Friendly reminder that Bluetooth has a larger network stack than Wi-Fi. Much more code, much larger available attack base. There have been many numerous Bluetooth vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution or theft of files.
This is truly becoming a surveillance state, in no way that can be debated. That want to be able to access everyone's innermost thoughts (texts, notes, recordings, calendars, contacts, photos, you get it) without any chance of someone being able to protect against it.
Reminder that Google was the 2nd or 3rd company to commit to NSA's PRISM.
AIM/MSN/Yahoo chatrooms. GeoCities. Neopets. Limewire, KaZaa, listening to Art Bell on the radio next to you while you search for the latest alien news and read ancient texts. Webrings. Message boards. NSA hadn't partnered with Microsoft for the first version of PRISM.
It was more decentralized, but even in the centralized parts there weren't yet entire industries dedicated to stealing every last bit of dopamine from you to sell to the highest bidder.
It's possible that it is a self-worth issue and lack of self-love. Overconfidence is a defence mechanism, and not being able to take compliments is a sign that you don't truly, deep down, believe people are being honest about them.
However it can be quite complex and let's say you have trust issues... an example is, let's say you didn't get many real compliments and were bulled in school and every time you wore a ratty shirt or didn't brush your hair, your bully 'complemented' it in front of others. Now you're primed to distrust complements and believe on a subconscious level that they are malicious.
Compliments are often used as a way to manipulate people, so if you've dealt with a manipulator before, now genuine comments may trigger you to have your guard up... not an easy place to be when trying to genuinely accept compliments.
This comes right on the heels of a bill to ban Kaspersky antivirus, which may simply be an interesting coincidence.
As unfortunate as it is, because Kaspersky is IMO the best AV for power users including detection for every type of attack under the sun (if you enable and configure it in the settings, you can set applications on a per-permission basis, so only apps that need network access, or user directory access, or system file access, or registry access can use it, and it can alert you to any changes or ask for permission.
Anyone else have recommendations for power users? Ideally I'd like to have access to a security network service that allows me to get scores for known hashes, while being able to disallow submission of unknown executables on my own machine for their service. I don't want all my custom programs to be sent and distributed.
Signal is a great example of this but I don't think you'll find any ways to do it non-VoIP.