13 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 45.3 ms ] thread
Nice quote at the end. One could argue: "I am my data. My data is me, but it is not mine".
Great article, thanks for sharing rosser!
The most thorough libraries of personal data ever built have been built by us.
It's weird how William Binney was actually correct. He went on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast about a year or two back and pretty much summed up exactly what we've seen with the NSA from the Snowden leak.

I remember the amount of commenters that were calling him a 'conspiracy nut' and trying to disprove him. Turns out he was correct.

> A tool called PRISM ... is sucking in data directly from the big Internet companies to do much the same thing that Binney warned about when he described "Stellar Wind." Rather than going to Internet companies piecemeal with search warrants and requests...

Huh? This is exactly what PRISM isn't/wasn't. It absolutely was not unfettered access to social networks or other websites, it WAS piecemeal requests by agencies.

I was hoping this would be instructions on how to install a package on your own server to do facebook-like functions between your friends over https.
If that's what you want, look up Elgg. What I hope someone creates, is something like Elgg but where the concept of public and private keys is used somehow, so that whoever controls the server where it's hosted doesn't have access to the users' content. Or even better, some form of peer-to-peer social network so that the central server could be dropped entirely, and users would just rely on clients on their trusted machines.
that second one -- where the social network was just a series of client applications rather than a central database -- would be an amazing idea for a product. Like a bittorrent-esque Facebook.
Maybe run a Diaspora "pod"? The pods are federated, so each user can either run their own server, or pick a pod provider they trust, and they still connect to each other on the same network.
Here I was hoping for a new, cool and exciting open source facebook clone :(
sounds like conspiracy theory