Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: "For What It's Worth" (or How do I know my Gentoo source code hasn't been messed with?)

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-----Original Message-----

From: Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net>

Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2014 23:20:26 

To: <gentoo-amd64@l.g.o>

Reply-to: gentoo-amd64@l.g.o

Subject: [gentoo-amd64] Re: "For What It's Worth" (or How do I know my Gentoo source code

 hasn't been messed with?)



Frank Peters posted on Tue, 05 Aug 2014 16:36:57 -0400 as excerpted:



> It wouldn't have to scan your local drives.  It would only have to scan
> the very few directories named "MY DOCUMENTS" and "MY VIDEOS" and "MY
> EMAIL" which have conveniently been established by the omnipotent and
> omniscient desktop environment.  Within these universal and standardized
> storage areas can be found everything that snooping software would need
> to find.


Hmm...  Some people (me) don't use those standardized locations.  I have 

a dedicated media partition -- large, still on spinning rust when most of 

the system in terms of filenames (but not size) is on SSD, and where it's 

mounted isn't standard and is unlikely to /be/ standard, simply because I 

have my own rather nonconformist ideas of where I want stuff located and 

how it should be organized.



OTOH, consider ~/.thumbnails/.  Somebody already mentioned that google 

case and the hashes they apparently scan for.  ~/.thumbnails will 

normally have thumbnails for anything in the system visited by normal 

graphics programs, including both still images and video, and I think pdf 

too unless that's always generated dynamically as is the case with txt 

files, via various video-thumbnail addons.  Those thumbnails are all 

going to be standardized to one of a few standard sizes, and can either 

be used effectively as (large) hashes directly, or smaller hashes of them 

could be generated...



Tho some images programs (gwenview) have an option to wipe the thumbnails 

dir when they're shutdown, but given the time creating those thumbnails 

on any reasonably large collection takes, most people aren't going to 

want to enable wiping...



Meanwhile, one of the things that has come out is that the NSA 

effectively already considers anyone running a Linux desktop a radical, 

likely on their watch-list already, just as is anyone running TOR, or 

even simply visiting the TOR site or an article linking to them.



I guess I must be on their list several times over, what with the sigs I 

use, etc, the security/privacy-related articles I read, the OS I run, and 

the various lists I participate on...



-- 

Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.

"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --

and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman