A good read. Not that old and I think it still has valuable points in the age of surveillance. You don't have to be a criminal to make use of it.

Edit: Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30788530

Don't buy a laptop second hand. I live in the UK, went to the USA with a second hand laptop from cash converters (a pawn shop in the UK) and got stopped at the airport on investigation. Requesting to hand over laptop and password. I was 19 and naive.

When I was 15, I had discovered a windows 98 DCOM and supposedly according to my secondary school "severely hacked the school". All I had discovered was how to reveal the C drive. I too had used the schools news paper account to access a student's course work, who had been bullying me and I sabotaged his work.

My rookie mistake was that I had copied his work to the public folder, made changes in my own school account and then updated it back via the school zone news paper account.

I was banned from doing my IT GCSE and got the nickname Hacker Kid. I got no secondary school IT qualification and colleges wouldn't accept me apart from one offering a BTEC because the lecturer gave me a chance of "you wouldn't do this again?"

My father had worked for a Isreal company, which was linked to Mossad and the Isreal government. Our phone lines had been tapped when installation broadband engineer noticed there was a strange device he had never seen on our copper wire from the exchange cabinet and was curious to know if it was "office related". My father used to WFH on an odd occasion and we had an ISDN line. Sweet sweet 128k in the days of 56k. 32ms on Quake 3 arena.

What I believe is that they had dug in to my school records and because this was the first time I been to the USA (2017) and my online friend in California whose parents had worked for the US government, which was where I was staying put me on monitoring. Tied with my father's records having governmental contacts with Isreal. Yahoo Messenger was a fun time.

I surrendered the laptop without encryption and they offered to return it during the week. I got it returned to my friends parents house and was advised by someone in a tech club thing to trash it before I left the USA. That was a hard one to explain to my parents arriving back home without a laptop they had bought. No pocket money for me for at least six months but at least I got laid on that trip.

Paranoia is a curse but keep it under control it keeps you sane. I have my own theories that KDE, Linux and FreeBSD are all tapped. It's known that Intel ME is. FreeBSD is my daily driver OS but now I'm conflicted to where I am looking at alternatives but that may just be paranoia. Who has really audited all of the kernel source? We take it for granted it isn't.

I've been skeptical ever since but my second thoughts do ride by that microprocessors since the 1980's are tapped.

Now this was a rollercoaster to read. I'd be curious to hear how you think KDE, Linux and BSD are all tapped, cause it's all open. You don't have to use proprietary blobs.

If you desire to stay in the behind times, sure. And I myself would but my daily workstation uses an 5600XT AMD card and AMDGPU is based on the DRM of the Linux AMD driver so this too raises suspicion. And that's where the back door is held. As the same with Nvidia.

I keep all my networking to my self. I own colocated servers where I route all my apartments ISP traffic though. I don't use ISP routers. Everything is ad-hoc. I get it. As a rookie network engineer due to the nature of the internet connectivity they don't always follow the same network hops. But the paths I've seen the data flow through have been strange, it's been spooky.

An example is Overwatch the game I loved, and where I have been ahead of the game and then suddenly I get disconnected. My server route path out of no loses network path or where on many occasions will take a random laggy network path and switch back when I disconnect from the game. People do get DDoS in game so this isn't uncommon but it's weirder than that. I trust my DC, and I pay for premium and their own reports show nothing on their end, so this had to happen at the TCP stack.

Discord was my main communication play-forum until I fell out with some users and deleted my account finally. Again traces where my network has suddenly been siphoned. Users have been hearing me in crystal quality and then suddenly drop to echo where my monitoring show no difference in bandwidth exhaustion especially when I bring up controversial topics including my CPU/GPU spike.

My recent "paranoid freak" is that don't use LSP Servers.

For my coding I did use Kate. With LSP Servers turned off, I have had console messages trigger within Kate terminal console of it trying to connect to Javascript, JSON, HTML and a ClangD servers. I have started dabbling in C like I always have wanted too. It's as if I am triggering a code pattern.

This started occurring when I discovered how to display a grid on screen in Tk and TCL. Why now, I don't know. Never had this issue before.

LSP servers and including Git trying to commit to a sub module, where I don't even use git, I use fossil. Linus, I don't trust. I dislike him personally and have spoken out about this.

Maybe a setting, bug or something else but I can't locate it. I compile the kernel from source and applications from ports.

It's these odd oddities that are near unexplainable without another user with knowledge present. Why wouldn't technology be tapped? Linus sold himself out with WSL and such are such controversial subjects. I believe Linux is unsafe but this post isn't to debate that, each to their own.

The big one that speaks loud to me, I used to play an old FPS game called Dirty Bomb.

Apart from a few friends outside of the IT field it's safe to say I have zero contacts on steam, I don't own facebook, discord et cetera but joining upon a near empty server and coincidentally there were four users.

One as my real life name, fine. Google me and you'll find my home address as that's my registered business. There was a player with my younger brothers name, who isn't exactly some famous online person, keeps to himself and a few more oddities based on past history. As if they were trying to fear me by doxing myself. Apart from my business and company registered in my deedpoll'd name you won't find any references to my real name.

I do fully believe backdoors exist and they exist within Linux and FreeBSD. China has known to back door chips Supermicro, Cisco can tell you the story of that. And this has all started since I started to rebel against the main stream crowd about four years ago.

I don't use frameworks and in a way a digital anarchist. I have used TOR so if I was on some LEO list, I do believe am. I am unorthodox.

37, plus my older history, it's just more sheer coincidentally than "David, you're being paranoid again".

So in the long run I just accept the sabotage and keep quiet about it and work on effing them legally until I do.

If you know me you'll know I hate this world. How it's rejected me and how history is constantly repeating it self foolishly. I'm not scared anymore. I hate being at a computer so you'll normally find me outside of my apartment. Coming home from work makes me psychologically sick looking at other computer screens.

I don't but have on occasional occasions smoked cannabis but not while coding. I have struggled through life with bullying but since fighting back I have encountered many strange encounters, real life and online.

I did use to mess around as script kiddie when I was 13 with botnets. RxBot, PhatBot to name a few but I keep clean now because my moral compass says so.

Everyone knows IT is boring af to anyone outside of the field. It's the most boring field alive and I hate it. Sadly I have no other knack and I've tried many. If I could break free from this suffocating field I would. But adult responsibilities. Sigh. All I wanted to be was a vet at 16, not some system architect.

Maybe it is, maybe it's not. I know I am paranoid but sane enough to know it.