If you care about this sort of thing then you know the answer. This is an interesting report nonetheless.

Original EFF article.

Conclusion

There are many ways to safeguard the privacy of individuals from government overreach. EFF has long engaged in impact litigation, educational initiatives, innovative technology projects, and policy advocacy both domestically and internationally to ensure that governments are held to high standards when it comes to accessing sensitive information about us. The foundation of these standards — which ensure our communications and private affairs are not subject to arbitrary government access — are the Fourth Amendment, decades of privacy law, and many years of case law. But in today’s increasingly digital world, online service providers serve as the guardians of our most intimate data — from email content to location information to our social and family connections. The policies adopted by these corporations will have deep and lasting ramifications on whether individual Internet users can communicate free from the shadow of government surveillance.

Readers of this year’s annual privacy and transparency report should be heartened, as we are, by the improvements major online service providers made over the last year. While there remains room for improvement in areas such as the policies of location service providers and cellphone providers like AT&T and Verizon, certain practices — like publishing law enforcement guidelines and regular transparency reports — are becoming standard industry practice for Internet companies. And we are seeing a growing, powerful movement that comprises civil liberties groups as well as major online service providers to clarify outdated privacy laws so that there is no question government agents need a court-ordered warrant before accessing sensitive location data, email content, and documents stored in the cloud.

I worte about this back in 2010 and now it looks like its finally taking effect. I don’t watch much TV but you don’t have to in order to know this is a problem.

From Paul McNamara at Network World:

Representing what may be the most popular act of Congress since the “Do Not Call” list, a law prohibiting broadcasters from cranking up the volume on TV commercials takes effect today.

So I have this Thinkpad that I love (an X201s) that is coming up on two years old and is still perfectly capable. There are of course better spec’d machines available but I just cant justify the expense of a new laptop since this is still acceptable. The one thing I have been watching for some time though are the SSD prices. I figured that an upgrade to an SSD would provide a noticeable improvement and belay any temptation to go for that sweet looking X1 Carbon Thinkpad. This week Microcenter had the last generation Samsung 830 256GB SSDs at a great price of $149.00. I really waffled over the size because I keep just under 200GB on my laptop. I went for the 256GB though since the price per GB was soo low (not so on the 512GB models).

I’ve spent the last couple days restoring and tweaking and getting this new install set up just how I like it. It’s has been an adjustment because I decided to install the latest LTS version of Kubuntu rather than going with the new Unity based Ubuntu that has been so maligned lately. The current KDE is a completely different experience than the Gnome 2.4 I was using for the last few years. I’m liking KDE, it is very highly configurable and has some quite nice features. The Apricorn SATA to USB adapter for laptop drives comes in handy for transferring the data from my old drive to the new installed SSD.

Regarding the upgrade to the SSD it has indeed provided a noticeable and welcomed improvement. The results are what you would expect… faster boots and shutdowns and very fast sleeps and wake-up’s. Application also load faster, filesystem browsing is faster and opening documents is much faster. I also have the addded bonus of not having to worry about bumps and vibrations that make the mechanical spinning drives vulnerable. It was a worthwhile upgrade.

Debian turns 19 today. Thank you Ian.

Just another endeavor that has its roots in geekdom. I’ve loosely followed the progress of the Internet Archive over the years and find their work seems tedious but fascinating. This week I stumbled across one of their current projects; saving the soon to be lost free hosting accounts existing on fortunecity.com. I noticed that they had some tools available for volunteers to use to help their cause so I joined in. I wonder if any of this will be important in the future.