
Project Megaphone: Fight Surveillance With 9 Lines of Code - sethbannon
https://rally.stopwatching.us/fight-surveillance-with-9-lines-of-code/
======
DanBC
Are the Facebook and G+ buttons some form of satire?

EDIT: Mass surveillance by any government is bad. Surveillance by NSA or GCHQ
is bad. But the abuse of privacy coming from spammers and marketers and the
walled garden of whatever social network are all far more harmful to the
Internet than whatever GCHQ or NSA are doing.

~~~
bendoernberg
Different people have different philosophies. Some people have stopped using
FB and G+ because they know their actions will be monitored. I choose to share
these links because I don't want to censor myself out of fear of surveillance.
Both approaches are totally valid, and everyone can choose to share on social
media, or not.

~~~
sinak
And the site uses [https://github.com/tfrce/share-
server](https://github.com/tfrce/share-server) so no user information/IP
address/browser headers are shared with any third parties unless you click the
buttons.

~~~
brymaster
There's also "two clicks for better privacy" like Heise.de started and that
Scheiner also uses on his blog.
[http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/](http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/)
&
[https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy](https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy)

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by_Seeing
At least the government is open again so they can see the rally.

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detcader
I feel like the people who would want to go to this rally would already have
loc services disabled..

~~~
sinak
It's geoip, so you don't need to have location services enabled to take part.
And it's disabled on mobile.

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chris_mahan
and if someone cracks into the cloudfront account and modifies the js... not
good...

~~~
sinak
Same applies anytime you use external javascript, no? Or in fact, anytime you
use AWS to host your site?

~~~
sinak
That being said, I can totally understand why you might not want to add third
party code to your site.

In that case, I think the best route is to take the html and add it to your
site yourself. You can actually even host the js locally if you want. The call
to our geoip server just returns json, so shouldn't be a threat:
[http://geoip.taskforce.is/](http://geoip.taskforce.is/)

But if you want to host that part as well, it's open source too:
[https://github.com/tfrce/node-geoip-web](https://github.com/tfrce/node-geoip-
web)

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aaronem
"...sound and fury. Signifying nothing."

~~~
bendoernberg
What're you getting at? The full quote is "It is a tale Told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury Signifying nothing."

~~~
unimpressive
I'm assuming something akin to what I posted some months ago:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5921688](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5921688)

~~~
bendoernberg
Is there an alternative you'd recommend?

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unimpressive
Not particularly. In this case it was more of a clarification of somebody
else's words than my own opinion.

Public pressure works to an extent, but it's dangerous to use it, because if
you can't get a sizable number of people to show up it signals weakness.

~~~
aaronem
There's also the much more substantive consideration that "public pressure",
in the shape of a rally like this one, only works at all if there's a credible
threat of meaningful action if the presented demands aren't fulfilled. There
being no chance of that here, the upcoming rally is little more than a chance
for the _soi-disant_ protesters to get out in the fresh air and reassure
themselves that they're Doing Something Meaningful.

~~~
sinak
It's not just a rally, we're also arranging a citizen lobby day for
constituents to meet with their representatives and talk to them about why
this is important:
[https://rally.stopwatching.us/lobbyday.html](https://rally.stopwatching.us/lobbyday.html)

~~~
aaronem
Oh, well, that's totally different, of course!

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sashaeslami
hells yeah.

~~~
by_Seeing
nuff said.

