good replacement for open office

Chad Perrin perrin at apotheon.com
Sat Oct 6 14:32:45 PDT 2007


On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 03:51:49PM -0500, icantthinkofone wrote:                                                                                                       
> Chad Perrin wrote:                                                                                                                                                   
> >On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 05:07:45PM +0200, Wojciech Puchar wrote:                                                                                                    
> >                                                                                                                                                                    
> >>nobody intelligent (or completely not caring about it) use any of big                                                                                              
> >>public mail/news/etc services.                                                                                                                                     
> >>                                                                                                                                                                   
> >                                                                                                                                                                    
> >There are two separate concerns here.                                                                                                                               
> >                                                                                                                                                                    
> >  1. General Privacy: If you're concerned with your documents and                                                                                                   
> >  communications being collected, indexed, and scanned for patterns
> >  and                                                                                             
> >  flagged terms along with billions of other documents and                                                                                                          
> >  communications, without any specific attention to yours in
> >  particular,                                                                                            
> >  you're right -- don't use "public", web-based services.                                                                                                           
> >                                                                                                                                                                    
> >  2. Specific Privacy: If you're concerned with someone cracking
> >  security                                                                                           
> >  on your account, targeting your communications for electronic                                                                                                     
> >  eavesdropping, and similarly making use of the "public" nature of a                                                                                               
> >  service like that for nefarious intent, you're probably among the                                                                                                 
> >  millions of computer users who are carefully locking the front door                                                                                               
> >  while leaving the bay windows and garage door wide open.  Are you
> >  using                                                                                           
> >  public key encryption systems like OpenPGP to secure your email?
> >  Are                                                                                             
> >  you encrypting word processor documents when you send email?  Are
> >  you                                                                                             
> >  using a text-based mail user agent instead of reading XHTML "rich"                                                                                                
> >  emails in a GUI mail client?  Are you anonymizing communications via                                                                                              
> >  the Tor network?  What exactly are you doing to avoid leaving
> >  yourself                                                                                            
> >  at least as wide open with plain text transmission of data as you
> >  would                                                                                           
> >  be with a web-based, SSL-encrypted mail service?  You're probably
> >  even                                                                                            
> >  transmitting login data to a web server in clear text.
> >                                                                                                                                                                    
> >Now . . . I know this is the freebsd-questions mailing list, and many
> >of                                                                                            
> >you are running mail servers locally, and otherwise mitigating these                                                                                                
> >risks.  On the other hand, simply telling people that they'll be safer                                                                                              
> >avoiding web-based services without explaining that this is only true
> >if                                                                                            
> >they also pay significant attention to securing their other
> >communication                                                                                           
> >and collaboration tools might be considered dishonest, or at least                                                                                                  
> >irresponsible.

> >                                                                                                                                                                    
> But then you are assuming Google, as well as the others, are willing to                                                                                              
> lose public trust by allowing those things to happen and running an                                                                                                  
> insecure system.  It would also be assuming an in-house group could                                                                                                  
> provide better security than Google and the others.

No . . . I'm assuming that I have zero control over whether Google et al.                                                                                              
are "willing to lose public trust by allowing those things to happen", et                                                                                              
cetera.  I'm not assuming any decisions on their part -- only that I'm                                                                                                 
not a party to those decisions (and maybe, just a little bit, that                                                                                                     
corporations like Google play by different rules that may require them to                                                                                              
in some ways prove less trustworthy, such as the fact that it takes a                                                                                                  
warrant to search *my* computer, but only a subpoena to search Google's).

--                                                                                                                                                                     
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]                                                                                                                  
Dr. Ron Paul: "Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when                                                                                                 
terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons."


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