lmost one decade ago I shifted all of my E-mail to a domain that I control. Well, to be accurate, my host and I control it, and that host is based in Ireland/UK. But over time it became apparent that this was usually useless for privacy. If the recipient uses an E-mail address in one of the big providers of ‘free’ E-mail services (e.g. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft), then my messages (incoming, outgoing) will be visible to corporations and governments whose business should not be other people’s personal lives. So among those who were close to me I was pushing to move to a private domain as well, often the same as mine. This goes back to around 2004. Alas, this wasn’t enough. People routinely use SMTP servers provided by their ISP (‘free’ traffic, free to engage in surveillance), and some use Web-based clients that spying-happy browsers are accessing. Those browsers got worse in that regard over time. Ubuntu now uses search to turn users into products. Besides all of this, the ISP has access to packets, and here in the UK we have Phorm, which helps ISPs do DPI (deep packet inspection) under the guise of “marketing” surveillance.

The bottom line is, encryption for E-mail is needed, but the problem is that few mail clients actually support PGP. Some make it cumbersome to use. Perhaps it’s fair to say that privacy in E-mail is almost an impossibility in practice (even among two willing parries). I no longer use E-mail all that much. face-to-face conversations remain one of the most private options for those who value privacy.

or many years I had abstained from joining Reddit, which I subconsciously viewed as a competitor to Digg, where I was already quite prominent and sometimes called “omnipresent”. But several months ago I reconciled all this nonsense and joined the site — a site that I had been sometimes criticising over at Techrights. During the weekend Techrights reached Reddit’s front page with this submission and the comments were surprisingly decent (in the past there were Novell employees attacking messengers in the comments, as means of misdirection). Things apparently do change over time, and sometimes in a positive way.

Separately, I have set up a page for me and my fiancée before our wedding (less than half a year away) and she loves it. Finally, a friend (and fellow professor) took dozens of videos and hundreds of photos with me over the weekend because we prepare a site and product called FXI (no public details on it just yet, but here is a a clue). There are some FXI logo ideas (the product is not yet up on the Web). This was made with the GIMP of course and it is far from final, only concepts.

Next weekend I hope to finally upload a lot of code I wrote in 2011-2012, accompanied by whitepapers and documentation. Busy week ahead…

ROBABLY stating the obvious here: the Internet was created to endure targeted attacks and the World Wide Web was created by a British lad who wanted to share his physics papers. Nowadays, the Internet and especially the Web are challenging the old conglomerates because they offer low-cost competition. Those with trillions in the bank account (aggregated wealth) are not going to give up without a fight; using their bought politicians they are not trying to manufacture new laws, such as ACTA, which ORG tells us is “having very serious consequences for the free flow of information online…”

No surprise here, but we must fight back against this dictatorial behaviour. The problem is not so-called “piracy” (copyright infringement), the problem is competition. By trying to paint all competition as “piracy”, sociopaths are trying to call all competitors “illegal” (even generic drugs) just so that they can keep increasing their wealth and their power, at the expense of other people. Class warfare is all it is.

Keep political correctness where it belongs — in politics

olitical correctness — like politeness in a sense — is one of those buzz terms that can be invoked to silence opinions we do not wish to hear or at least discourage messengers, marginalising them or leading to self-censorship (through deterrence). Political correctness is an overused term, much like “racism”, “homophobia”, “anti-Semitism”, and so on.

In an ideal world, people should be free to express themselves and those who choose to be insulted by words can shut their ears. One of their “defences” — if it qualifies as such — is that there is incitations in words, but this becomes akin to imposed censorship, where one finds a messages or image too objectionable for the public and thus wants to impose central censorship.

We live in a world where people are not tied to a television set with just 5 channels. People choose to subscribe to one of a plethora of sites or channels or books. There is abundance. Trying to limit ourselves to particular messages based on their “political correctness” is not going to achieve much except add some “allure” to the suppressed messages. People who seek particular types of speech will ultimately find it anyway, especially on the Internet (even if encrypted).

Political Correctness (PC) — like the Personal Computer — is outdated. It is for politicians to know what will attract funding and what may alienate potential voters. But political correctness need not belong on the Web; it’s incompatible with the values of freedom, including freedom of expression. Sadly, however, in a world full of hardcore conservatives, there will always be pressure to impose draconian rules of speech.

INYURL used to be one among few services that shortened long URLs for people (snipurl was another). These services would typically be used only when a URL was exceptionally (and perhaps irregularly) long — to the point of being incompatible with some mail/news readers. The landscape has changed somewhat and nowadays, with people becoming lazy and phone-tied, folks assume that original URLs don’t matter, even though they indicate their source, their date, and perhaps title as well, at least most of the time (if properly designed at CMS level). URLs are not merely barcodes, their visibility contributes a lot toward expectation and even the ability to recover broken URLs in the future (based on their source or title). Now that every John and Jane creates his or her own shortener, there is less incentive to keep those services up in the long run, especially once they drive a lot of ‘legacy’ traffic and do nothing for revenue (mere redirections). As the creator of the World Wide Web put it about a year ago, there is also the danger that authorities of TLDs will sooner or later be misusing their power to censor some popular shorteners and immediately break a whole lot of linkage, upon which much of the Web is based. In a sense, short URLs break the Web, but when there are limitations on the number of characters in services like Twitter, people are pressured to use them, even by default.

Best practice is, avoid URL shorteners unless there is absolutely no way around it. And if you must use a shortener, choose one which you believe is most likely to survive the next 5, 10, or maybe 50 years (very unlikely). Otherwise, the URLs will be as useful as a random string, i.e. disposable garbage. As wary as I am of Google, I recently started using Google’s shortener when no other choice exists (identi.ca/Twitter have length limitations). Being a tracker, it’s one service that Google is unlikely to axe any time soon.

s we have seen here before, when BT messes things up, it messes up royally [1, 2, 3]. Yesterday was another reminder of this. At 9AM, without any warning or notification, the connection went down, apparently affecting entire large areas in Manchester and perhaps Bolton. The helpline which is only ‘manned’ by a recorded message preferred to draw attention to some Yahoo! (E-mail access) problem and there was no estimated time for return of service (for those who may resort to contingencies). The less advertised number through which one can speak to an actual person later contradicted the automated messages, which preferred to pretend the connection problems were over long before these were over (the connection was said to have been resorted at 3PM). The actual person whom I eventually spoke to (based on India) was very kind, but he used the same strategy of emphasising that the phone line is fine (while knowing perfectly well that the problem is the Internet connection, not the landline). It was very hard to actually ‘squeeze out’ information and empty reassurances from the rep I spoke to. Why not be honest and forthcoming? BT was seemingly reluctant to even acknowledge that this was a large-scale failure at its end. Does reputation or the customer come first?

Eventually, 14 hours after the disruption had occurred, the connectivity was suddenly restored, no sooner than 11PM. So en entire day from morning to night was essentially without Internet and with very unreliable estimates of recovery time (if any estimates at all).

Now good, BT, not good…Many people’s job these days depend on the Internet. If you cannot provide an Internet connection for an entire day, then please at least provide reasonable status messages and estimates for restoration of service. If one expects the connection to be down for so long, a dongle or another PC (elsewhere) can be approached and used.

or those who have not heard, the government looks into censorship of the Web as miserable and counter-productive means for suppressing real grievances. The Prime Minister surely learned nothing from Egypt, which had this famous cartoon produced. I decided to do some GIMPing of the original to show the equivalence.