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Windows 7 Sins

A nice web page published by the Free Software Foundation: Windows 7 Sins. Definitely worthwhile for reading!

TOR Browser on an USB Stick

The TORProject is a very powerfull tool to make internet trafic anonymous using an onion routing network. Now I just spotted that the TORProject provides a selfcontained browser boundle which lets you run a TOR enabled browser (Firefox) directly from an USB stick without the need to install any software on the computer. Just plug in the USB stick on which you have copied the TORBrowser and start surfing the internet without leaving a trace.

Avoiding the Electronic Police State No.5

I am living in the UK which is currently ranked in this study by Cryptohippie as the 5th under the worlds electronic police states (the UK is only exceeded in this field by China, North Corea, Belarus and Russia). I am not much surprised by this ranking. But reading this ranking gave me the final push to think about doing something about it.

Just recently I thought what to do about it and got the following idea: why not to try out one of the many public VPN services which are out there? So what did I do? In my case I moved my connection to Switzerland (which is ranked on place 30 in the same report). It doesn’t cost much (5USD for a month which is about the price of a good beer and a package of chips here  in the UK) and is set up easily in less than … 5 minutes!

Modern Darwinism at Work

From biology we know that if you provide a constraint to a biological system, then evolution will addapt. The same happens in the internet: if you try to control and restrict the information exchange, people will begin to develope means how to get around the atempts of control and restriction. One recent example where one can observe this to happen is in Sweeden. There the new anti-piracy laws boost the market for encryption technology.

What the Pirate Bay Trial Means for the Future of Entertainment

Here an excellent blog entry on the recently finished trial against The Piratebay.

What Facebook is For

And no, I do definitely not have a profile on Facebook!

OneSwarm

A new file sharing software, this time developed by the University of Washington: OneSwarm. It is based (and backwards compatible) with BitTorrent but provides more anonymity (relative to other P2P software) if used to share data using what they call the Friend-to-Friend (F2F) network. From their FAQ:

Isn’t P2P software just for piracy? Don’t you have better things to do?
Our interest is in building a system for users to share data efficiently and securely while preserving their privacy. Virtually everyone on the Internet is a content producer, but today we only have one model for sharing: sign over the rights to your work to a website, with the hope that it will respect your privacy. Our work is to show that there is a better way.

Nuff said! Have a look at their screen cast introducing their software and concept…

UK Censors Wikipedia

Imagine a country where there exists a authority which maintains a list of addresses of internet pages which are not suitable for the public to see. Imagine that most of the internet service providers of this country use this list to block access to the addresses on this blacklist. Imagine that the blocking is done secretly without telling that is happens. Imagine that whenever a address is blocked you will get the message “404 Not Found” and you will unlikely know for sure whether this page doesn’t exist or is not accessible because it is on this secret block list.

Imagine web pages could suddenly disappear silently from your vision if some person ads its address to the block list. Imagine some people in the state want information on the net to vanish in the void … and the technical possibility for this exists.

Does this sounds scary?

Does the Ministry of Truth come to your mind? Do you think of China?

It is the United Kingdom I am thinking of, and partially the above scenario is happening just right now. The organisation I think about is the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the incidence in question this time is a page on Wikipedia. The page in question is the album Virgin Killer by the German band Scorpions. It shows amongst other thing the controversal cover picture of the initial release in the year 1976. The image on the right shows how this page looked to me while surfing from home. The original page is still there, people from UK might not see it (without some small and very simple modifications to their internet settings), if you are outside the UK you will probably have not the slightest problem to access the page.

Still, it is no problem to access Wikipedia through a secure channel provided by Wikimedia foundation. On the right a screen shot of the page how it is accessible using the link https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Virgin_killer.

Sure, the image in question is debateable and caused and again causes a lot of controverse discusions. And I myself could not care less if the people editing Wikipedia decide to have it on their site or not.

But what is scary is the fact that in a democratic state an instituition is established which gives a theoretical possibility to secretly censor anything they would like. It might still sound like fiction, but where there is a posibility desire will grow and history has shown that posibilities will be deployed.

More detailed information about the incidence can be found here on Wikinews, in this article on The Register and in this blog entry on ZDNet. And now the story is also on BBC.

Now after the big protest IWF as reivsed their decision about the image in question:

“However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.” (source)

Child pornography is a very bad and sad thing and I myself do not support it in any way! Still I firmly belive that secret censoring system as the IWF blocklist is something a demorcatic state should not have. Ever! To much is at stake here and one always should be aware of the beginning.

Now the above incidence was the first one which caused publicity. But when will the day come that we have to read Wikipedia (and other places in the internet) using encrypted connections to access information freely?

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