Google released their new browser, with some really interesting features.

However we would tell people to really not use the browser for their daily things, especially things which you would treat as private. Like posting articles or to forums, or read your emails online. (Except for gmail, then you’re fucked anyway…). Unfortunately nothing else have been expected by us from google:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

Source

So better wait for an opensource-fork, which won’t contain any of these nasty things. We are waiting for the good debian fork

Google your new e-banking backup solution.

… and any other proprietary (instant messaging) protocol. On Tuesday 1nd July, ICQ presented another time why people should never ever use proprietary protocols or tools again: By changing their protocol they locked out every free instant messaging client to connect to their servers. (See Gulli or golem (both german) for more.

Via gulli I even found a (german) page which describes quite in detail and very good, why you shouldn’t use icq: Sagt Nein zu ICQ. And just to note: any other proprietary protocol won’t better. So: cool kids don’t use icq, nor msn…

What to use else?

@immerda.ch we started quite a while now a jabber service, which is open to all people using our services. Jabber can do the same, as msn and icq, it’s open and even cooler! Have a look at our Jabber Services Page, drop msn, icq, etc. and join the jabber community!

Russel Coker have done some math about kernel security related reboots and some common uptime marketing gags.

In Short: If you do all the security related reboots, you can hardly achieve an uptime like: 99.9999%, which is not uncommon nowadays in many bussinness categories.

Karl McMillan and Chad Sellers have both some nice blog entries [2] due to the recent OS X trojaner: They both sign the need of more restrictive and finer grained security controls for operating systems.

SELinux or the Sandbox for Apple, which comes from TrustedBSD a sister project of SELinux (circuit close!), both provide systems like these. As Redhat is now including and propagating the use of SELinux, as well the Fedora Community integrated some nice support into Fedora 9, it even looks like apple will more and more come with things like that. And they seem to have started to integrate it into CUPS.

Good way to proceed.

some facts about surveillance in europe and upcoming international surveillance:

• Berlin: Wiretapped one million phone calls a year: Gulli, Datenterrorist (both german)
• Austria: 32 daily requests for wiretapping and internet traffic surveillance: Gulli
• Duties should be allowed to scan your computers for piracy: Gulli
• USA likes to observere there inhabitants more and more: Gulli
• unfortuantely more to come…

it looks like there is no encryption for microsoft windows when using a french version. according to a blog-entry @fefe (german), which points to a french blog-entry. Windows is turning the random key generator off, when it thinks being used in france. someone even notices that all french windows versions are affected. scaring…

Besides our standard link to gmail users, we just found some another intersting page about gmail violating privacy: Gmail Privacy Page

It’s a FAQ driven by the electronic privacy information center. Opposite to the “Gmail is too creepy”-Page it looks like a more reliable source and therefor the best “don’t use gmail”-page we have seen yet. (All informations on the “Gmail is too creepy”-Page are correct, however they drive a more populistic way, which might discourage some people to read-on.)

So have a look at the FAQ, make your thoughts, don’t use gmail and don’t mail to gmail if you care about privacy. it’s just so simple.

Or at least attach these two links to any mail going to a gmail address.

Anarchogeek has an example about problems with data retention from a a friend which is providing a service called TxtMob. This friend “has been subpoenaed by the new york police department demanding the records of everybody using the service during the RNC protests in 2004.” What is good is that the software wasn’t collecting any data, which isn’t really needed, from the beginning on, and even really deletes any data if you’re deleting you’re account. This is really cool and exemplary, as we have pointed out earlier: On most Social Networking plattforms it’s quite hard to even delete your account!

So the post pointed out also some other stuff:

• Due to the high amount of collected connection information and this amount of data, it’s quite hard for investigations to get out the right informations. Therefor they want the data directly from the source. (As happened in this case)
• As if there is no data they can’t get, they simply won’t get any data.
• Free Software is the final goal to provide service possibilities on a complete anonymous basis. If they’re not yet capable of anonymous access, you can simply improve it to do it.
• There are a bunch of people and collectives out working on cool projects with the idea of giving anonymous and secure access to several services and protecting your privacy. So do we or at least try to do it.

So help to work on secure and anonymous services, protect the privacy of you’re users and simply don’t collect any informations you won’t neeed!

One of our readers (ha! we really have a few!) pointed us to another nice and interesting video(s) about the end of intimicy within the growing surveillance of citiziens.

Interesting that they also mention the project “Track me not”, which we discussed already earlier.

So have a look at the (german spoken) video on youtube:

Which is part of a series of videos: 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

A nice video about what data rentention means. simply say no thanks!




available as mp4 here