It's like hygiene. A few hundred years back people weren't washing their hands and health was very bad. As soon as we understood the germ theory of disease, we learned hygiene and now we are much better.
With encryption and privacy it will be the same. People will need to learn new skills.
Unfortunately, what we need to do is as cumbersome as a surgeon prepping for operation - it takes too much care to make sure you don't mix things up. You never login into your Gmail on Tor, don't refer to your reddit user name on Gmail, etc.
Unless you already did, in which case you're toast. They already have years of data on your views and interests.
Could we make a browser extension that would compare all you do and force privacy for you? For example, if you mistakenly mention your anonymous identity in your official mail, to catch it before sending. It should have a list of forbidden things - keywords, user names, etc - and send watch people not to mix the pots. Take care to separate cookies between anonymous mode and public mode. I am sure such an extension would go 99% of the way to making your private online life private again.
I envision a whole suite of apps - browser, mail, messaging, file sharing - written with this goal in mind - to separately manage identities - private and public - based on the content of communication. Like spam filters, but applied to all our data leaks.
I wonder if one day, 3d printing will be cheap enough so that one could go to the local hackerspace, Print print out chips, assemble the board/internal devices and be sure to be free from hardware backdoors?
This is feasible today. Although it takes a decent skill set. Open source communities like OpenCore.org have enough FPGA architecture to build your own RISC computer from scratch. I suspect as FPGA's become more popular and speeds improve the hacker community will move towards one-off computers they made themselves.
This coupled with your idea of 3d printing for casing is interesting.
I think it would be impossible, from a computer science standpoint, to create a backdoor in an FPGA that could compromise your own OS, in a general case. Perhaps, the computer that you use to program the chip could be compromised, to change the code that is put on the FPGA.
When I wrote that, I was under the assumption that people would use open-source CPU designs from OpenCore for convenience. With a little help from Xilinx and Altera, it wouldn't be too hard for a government to have the synthesizer detect when an OpenCore design is being used and surreptitiously put a backdoor in. I admit that it would be hard to write software to simultaneously detect a completely unique CPU design is being synthesized, figure out its instruction set and weaknesses, and finally create a hardware backdoor that could circumvent any software written for that device.
As always, there's a tradeoff between cost and security. How many hardware hackers are good enough (or motivated enough) to design their own brand new ISA and CPU design, then bootstrap a compiler and OS for their homemade CPU? Maybe 0.001% of the population, if that.
Well, I'd be down to try at somepoint, if I knew where to start. I feel like moving forward from now, in general, the future will require these skills in order to maintain some sovernty over onself.
I was wondering about that too. So we're down to buying silicon wafers in the the mail, 3d printer or some set up to dope them using open source designs? Is this possible now?
With encryption and privacy it will be the same. People will need to learn new skills.
Unfortunately, what we need to do is as cumbersome as a surgeon prepping for operation - it takes too much care to make sure you don't mix things up. You never login into your Gmail on Tor, don't refer to your reddit user name on Gmail, etc.
Unless you already did, in which case you're toast. They already have years of data on your views and interests.
Could we make a browser extension that would compare all you do and force privacy for you? For example, if you mistakenly mention your anonymous identity in your official mail, to catch it before sending. It should have a list of forbidden things - keywords, user names, etc - and send watch people not to mix the pots. Take care to separate cookies between anonymous mode and public mode. I am sure such an extension would go 99% of the way to making your private online life private again.
I envision a whole suite of apps - browser, mail, messaging, file sharing - written with this goal in mind - to separately manage identities - private and public - based on the content of communication. Like spam filters, but applied to all our data leaks.