We don't know what the truth is. We know what we're being told though. And Kik is telling us that their messages aren't encrypted end to end, whilst bittorrent are telling us their messages are.
I commend you for compiling all of the resources. I would like to point out that your choice of Ubuntu linux is deficient. If one was concerned about privacy the choices that come to mind are tails/whonix. Debian and OpenBSD both respect privacy
But Ubuntu sends all queries typed in Unity to Amazon by default. Canonical says that the queries are anonimized, but no one can check what data is actually leaked.
I think that adding a few other user-friendly distributions such as Fedora or Mint in the "Install Linux" step might be a good idea.
Also, I haven't really followed the developments on this story but Ubuntu did effectively spy on you at some point by sending your searches to Amazon, considering this it is a pretty bad choice to recommend it in my opinion.
> His dumb little company VaporSet had this stupid setup where the people deploying Rails didn’t have root access.
Pardon, but how is this stupid? Given the descriptions of people he has provided, I - as a system administrator - would want absolutely nothing to do with such people having root access on my servers.
Hell, that's how it is at my current dayjob. Most of the devs do have root access because we know they're competent enough to be able to handle that level of responsibility (not to mention that we're a small team, and I'm the only dedicated sysadmin, so it's nice to have the devs be crosstrained for simple tasks like basic server provisioning while leaving me to more difficult tasks like stack design and low-level Unixy troubleshooting goodness), but our setup's engineered in a way that code deployment does not require superuser privileges.
