Cou
National Hazard
Posts: 958
Registered: 16-5-2013
Member Is Offline
Mood: Mad Scientist
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Could posting on here/googling about chemistry result in a raid?
Have you ever thought about the fact that the DEA could be browsing this forum, and looking for people to raid? I'm worried I'm already on the watch
list for some stuff I googled about chemistry. Has anyone actually gotten in trouble because they made a bad google search? There are millions of
google searches every minute, so it seems unlikely
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12AX7
Post Harlot
Posts: 4803
Registered: 8-3-2005
Location: oscillating
Member Is Offline
Mood: informative
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Nothing that I've heard of... of course, how would you know?
At least on this forum, there is rudimentary security available: you can use the https server for a secure connection (though not a verified
connection, as it is self-signed), which makes it difficult for ISPs to spy on your activity. (They'll know your computer was talking with so-and-so,
which is registered to this-and-that website, but they won't know what was transmitted, at least not without some effort.) The absence of ads means
no trackers (at least within the forum; referring pages might be able to collect such data though), so Google isn't privy to your reading patterns
within the forum. It's likely that various methods can determine that you've *been* here, perhaps frequently, but as in forensics, that's
circumstantial. Actually gathering evidence would require access to the forum, matching up user with computer with IP address with username and post,
which requires moderator access; if the forum were ever involved in an investigation, that information would be fair to subpoena I think.
As far as I know, this forum has never been involved in an investigation (at least, that Polverone has mentioned and that I have read), and we
wouldn't want the kind of people who would attract that kind of attention anyway. So in conclusion, you're either 1. excessively paranoid, in which
case get over it, or 2. actually intent on committing a crime, in which case, please leave. 
[Philosophical thought which just ran across my head. It's funny: in technology, we keep trying to build things more complicated and higher security
(more scrambled). In biology, we're trying to simplify and unravel the nonsense of DNA. If you compared an average HTTPS communication with a random
chromosome (encoding both in the same format, binary let's say), you probably wouldn't find too many patterns in either (ignoring repeated sequences
in the DNA). In time, both will converge to bloated gibberish which can only be understood on the highest of levels!]
Tim
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