The answer for me was giving up on most privacy. I gave up in 2002 after Google exposed my early 1990s Usenet posts for easy searching. At its root though, the Internet was never designed for security. It's a store and forward system. Store and forward means "copy and send copy". There's always multiple copies of everything continuously. Want to break into someone's system? Forget all the high math cryptography methodologies. Kidnap their family until they give you the passwords. The systems can never be fully secured as they stand. == If you want security, don't use the Internet. It's not, never will be, and cannot be secured. The flaw is fundamental. The very processes that cause it to function at ALL (as opposed to NOT being networked) is ALSO WHY it will never be a secure medium for information transmission. All humans can do is keep closing gaps as they're found, just for a clever one to find new ones. The bucket will always leak and never be plugged. It's the nature of the beast. The tradeoff for all the wonderful goodness it gives us. == Precisely. But it's using uncommon channels even over public networks. You're talking about buring the signal within the noise. The thing is, we're getting more and more clever at focusing on retrieving faint signal within noise when bundled together. But a lot of this speaks of my personality: Back in 1999-2002, I did a lot of investing. Through trial and error, I found a methodology that works for me. I found out it even has a name: contrarian investing. See what the bulk is doing, and look in the opposite direction at the stuff they've neglected or are running away from at full speed. People right now are running TOWARDS qubit math, incorporating chinese remainder theorem and all sorts of folding, tearing, swapping, shifting base systems, and all kinds of math tricks. But what about sparse information distribution? Staggered timing? Hiding in old documents? These are all well-worn methods for hiding your trail of information but because they're not in bundles, neatly packed and utilizing standard protocols but require human intervention and creativity, these simple techniques make it harder to trace. == Well, that's all you need is time. Once messages are received, they're no longer needed. I ran a Minecraft server from 2012-2014 for my elementary age nephew. It got very popular, gathering 27,000 unique players and had a ongoing userbase. Felt bad shutting it down honestly but it was killing my laptop. Anyway, I let them do whatever they wanted (creative / roleplaying) and I kept only a loose eye on things, to make sure there was no sexual harassment or bullying 'cause there were people of all ages on it, and I allowed ppl their privacy as much as possible. I was a friendly "serverGod" but those who knew that I could theoretically see all the chat on the system (I rarely looked at it because I was busy) had a clever message passing method they used: They'd write notes in a book, using a pre-established code, pass the book, then throw it in lava after being read. They bragged about it of course. Still, quite clever. Foolproof? No. But it was the speed of transaction and deletion that was clever. It left no permanent log file traces. == I'd focus on auditing systems myself if I was worried about security. Any history trails generated during the process. For example, I have all of the chat logs saves from 25 months. I could search through and easily find Skype names, email addresses, phone numbers, real names, Kik account names, locations (kinda - that depends on their ISP), youtube accounts, etc. I could even pull a WikiLeaks on them all and release them publicly but of course only they'd care. Still, a virtual world is a microcosm of the real world. For myself, I use my real name. Everywhere. I pump out information, knowledge and opinion freely and my throw up is ALL over the Internet. Google me. I'm EASY to find. You can find my home. Is anybody going to find me and take me away? No. I talk so much that I'd be too boring to bother with. == and actually, I did do an Eye of Sauron on them once. I have several Gigs worth of chat logs and one day, out of boredom, I extracted all of the youtube accts I could and subscribed to them all. As a nice server God, they appreciated my occasional thumbs up on their videos, and even two years later, some of them still follow me around the 'net and it's kinda flattering. Honestly,- there's a LOT of freedom in being an "online persona of yourself". I use my real name. Is that really "me" that you see out there? No. The real me is sitting in an ugly yellow chair on a back porch. I'm a fiction of myself. I even registered my own NAME as a fictitious name a few years ago to make it legitimate with the Florida fictitious name database. $50 for a little poetic fun. I even created a circular fictitious name chain so that I ended up so that I am LEGALLY: SOMEBODY owned by NOBODY I don't use any of it for evil purposes. But I like knowing how to do it. == I get accused of working for foreign agencies sometimes. Here's one from just two days ago: I've been uploading Vines I've been making to the Internet Archive. They were nice enough to give me my own collection because I was clogging up the community collection. This one user, Noah, was getting REALLY MAD about my massive uploads to the system. I had it all pre-prepared ahead of time, Metadata already filled in, the MP4s all ready, everything FTP'd to the upload staging area.... and then I set my browser to open each of the url submissions one after another, spaced 3 seconds apart. boom boom boom boom boom - thousands of them one after another. Anyway, at one point during a forum discussion where he was complaining he says this: "If I were to attempt to experiment on the best way to not so much shut down but effectively block a MASSIVE site like - - - oh say, gee I dunno - - - - a government agency (?) what better way to rehearse than here?" He said a few other things like that, but he was CONVINCED that I was attempting to shut down the Internet Archive with all of my uploading. Oh! And he was sure I wasn't working alone. But, I am. tongue emoticon ==