this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Andy Grove was a Hungarian refugee who escaped communism [... and] encourages us to be paranoid.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that Grove was referring to business strategy, not communications security.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Congratulations — you can now use the internet with peace of mind that it’s virtually impossible for you to be tracked.&lt;p&gt;Something I&amp;#x27;ve seen over and over again is that Tor users tend to have a poor understanding of what Tor protects and doesn&amp;#x27;t protect. The original Tor paper said that Tor (or any technology of its kind) can&amp;#x27;t protect you against someone who can see both sides of the connection -- including just their &lt;i&gt;timing&lt;/i&gt;. Sometimes, some adversaries can see both sides of a person&amp;#x27;s connection. As The Grugq and others have documented, Tor users like Eldo Kim and Jeremy Hammond were caught by law enforcement because someone was monitoring the home and university networks from which they connected to Tor and saw that they used Tor at exactly the same time or times as the suspects did. (In Hammond&amp;#x27;s case, recurrently, confirming law enforcement&amp;#x27;s hypothesis about his identity; in Kim&amp;#x27;s case, only once, but apparently he was the only person at the university who used Tor at that specific time.)&lt;p&gt;As law enforcement has &lt;i&gt;actually identified Tor users&lt;/i&gt; in these cases, I think people need to understand that Tor is not magic and it protects certain things and not other things. In fact, I helped to make a chart about this a few years ago:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.eff.org&amp;#x2F;pages&amp;#x2F;tor-and-https&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.eff.org&amp;#x2F;pages&amp;#x2F;tor-and-https&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;This chart was meant to show why using HTTPS is important when you use Tor, but it also points to other possible attacks (including an end-to-end timing correlation attack, represented in the chart by NSA observing the connection at two different places on the network) because many people in the picture know &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt; about what the user is doing.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been a fan of Tor for many years, but I think we have to do a lot better at communicating about its limitations.</text></comment>