The National Security Agency has some of the brightest minds working on its sophisticated surveillance programs, including its metadata collection efforts. But a new chat program designed by a middle-school dropout in his spare time may turn out to be one of the best solutions to thwart those efforts.
School dropout codes chat program that foils NSA spying (Wired UK).
The National Security Agency has some of the brightest minds working on its sophisticated surveillance programs, including its metadata collection efforts. But a new chat program designed by a middle-school dropout in his spare time may turn out to be one of the best solutions to thwart those efforts.
Prompted by Edward Snowden’s revelations about the government’s intrusive surveillance activities, loosely knit citizen militias of technologists and security professionals have cropped up around the world to develop systems to protect us from government agencies out to identify us online and grab our communications.
John Brooks is now among them.
Brooks, who is just 22 and a self-taught coder who dropped out of school at 13, was always concerned about privacy and civil liberties. Four years ago he began work on a program for encrypted instant messaging that uses Tor hidden services for the protected transmission of communications. The program, which…
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People tell me I should use public transport to save on money, so I decided to check cost differences.
To use buses only, would take me 2 hours on a good day, and on a bad day, possibly 3 hours to get from one end to the other. A single bus fare would cost me £2.40 (2 buses), costing £24 a week.
To use underground only, would take me 1.5 hours to 2 hours on an average day. I have to travel from Zone 5 to Zone 1. I travel during the peak so that costs me £4.60 each way, total of £9.20 per day, or £46 per week.
If I wanted the flexibility of using both, a monthly season ticket between Zones 1 and 5 costs me £205.10 or £51.28 per week.
Buses, so far are the cheapest option, but they are the slowest (at 2-3 hours) and are most prone to have disruptive commuters (school kids, drunks, smokers)
But what about if I use a car? In a car it takes me 30-45 minutes to get to work in the morning, and about the same to get home. If I hit a peak of traffic, it maybe, at worse, 1.5 hours. Compare that to a 1.5 hours BEST case on the underground and 3 hours WORST case on the buses.
Here’s my breakdown of costs:
Diesel: Approx £16 pw — I fill up every 3 or so weeks, and on everage, it is about £16 per week of fuel
Road Tax: £0.39 pw (£20 per year)
MOT: £1.05 pw (£54.85 py)
Service (Full): £6.05 pw (£314.36 py) — including work done. If no work actually needs to be done, then this is much lower.
Tyres (4): £4.58 pw (£238 py) — assuming I have to change all tyres at least once a year. Not likely as I don’t do too much mileage, and I have only had to change the tyres once since buying the car.
Insurance: £8.65 pw (£450 py)
Total Cost Per Week: £36.72
So, even with the worst case scenario (lots of work to do on the service and yearly replacing of the tyres), my weekly running cost is STILL less than a season ticket on the Public Transport (and I also get to and from work a HELL of a lot faster).
I completed C25K Week 8 Day 2 (4.43 km), in 22:38, pace 05:06 min/km, with @RunDouble http://rndb.co/z5kA
A better run today. Only dropped to a walk once, and it shows in my pace time. It’s been a while since I hit close to 5:00 min/km.
I completed C25K Week 8 Day 1 (4.44 km), in 24:11, pace 05:26 min/km, with @RunDouble http://rndb.co/u5iq
First successful run in a long while – and work hasn’t exactly helped matters. My overall fitness has therefore been diminished somewhat.
Week 8 is a toughie. 4.4km. I reverted back to an old 5km running route, but still dropped down to a walk a few times. Going run run Week 8 several times before moving on.
NOTE: Automated 32-bit-enabled builds are now available. See this page for link details.
EDIT 29th September 2015: This article seems to be quite popular. Note that Docker has progressed a long way since I wrote this and it has pretty much broken the script due to things being moved around and versions being updated. You can still read this to learn the basics of LXC-based in-container compiling, and if you want to extend it, go right ahead. When I get a chance, I will try to figure out why this build keeps breaking.
Steps to compile and build a docker.io binary on a 32-bit architecture, to work around the fact the community does not support anything other than 64-bit at present, even though this restriction has been flagged up many times.
A caveat, though. As the binary you compile via these steps will work on a 32-bit architecture, the Docker images you download from the cloud may NOT work, as the majority are meant for 64-bit architectures. So if you compile a Docker binary, you will have to build your own images. Not too difficult — you can use LXC or debootstrap for that. Here is a quick tutorial on that.
I am using a LXC container to do my build as it helps control the packages plus it reduces the chances of a conflict occurring between two versions (e.g. one “dev” version and one “release” version of a package), plus, the LXC container is disposable – I can get rid of it each time I do a build.
I utilise several scripts — one to do a build/rebuild of my LXC container, one to start up my build-environment LXC container and take it down afterwards; and the other, the actual build script. To make it more automated, I setup my LXC container to be allow a passwordless SSH login (see this link). This means I can do a scp into my container and copy to and from the container without having to enter my password. Useful because the container can take a few seconds to startup. It does open security problems, but as long as the container is only up for the duration of the build, this isn’t a problem.
EDIT: One note. If you have upgraded to Ubuntu’s Utopic Unicorn version, you may end up having to enter your GPG keyring password a few times.
EDIT 2: A recent code change has caused this build script to break. More details, and how to fix it on this post.
As with most things linux and script-based. There’s many ways to do the same thing. This is just one way.
Blender Fox 
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