Provider Trustworthiness

XFS_Duke

Oh yea, transparency by all hosts is needed. Too many shell companies lately with a few CC resellers..

HostNun

@XFS_Duke I was only asking for more candor on the subject. It's not for me to judge anyone or their reasons for doing what they do.

HostNun

re: transparency, there are probably limits depending on context, but yeah, in general I agree. I'm not trying to get all infowars.com here. All I'm saying is for those who felt the 'need' to hide government complicity to begin with, why would anyone ever want to trust you? i.e. the direct question to you is, why would you have ever had to hide that from people to begin with? I thought y'all liked open source! Why not 'simply' be open about it?

I feel that I am not paranoid or 'out of line' or whatever to be asking this, and that these are calm, reasonable questions to which answers are due.

XFS_Duke

@HostNun said:

Yea, no doubt. We all would rather for companies to be legit and really be transparent and trustworthy. We see it all too much on here, summer hosts or scam/shell companies come up and screw people over. I hate it. In fact, it is one of the reasons I am doing this. Other than the fact that I love this industry, I believe that providing great services for a decent price is worth it for me.

Maounique

1. Nobody will admit it because it would be illegal to do so, when the spooks come, they bring many threats and even have access to blackmailed judges to issue legal papers;
2. A host can at most say they will do all they can to resist illegal pressure and threats and only small hosts can afford this, the big ones have shareholders and CEOs which can be blackmailed much easier, if not, at least a few employees can. For small fish, simple threats will do, like your admin gets harassed with laptop confiscated and "terror" or "CP" "evidence" planted, you can never know if the judge (especially in "terror" cases) was not already successfully blackmailed or recruited in one of the other ways so will give them all they want, nobody will know.

This is how the system works, if you do not want to be exposed to snooping risks, keep your data encrypted and at home, if you must put it online then you have no issues with the snooping risks. If you need to transmit it some other place, you can always transfer encrypted containers over encrypted direct or Tor connections if the spooks should not be able to prove you were in contact with someone.

However, all this is useless when the law has been corrupted, either at micro level by recruiting judges, prosecutors and cops and/or at macro level by making laws which break the constitutional rights and even basic civil and human rights. You can only hope you remain below the radar and nobody knows you are involved in supporting human rights or they consider you too irrelevant to bother, at least for now, when there are bigger "terrorists"/"traitors" or "child molesters" to fry.

HostNun

haha, this thread is already hilarious

HostNun

here ya go Maou

HostNun

...anyway, other than taking leaps of faith, I agree with what everyone is saying re: test beds and non-substantial content. I don't think there is any other way to do it, at least not in the 'LEB' sense.

Even with the most expensive and 'reputable' providers, there is no automatic fail-safe guarantee that 'your data' will be safe, is there? The ongoing leaks and exploits at the corporate level would seem to prove otherwise/inexorable. Wasn't there a big one with Sony the other day?

& do people no longer 'trust' Sony because of it? Of course not, they'll probably forget about it in a week, if they were ever aware of it to begin with.

EDIT, or maybe not:

Sony Pictures is in full-blown damage-control mode and has called an all-hands meeting following another huge leak of sensitive, confidential info. The new trove of data released by the so-called GOP (Guardians of Peace) includes more private employee info, actor phone numbers and traveling aliases, legal claims against Sony Pictures, film budgets, scripts and more. As pointed out by the WSJ, it also includes private info of some 40,000 Sony Pictures ex-employees like home addresses, previous salaries and social security numbers. Many of those folks are incensed with the Culver City-based company, which gave them no guidance on how to protect their identities or sign up for credit monitoring.

Maounique

Sooner or later people will realize that whatever is not under their direct control at home encrypted and offline while not needed, is public knowledge and act like that.
I do not give my data where not absolutely needed and when I do, only data that is already out there and cannot be esily connected with me unless a warrant issued (not that the spooks ever cared about "technicalities", but they will have to work a bit more).
Bottom of line, stay anonymous or at least well below the radar, have secondary and tertiary, etc lives online, you should be better than 99% of the people which do not know what is going on and do not care even if they would know.

jemaltz

Sure - but when it comes down to it, we all have confidential, personally-identifiable data, and we need a place to back it up. It's a lot easier to do so online in another state/country/continent than it is to store it securely offline in those places!

Maounique

jemaltz said: Sure - but when it comes down to it, we all have confidential, personally-identifiable data, and we need a place to back it up. It's a lot easier to do so online in another state/country/continent than it is to store it securely offline in those places!

Well, if you trust your encryption scheme well enough, that works. SD cards and external drives also work, they can be stored some other place, still encrypted, of course.