from the evading-big-brother's-ever-present-eye dept.
Vice Media's Motherboard reports
[Beginning January 21], the Washington DC Public Library will teach residents how to use the internet anonymization tool Tor as part of a 10 day series designed to shed light on government surveillance, transparency, and personal privacy.
The series will open with a screening of The Internet's Own Boy, a documentary about Aaron Swartz, the brains behind RSS, Creative Commons, and an influential partner at Reddit who committed suicide while under a widely criticized [federal indictment for data theft].
There will also be marathon readings of George Orwell's 1984, a lesson in how to use the anonymity service Tor to protect your privacy online, a lecture about how to access government data online, a lecture about how to track campaign finances, internet safety classes for teens, and screenings of the Frontline documentary United States of Secrets, about the Edward Snowden leaks.
Related Stories
The book publisher Penguin is printing more copies of George Orwell's dystopian classic "1984" in response to a sudden surge of demand.
On Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning the book was #1 on Amazon's computer-generated list of best-selling books.
[...] "We put through a 75,000 copy reprint this week. That is a substantial reprint and larger than our typical reprint for '1984,'" a Penguin spokesman told CNNMoney Tuesday evening.
[...] According to Nielsen BookScan, which measures most but not all book sales in the United States, "1984" sold 47,000 copies in print since Election Day in November. That is up from 36,000 copies over the same period the prior year.
When the submitter visited amazon.com, the book was ranked #3.
Additional coverage:
- Los Angeles Times
- The New York Times (may be pay-walled)
- 9News
- The Washington Post (owned by the founder of amazon.com)
- The Guardian
- The Man Who Invented the Science Fiction Paperback
Related stories:
Washington DC's Public Library Will Teach People How to Avoid the NSA
George Orwell's "1984" Telescreens are Here...
Traveling to Thailand? Don't Pack George Orwell's "1984"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SuperCharlie on Thursday January 22 2015, @12:24PM
While I agree in general with helping people learn all these nifty things, I can't help but think everyone who walks through the doors instantly becomes very interesting to the exact people they are trying to avoid, especially in DC.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday January 22 2015, @12:41PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Friday January 23 2015, @04:39AM
Well, now everybody working for Washington DC's public library are now on the terrorist watch list, for directly giving aid and comfort to terrorists.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday January 22 2015, @12:26PM
The DC Library link gives me only a blank page. But the idea is a great, timely. I do hope that it also include getting users with relevant hardware onto PC-BSD. There are too many backdoors and bugdoors in that infamous Other OS and any attempt at building secure communications on it would be like building on sand. GNU/Linux is not an option after the short term. Though CentOS 6 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS are good through 2020 and 2019 respectively, subsequent versions are planned be systemd/Linux instead (so far) and not viable or safe.
The Motherboard article renders properly but does not mention getting people set up with a safe system. A safe system is needed since encryption these days is that it is generally good enough that it is not practical to break. Instead it looks like efforts are at compromising the end points and there anything proprietary needs to be avoided as well as anything else overly complex, monolithic and undocumented.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22 2015, @05:40PM
The blank page is classic content hidden by style-sheets until the Scripting loads. I sent them a note about it.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday January 23 2015, @03:19AM
I'm sorry but anybody so batshit they invoke the Voldemort meme [tmrepository.com] is too much of a fruitcake to be taken seriously.
BTW this is really gonna make your tinfoil hate hurt but guess what? Several major subsystems, including a chunk of the networking stack in Linux is controlled by Red hat, ya know, those guys that up and out of the blue after Snowden snitched all the juice stuff suddenly INSISTED that a critical boot system (that nobody had really been bitching about) just HAD to be replaced by this hard to follow black box mess called systemd? Yeah those guys...well guess where Red hat gets THEIR money from? NSA, FBI, DoD, DoJ, yeah they are pretty much the bitch of the 3 letter boys, in fact it came out that if the federal government quit buying Red hat that there company would be practically dead, something like 84%+ of their revenue comes from the 3 letter boys.
Oh, you think because somebody offers some code that you possibly could inspect that this will magically save you? Yeah about that, ever hear of Shellshock? heartbleed? Those were exploits on two of the most vetted pieces of code there was in the Linux stack. You see "many eyes" is a myth because its a classic "is ought" fallacy, you see because somebody* COULD have looked at the code you assume that somebody HAS done the work...well there COULD be vampires, does this mean we should be handing out stakes? Just because somebody COULD be does not mean something HAS BEEN, see the problem with your thinking? And note the * beside somebody, because for "many eyes" to have actually worked it could be just ANYBODY, after all if I print out the code for systemd and hand it to your proctologist and ask him to go over it, do you think he could tell if there is a backdoor in it?
At the end of the day what you are doing is "magical thinking" in that "if I use X I'm safe" which is bullshit. the ONLY way to be safe in this case is actually do your homework, learn about encryption (and use it),learn about VPNs and get yourself one, its gonna take work. But anybody who speaks with Voldemort memes isn't gonna have the sense to do that sadly, instead you'll just get pwned just like those poor fools being taught to use Tor which has already been shown to be bullshit, too many nodes are in five eyes territory so its easy enough to just control enough exit nodes to grab the data as it exits.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23 2015, @04:43AM
systemd, linux networkstack ... that's why he suggested pc-bsd which is based on the free bsd network stack and doesn't use system d
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 22 2015, @12:35PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22 2015, @02:44PM
Librarians have been fighting the good fight in America at least as far back as the 1940s when they stood up to red scare shenanigans. [pbworks.com] They were also at the forefront of fighting the PATRIOT act, [propublica.org] both in lobbying and in action when they redesigned their circulation software to delete all information once a book was returned. [ala.org] They are also at the center of the hackerspace movement. [npr.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Magic Oddball on Thursday January 22 2015, @03:07PM
While I really respect(ed?) Aaron Swartz for the things he did, he was not "the brains behind":
To be clear, I don't think you're exaggerating it yourself; the Internet (including Wikipedia) has been crawling with over-the-top mythologizing since his death, so it's hard to get accurate information. I wish people wouldn't do that — it takes the focus away from the things he really did do, some of which were in response to issues that still merit discussion.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 22 2015, @04:52PM
Alex, the answer is, "How is to burn Ft. Meade to the ground?"
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 24 2015, @11:36PM
Listen to your gov't telling you how to avoid the NSA and get on their top 10 list for doing so.