Yesterday I reported on a talk given by Eben Moglen (Blech!).  Among the things he talks about is a technology called Tor.

Essentially, Tor is an world-wide network of relay servers integrated and designed to ensure the privacy of the surfers (not serfs) by anonymizing all browsing activities and locations.  Reading the overview on this page will give you a basic understanding of how this works.

There are several ways that one can participate in the Tor network itself and you can read about those here.

For those of us not running servers or otherwise currently capable of participating on the network side of Tor, there is Vidalia.  Vidalia is a client—available for Mac, Windows, and Unix systems of all flavors—which allows you to take advantage of the Tor network (as a proxy network) and thus annonymize much of your on-line activities.

For Opera users, I found this article for using Opera over Tor.

Tor is located in the Ubuntu repositories.  (If you are not running Ubuntu as your operating system, I recommend it.)  This is a good place to start if you are interested in either using or participating in the Tor network.

I’m just doing my little part to make the world a better place.  I hope that I can help you work toward that same goal.

Happy hunting.

Here is a great collection of talks by Eben Moglen concerning cloud-computing and, among other things, spying.  He has an excellent wit, a broad set of real-world non-technical examples, and a powerful argument.

Many of us are trying pretty hard to forget that privacy and security are held by us with thin fragile threads.  It’s unpleasant to think about all the time.  But please take some time today and devote that time to thinking about exactly this.

To give you an interesting and perhaps seemingly peripheral example, let’s talk briefly about the relationship between Exchange, Outlook, and mail.  It’s always been a bit of a hassle to obtain and copy the message headers from an e-mail message using Outlook.  The headers are not part of the message as it is displayed in Outlook.  They are buried in a menu item and even I have trouble remembering how to locate them.

Newer versions of Outlook working with Exchange (and I think this is currently unique to RPC/HTTP and not for the other protocols) do not display message headers in the box where they normally appear.  Why is that?  Because Exchange no longer offers those headers to the client.

The server keeps the information from you.

If you are a non-IT person, you’re probably thinking “why should that matter to me?”.  I mean it only as a small piece of evidence of a larger trend of corporations reducing our abilities to know.  What is alarming is that this reducing is occurring in the one medium (the Internet) that was wholly designed to allow people to know.

It’s not all about them reducing our abilities to know; it’s also about them endeavoring to own knowledge and then licensing that knowledge back to us.  This is true for Facebook, Google, Microsoft, the MPAA, &c.  What we buy—what we are allowed to buy—increasingly, is the right to enjoy what they own.

I should step aside and let you listen to what Eben has to say.  He’s really worked this out in very precise detail and I trust you will enjoy what he has to say (even if the picture he paints is, hopefully, sobering).

This page includes both audio files and video files (in open source codex as well as proprietary, of course):

Eben Moglen ‘Freedom in the Cloud’

I hope you enjoy his talk.  If you are in IT, I hope you will help work toward a world and an Internet that respects individual freedoms.  If you are not an IT professional, I hope his talk helps you to understand better some of the difficult choices that will approach each of us as we move forward in this increasingly complex and technologically dominated world.

Thanks for reading.  See you around.

This evening I returned home from dinner at my favorite Thai restaurant (Thaiku) here in Ballard to find that when I refreshed Facebook I received a security warning from Opera.

This should not be happening.  Facebook is requesting information about my local network (which is to say information about my machine and my router and firewall and so forth).  This is a security violation worthy of any spyware maker.  In other words, it is a serious security issue.

As such I will not be visiting Facebook until they are able to resolve this matter.

Don’t cry for me; I’ll be ok.

Google has announced their newest technological innovation. It’s an instant search feature and they are calling it Google Instant. Pretty clever name, eh?

I’ve never been all that interested in the look-ahead technologies out there. I turn the spelling correction off on my Android mobile because I don’t care for the look-ahead feature.

Google Instant does represent a good decision here.  They make the default search what you have actually typed and not what they are suggesting, which is exactly what I hated about the spelling correction on the phone (as it would insert things I didn’t want to say at all—I’ll leave that up to your imagination).  Bravo.  Now go fix that in Android.

This is some pretty cool stuff. Firefox, Opera, and Safari (and others) have been offering search term look-ahead (guessing at your desired search terms) for a long time now. As to the dynamic (javascript reliant) searching, well, Facebook and other sites have been doing that for a while. Granted Google has put together an excellent implementation of these technologies; but let’s not pretend they pulled a rabbit out of a hat here.

I’m not feeling all that compelled by being able to get one click quicker to my search results. I touch type so I can type a search term and hit enter often before I can scan and read their results. (Make your children take some typing. It’s useful.)

The one aspect that is more innovative is that the results are location aware. I know, maybe not more than the iPhone’s location awareness gimickery, but hey who’s counting?  It means typing one less search term if you are seeking something close to home (or whatever your current location happens to be).  Even I can’t type that fast.

I will say it is nice to see that we can’t search for the seven words you can never say on television (which you can certainly say on television now, given the right conditions—let’s write a television show about someone with Tourette’s).

I mean, I don’t want forking asp holes digging my sheet, beach.

You can search for erection and you can search for nipples, but you can’t search for erection nipples. “You can prick your finger, but don’t finger your prick.” Thanks, George; thanks, Puritans; and thanks, China.

Google seems to imply that we are able to turn off this filtering feature, but I have tested it with safe search turned off and this changes nothing.  My tests are confirmed in this article.  (Here is another article.)

All in all, I like it well enough. Not sure why they bothered with all the hubbub. They could have slipped this out pretty quiet like. I’m much more interested in the possibilities of Google Wave and that is languishing and obscure yet (and still doesn’t work properly in Opera).

Oh, and Instant doesn’t work in Opera. Here work means “Google does a browser check and if it detects Opera it doesn’t serve up the required Instant code”. Other than that it seems to work just fine.

So if you want to use Instant in Opera you’ll have to at least identify Opera as Firefox ( right-click on the page —> Network tab —> Browser identification —> Identify as Firefox drop-down ).

Good luck with that. And remember you save two to five seconds per search, but Google saves bazillions of processor cycles.

Ode to a Bull Market

O sweet smell of success
the unmimicable aroma
sought by perfumeries in Paris
so strong the nose of noses
dies a little death
and the effluence of the shitting bull
dissipates in fog