A big Thank You to www.StartPage.com for defending our privacy. I have used them for almost 4 years.

Message from search engine "StartPage.com"

Giant US government Internet spying scandal revealed

The Washington Post and The Guardian have revealed a US government mass Internet surveillance program code-named "PRISM". They report that the NSA and the FBI have been tapping directly into the servers of nine US service providers, including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, YouTube, AOL and Skype, and began this surveillance program at least seven years ago. (clarifying slides)

These revelations are shaking up an international debate.

StartPage has always been very outspoken when it comes to protecting people's privacy and civil liberties. So it won't surprise you that we are a strong opponent of overreaching, unaccountable spy programs like PRISM. In the past, even government surveillance programs that were begun with good intentions have become tools for abuse, for example tracking civil rights and anti-war protesters.

Programs like PRISM undermine our Privacy, disrupt faith in governments, and are a danger to the free Internet.

StartPage and its sister search engine Ixquick have in their 14-year history never provided a single byte of user data to the US government, or any other government or agency. Not under PRISM, nor under any other program in the US, nor under any program anywhere in the world. We are not like Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Apple, Skype, or the other US companies who got caught up in the web of PRISM surveillance.

Here's how we are different:

StartPage does not store any user data. We make this perfectly clear to everyone, including any governmental agencies. We do not record the IP addresses of our users and we don't use tracking cookies, so there is literally no data about you on our servers to access. Since we don't even know who our customers are, we can't share anything with Big Brother. In fact, we've never gotten even a single request from a governmental authority to supply user data in the fourteen years we've been in business.
StartPage uses encryption (HTTPS) by default. Encryption prevents snooping. Your searches are encrypted, so others can't "tap" the Internet connection to snoop what you're searching for. This combination of not storing data together with using strong encryption for the connections is key in protecting your Privacy.
Our company is based in The Netherlands, Europe. US jurisdiction does not apply to us, at least not directly. Any request or demand from ANY government (including the US) to deliver user data, will be thoroughly checked by our lawyers, and we will not comply unless the law which actually applies to us would undeniably require it from us. And even in that hypothetical situation, we refer to our first point; we don't even have any user data to give. We will never cooperate with voluntary spying programs like PRISM.
StartPage cannot be forced to start spying. Given the strong protection of the Right to Privacy in Europe , European governments cannot just start forcing service providers like us to implement a blanket spying program on their users. And if that ever changed, we would fight this to the end.
Privacy.

It's not just our policy - it's our business.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We are working hard to offer you an encrypted email service later this year called StartMail. We have to stand up and protect our freedoms from increasing overreach from data gatherers. You've made the right choice by using StartPage.com. Now is the time to tell others!

Sincerely,

Robert E.G. Beens
CEO StartPage.com and Ixquick.com

and the moment he get's a Court-Order from that shady,errm,secret Court,to turn over Info,he either complies,or goes to Jail!
It's all spelled out in that "Patriot"-Act,started by Bush,reinforced by Obama!

Problem is,they will still know who is using their Service,so can be compelled to reveal that!
The moment you activate your LAN,you are out of your Computer in No-Man's Land,and your Puter has become part of that No-Man's Land where everything goes!
Better not having any Illusions about Privacy or Safety on the WWW.

Startpage collects no data to share, but they are only a search engine and not the whole package.

Being a privacy advocate and the fussy duck that I am, I have my own preferences for search engines and email.

For a search engine, I sometimes like Startpage, but my favorite engine is (naturally) DuckDuckGo.com

As for & web browsing & email, I find it hard to beat the Torbrowser package and Tormail.org for email. If you have someone you correspond with who also has a Tormail account (or similar mail service in the Tor network) you can send private emails back I forth and nobody is gonna see it because it stays on the darkweb. You can use it for regular email too, but your privacy can be compromised by the people on the clearnet who know who you are (loose lips syndrome). "They can't see where you come from or where you go on the darknet, but there are other subtle ways to identify you, so you should always keep an eye on what you say and who you say it to, and how much (with enough text to go by, a style can be almost as revealing as a fingerprint)

http://duckduckgo.com/ (should be https, but owing to Mingle's limitations can't be)

http://www.torproject.org/ (ditto on https)

http://tormail.org/ (Take THAT Yahoo!)

Tormail is good and startpage is using the same https: format to launch their secure email late this summer.

I have my doubts that anything is safe anymore, encrypted or not, since gov't seems to think the people have NO right to privacy, and they can spend taxpayer money to hire the best hackers, lawyers, judges, and media talking heads in the world to promote, implement and sell whatever lie suits their purpose.

We all know DC is corrupt and quit working for us as soon as the courts deemed corporations as "people" too.

Repeal that law from the books and MUCH would change. Add term limits for congress and senate and we may have a start at reclaiming our liberties accorded by our creator and the constitution/bill of rights

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2041044/how-to-protect-your-pc-from-prism.html

However,nothing is foolproof!
Don't forget,you need an ISP!
Really think PRISM is all there is?

"Core Master" makes PRISM look like childs play and they are building the $2B complex in Utah to implement it!

The NSA's Best Defense of PRISM Didn't Even Last a Week!

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/06/nsas-only-terrorist-defense-prism-didnt-even-last-week/66143/#ixzz2VzgmynS7

The only secure computer is one that's unplugged, locked in a safe, and buried 20 feet under the ground in a secret location... and I'm not even too sure about that one
Dennis Hughes, FBI

I wouldn't sweat it too much, the best hackers come from the free & open source software movement and do what they do in terms of what their social conscience dictates, not their paycheque. There are very few "turncoats" and the ones that are in it for the money probably weren't that good or creative to start with. Frankly, I don't think the spy agencies stand much of a chance, as there are encryption algorithms that are even safe from the upcoming (here already?) sophisticated quantum computers.

Really the biggest threat to personal privacy and security comes from the people themselves, because they don't know how to secure their systems and are basically too lazy or apathetic to even try very hard. Hell...Most people still us Windoze! and even the OS X is no longer all that secure. Unfortunately, even Ubuntu is becoming insecure, but there are other OS's that are VERY secure.

Rick Stallman (I'm told) is an even bigger privacy nut than I am and doesn't connect to the internet much at all & when he does, he uses an oddball Chinese-made processor designed to be safe from US based hacking attempts in addition to his other precautions.

My personal favorite encyption is still the OTP Vernam cypher developed in the early twenties. It is simple and uncrackable by ANY computer or algorithm. here again the only security flaw is arranging for the two parties to exchange the symmetric cypher key securely...major vulnerability there!

Tor is a good anonymizer, but can be somewhat vulnerable to flooding attacks & the exit nodes can be compromised by traffic analysis with a sufficiently sophisticated system or hostile exit node, but staying in the darkweb fixes that.

An option I really like is called I2P, but that might be a little too sophisticated for the average user and can be a bit complicated to set up, but it doesn't have reliable exit nodes, so all traffic goes into the darkweb & stays there...Very secure.

There is also a LOT of work going on to build wireless mesh networks using secure protocols that will free most people from ISP slavery and reduce cost to not much more than electricity.

Anyone who uses "toolbars" or "automatic updates" features, "express installs" (instead of "custom") or opens "cc or bcc" emails..... well, welcome to the machine!

I need some help.
I like and usually run Mozilla.
Lately, it has been crashing a lot.
I also have installed, IE and Google Chrome.
Any suggestions on what safe provider I can switch to?