Can You Please Explain How Not Using Facebook, Or Shopping Off Amazon Means I Still Give Them Money Or

can you please explain how not using facebook, or shopping off amazon means i still give them money or the same amount of money? legit question. i don't understand those tweets.

What Brandon is saying here is that because these mega-corporations all use public infrastructure to run the logistics of their operations whilst avoiding paying taxes, it is the American taxpayer that is subsidizing the profits they enjoy by avoiding said taxes. This is true whether you shop with them or not.

You can take this even further with companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart who pay their workers such meager salaries that they need to go on public assistance and even encourage them to do so. This means that state funds are going towards subsidizing Amazon and Wal-Mart’s worker exploitation all in the name of increasing their profits.

Sarah Learns Cyber Security (Part 1 - Passwords and TextSecure?)

In my hands I hold a weapon of mass destruction and madness, a tool that only a few short years ago was every science fiction movie’s wet dream.

I own a smart phone. (LG Nexus 4, running Android 4.3 Jelly Bean) Now I kinda hope that people who know more than me will read this and maybe throw me a bone. And I kinda hope that people who know less than me will read this and perhaps reconsider their own security practices.

I am terrified of my cell phone. I’m not scared of cancer or radiation or that my head will explode while pumping gas. But I am very, very afraid for my safety.

And perhaps the biggest problem is that I want to have my cake and eat it too.

I want to be social and take awesome selfies with my friends on my adventures. I want to be able to quickly check my bank account so I can discreetly see if I can grab dinner with my friends. I want to be able to look up a map for new places to check out or directions when I am lost.

But I also want to be safe. I don’t want to inadvertently become an accessory to a crime because I was geotagged in a location while on a photo adventure. I don’t want my financial information stolen from me, or my location broadcast to predators. Or anyone for that matter. It freaks me out that Google knew within a week that I had left my last job.

Maybe I watch too much Person Of Interest. But what scares me the most about that show is how dead on it is. It’s not that hard to get people’s information, most people give it away willingly, and there is a Machine. It’s called Google. But watching this show really opened my eyes to how blind I’ve been and how ignorant I am when it comes to my own safety.

The fact is, I don’t feel safe with my phone. I am terrified of this thing. I am so scared every time I check my Facebook, or send a text message. These scenarios I describe are not worst case scenarios. These are common, real life situations that are not that difficult to accomplish.

When ATM’s first became a thing, my mom was terrified of them and refused to use them. It took some hard core convincing on my dad’s part to convince her that it was okay. I remember telling Ocean the following story:

“Like, I don’t get it. My mom is a computer scientist project manager who’s afraid of an ATM. How lame is that?”

His response: “Your mom was afraid because she’s smart and her fear was not irrational at all.”

And now here I am, the next generation of paranoia, and it’s my cell phone that I am trying to avoid using.

I am thisclose to selling my smartphone, and jumping back on the CDMA network with a talk and text phone. CDMA is way more secure than HSPA. (One of many reasons why it’s considerably slower.) But knowledge is power and I see many people I look up to using their smart phones. Professional hackers, cyber security experts, mobile security experts, military and police personnel, developers… they are not afraid of their phones. And if they can feel safe using their phones, then maybe with some knowledge, I can feel safe using mine too.

It’s not that I have anything to hide (well, perhaps a few questionable pictures), but rather the fact that I feel like my life isn’t my own. I feel like I can be blackmailed or made very, very vulnerable by an inanimate object and that’s scary to me.

Step 1 - encrypt phone… I don’t really know how this works, but encryption is good, right? Sounds legit. Seriously. I know what encryption is, but how this works to keep me safer, I’m still not really sure.

Step 2 - password protect that shit. When I still worked in mobile sales, I used to cringe every time someone would hand me a phone with no password. In fact, if you do nothing else, put a password on your phone. (Thank you Ocean for drilling that one into my head a year ago.)

Step 3 - turn off GPS, Bluetooth, NFC, Wi-Fi when you are not using them. My resurgence of smart phone paranoia started again when I was messaging someone over Facebook and all of a sudden, I saw that it was also messaging my GPS co-ordinates and a handy dandy little map of where I’m messaging from. It’s a damn good thing I know him and trust him.

Step 4 - Realize that you don’t trust Facebook’s ever changing privacy policy because you don’t understand it, change the password on your phone, go in and remove location permissions *again* because Facebook seems to find some way to reinstate those without my knowledge far too often for my liking. Start messaging this guy over email.

Passwords are supposed to be the key to our safety. The cliff notes crash course on passwords… the longer, the better. The more you mix up, numbers, special characters, capital and lower case letters, the safer you’ll be. And have a different, unrelated password for everything. Great fantastic advice. Now back to the real world for a moment… how the hell am I supposed to remember all these passwords and still be safe? AAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Step 5 - Install TextSecure. All my security smart friends are using it, so it must be legit. Almost lose my shit when half of my text messages stop sending properly. Lose ability to send multimedia messages. Hand phone to Amadeus and say “fix it!!!!!” Regain ability to text him, but no longer able to text Smile or Wink. Wait until next morning to have Wink walk me through what happened, why it stopped working and how to fix it. Smile has zero issues with the installation of his app or sending and receiving messages between TextSecure users.

I think that maybe a huge part of this is that I just don’t understand how the technology works. Even with the safe practices I have put in place, I really am mostly following what I see the people at the hacker space doing with their phones, watching Person Of Interest and trying to do the opposite.

And after all of this, if my phone is safe and yours is not, then we’re all at risk. God, I almost feel safer having unprotected sex with strangers. Or in this technology revolution that we are living in, is our ignorant smart phone use equivalent to the sexual revolution of the 60’s? Will this be all fun and games until people start to get seriously hurt and we all have no choice but to scream out “for god’s sake wear a fucking condom!”.

One day in the future, my kids will be sitting there telling their friends, “Oh my god, like, my mom is a computer scientist security expert who’s scared of her own phone. How lame is that?”

And I will totally deserve that one.

So I will now also publicly say, Mom you were right to be scared of the ATM. You were right and I was wrong, you can now sing the “I was right” song.

Also, I think my next step is to learn more about what encryption is and how it works. And passwords. There must be a magic trick to remembering safe passwords.

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mydickneedscpr

8 years ago