In my previous post on this subject, I talked a little about the search engines we use and how we can start our drive to recover control of our online lives with them.  This time, I’d like to look into web browsers.  I’m going to focus in on Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome here as these are the two I know.

Your web browser is most likely to be the primary tool you use when dealing with the Internet, in fact I’d take a wager that when most people think of the Internet they think of their web browser.  This means that in our push for control, this is our next step.

The first place to look is the method we use to get information across the Internet and onto the screen.  Generally, your browser will use a method called HTTP or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.  This is a transfer protocol, one of many, and this one deals specifically with web pages.  The problem is that it transmits in the clear, but we can fix that by using the HTTPS (HTTP Secure) protocol which is encrypted.  This sounds complicated, but really it isn’t and there are already extensions for Firefox and Chrome, which are called HTTPS Everywhere and HTTPS Enforcer respectively.

Now we’ve got some protection on that aspect of things, we need to look inside the pages.  Ad networks are quite capable of tracking your behaviour as you browse the Internet, which makes sense as they want to serve you the most relevant ads.  For our part, we can do something about this with three extensions.  The first prevents adverts from being displayed and is called Adblock (Firefox) (Chrome); the second blocks all manner of tracking and ad networks and is called Ghostery.  The third sets permanent opt out cookies for 90 major ad networks and is called Beef TACO, as far as I know this one is Firefox only.

OK, that’s data transfer and tracking networks, now we need to think about information that’s been saved on the computer.  This is in two parts, the Cookies and the Cache.  Cookies are small files that are saved on your computer, websites can store a number of things in them, from the useful (site preferences) to the sinister (behaviour tracking data).  Generally cookies can be cleared from within the browser, and we have most of the sinister stuff covered with the above extensions, but if you’re using Adobe Flash Player then we have a problem.  Flash Player sets a type of cookie called LSO Cookies, which can’t be deleted by the browser as they’re managed by Flash Player, luckily there is a Firefox extension for this called BetterPrivacy.  If you’d like to see exactly what Flash Player has stored, click here.  Our next target is the cache itself, this is where your browser stores data that it’s downloaded during the browsing process.  It then uses this local store to save it having to fetch things over the network.  This speeds things up nicely, but does mean that if you’re concerned about somebody accessing this data (e.g. you’re using a computer for sensitive communications in a repressive regime), you have a problem.  The cache itself can be wiped by your browser, that’s fine.  But data can be undeleted, which is where these next two extensions come in.  The first secure wipes the Firefox Cache, the second restores the close down settings clear dialog to Firefox 3.5+, respectively, they are Secure Sanitizer and Ask For Sanitize.

Finally we come to an extension that allows you to control the operation of scripts that run in webpages, it’s called NoScript or NotScripts and is available for Firefox and Chrome respectively.  This is useful as these scripts can still betray a lot of information about your actions, but do be careful around public access WiFi (e.g. theCloud.net) as I’ve had this extension render that service unusable.

I think that covers the browser pretty well, but if anyone knows of anything else that can be added, please leave me a comment!

I’ll switch focus towards the technology side of things starting with this post.  We’ve been regularly seeing stories in the online media about the internet and privacy.  It does seem to me that there is a slow erosion of the basic expectations we all have of privacy, this is magnified by the ease with which information held in networked systems can be cross-referenced.  An example I remember is a time that a neighbour was incensed that he’d had a letter from the government regarding his car tax, he’d not paid it and was convinced that somebody had “grassed him up”.  It never occurred to him that the various government agencies had all of his information held electronically and that a simple SQL query would turn up his details in seconds.

Regarding our Internet privacy, things are equally worrisome given the amount of data that we carrying with us in our browsers and that flows between our computers and the networked systems we access regularly.  What can we do to help us reclaim a little bit of control?  Well there is the option of Tor and also darknets,  but I’m going to look at a few simpler options over the next few posts, all of which are free or Free Software.

For this post, I’ll cover search engines.  Google keeps quite a bit of information on your activities, it’s not the only one that does this and our choice of search service is the first place we can go to start to reclaim some control over our online lives.

The first one I’d like to mention is reasonably well known, it’s called DuckDuckGo.  It’s a search engine that doesn’t track you and doesn’t keep records of what you do.  If you want a privacy minded chat system, they also rung an XMPP server which can be accessed by any Google Talk compatible client and there is a community forum for help.  I recommend that you hit the options on DuckDuckGo and turn the “” to off, otherwise anyone with access to your proxy server logs or who is sniffing network traffic will be able to tell what you’re searching for.

The next service is a European site called Startpage.  Startpage seems to be a service that takes results from Google, but protects your privacy while doing so, they are the first search engine to have EU approval from EuroPrise.  Although they don’t seem to have a community forum, they do offer a useful proxy service for each search result they return and they use HTTP POST for searches by default which keeps the search terms out of the URL.

Both of the above search engines support the use of https connections for improved privacy and I encourage you to give them a test drive.

Let’s bring my two chosen fields of interest together for this one shall we?

I’ve talked yesterday about the idea that in Buddhism, compassion (or karunà) is a very wise kind of selfishness, a kind of enlightened self interest that starts at home but actually works to the benefit of all of those around us.  If you’re in Computing, or if you follow it, this sounds quite familiar when you think about it; it sounds like the Free Software movement.

Let me play on that idea.  Free Software is software that id defined by the four freedoms:

• the freedom to run the software as you see fit.
• the freedom to study the program code and change it.
• the freedom to redistribute copies of the original software as you see fit.
• the freedom to redistribute your modified version should you so wish.

The result is that an awful lot of programmers (or hackers if you prefer that term) are producing great software for nothing and giving it away!  This may look awful, but the result has been GNU/Linux, many of the services that run the Internet, Firefox, Chrome, VLC and many other great things.  So we’ve all benefited hugely, including those original hackers.  It’s not just hackers and the public, when you investigate you find that a lot of Linux kernel development is paid for by corporates.  They wouldn’t do it if they didn’t benefit, but by doing that their actions ultimately benefit us as well.

So this serves as a more practical example of what I was talking about yesterday, the idea that compassion that starts at home can reach out to, and benefit the wider society.

I reinstalled my laptop recently, taking it back to Debian Sid.  It was running OpenSUSE 12.1, but I wanted to move towards a rolling release and not have to deal with static ones, plus I’ve always had a soft spot for Debian.

I’d started to tinker with Gnome 3 on OpenSUSE and have continued this on Debian, I must say that I’m growing more impressed with it.  It’s a huge break from the traditional Gnome and is causing a lot of controversy in Linux circles.  This is understandable when you consider that geeks are utter power users and we also tend to aspergic traits, thus disliking change.  For me it’s a simple and elegant environment and this desktop environment addresses a pet hate of mine, multitasking.

I’ve been a KDE user for a while on my main desktop, which runs OpenSUSE 11.4 though recently the KDE desktop has started to strike me as overly complicated.  I’m not a fan of this, I prefer something that is simpler but also I prefer to focus on one application at a time, multitasking isn’t something I think is a good thing at all.  Multiple windows are something I find distracting and I’m finding myself using Gnome 3 with the windows maximised all the time.  In light of this, I’m starting to give serious mental room to the thought that a taskbar is something which we should be consigning to the dustbin of history, it simply serves to bring all the distractions and put them front and centre!  If an application wants my attention, it can put an icon in the notification area, which I will deal with when I’m good and ready.  I want to see my screen real estate taken up by what I’m doing, not cluttered with the distractions.

The funny part is that even computers can’t really do two things at once, they just give the very convincing impression that they can.  Multitasking?  Humbug!

Well, I’ve got a little work done over the last week or two and I’ve just update my SitQuietly web-based meditation timer to version 1.3.  I’m still working on getting it going on tablets and phones, but my spare time is quite limited so this may take a while.

Changes are:

• Added tool tips to sidebar items.
• Centre the timer window.
• Highlight the Acknowledgements section.
• Slight wording change to the meditation instructions. Added two more resources to the resources section and amended the format.
• Number input boxes allow multiple lines, fixed this issue.

As ever, I hope you find it a useful tool and should you find a bug or have any suggestions please let me know!

I’ve been a busy bee over the last couple of weeks in my spare time.  The result of my work was uploaded just a few minutes ago and I hope you’ll like it.

After a long hiatus for various reasons, the web browser based SitQuietly meditation timer has received an update.  This new version removes the dependency on Adobe Flash, replacing that code with HTML 5 sound code instead.  I added a short section on meditation, with basic instructions and the site also sports a new format and has a few fixed bugs.

I’ve tested it in Firefox, Chromium, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari and Konqueror.  I also know it renders fine on IOS and Android but the sound is not yet working on those platforms.  I have a handle on what needs to be done, but I had no way of finishing the work before my deadline of 1st Jan.

Anyway, you can find it here, please let me know what you think!

The Occupy protests are spreading.  This is in spite of quite a bit of silence in much of the mainstream media, who only covered them when ultimately forced to.  I should except Russia Today and Al Jazeera from the above statement, their coverage has been very good.  I’ll chat about my views on the protest movement another time, but something else has caught my attention.

The protest camp in New York made it into the IT media earlier this week.  This was in the form of an article covering their IT infrastructure, which I must give praise where it’s due, seems very nicely put together given the circumstances.  The sentence that caught me is in the above article, it’s a quote from a protester referring to the disappearance of a laptop during a police raid,  and I’ll quote it below.

“We’d love to get an Apple, because a lot of the software we’re used to is on the Mac,” one said. “Linux machines are always nice, given Linux is having the same revolutionary effect on the industry as we are on society, but even Windows machines would be a help.”

The above is quite accurate, GNU/Linux is having a revolutionary effect.  But the thought struck me a little later that this isn’t the entire story, is it?  GNU/Linux is a great system, a colleague of mine was at a presentation given by a Microsoft employee where the MS guy went through the Windows Server 2008 kernel and the Linux kernel.  After 1 hour 45 minutes, the conclusion was that they’re much of a muchness, he had to admit that the Linux kernel is every bit as good as the Microsoft offering.  Of course, with tools like openQA from the openSuSE team, the future is looking even brighter.

So the software is great, we know that, but revolutionary?  I submit that it isn’t by itself revolutionary.  You can get the code to BSD Unix, but that doesn’t really seem revolutionary in the way that is implied above, so what do I mean?  Enter stage left, the GNU General Public License, or GPL for short.

My understanding of things is this.  The BSD code can be referred to as “Open Source”, which means you get access to the source code and can play with it as you see fit to do so. However, you’re not required to give your changes back.  This means that BSD code has found it’s way into both Windows and the MacOS, but they are not required to return any improvements they made on other people’s hard work to the community.

The Linux kernel is under the GPL, which comes with a string attached.  If you modify the program and distribute it, then you have to make the modified source available so that others in the community can do the same.  For this reason, GPL’ed code is known as “Free Software“, it is not “Open Source”.  For a background to how the GPL came to be invented, I recommend “Free As In Freedom” a biography of the founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard M Stallman.

I’ve come to believe that the General Public license, and the associated “Four Freedoms” (see the “Free Software” link above), have been the thing that allowed the revolution to happen.  Think about it, a license that says high quality software and the improvements to said software are all available freely to everyone.  Individuals, communities and corporations alike.  We can study it, improve it, redistribute it, but not lock it away.

Now that’s revolutionary!

Well, this is a nice surprise. Today, the KDE Community is 15 years old.

The KDE community has created an advanced desktop environment for the Linux and BSD operating systems.  Personally, I’ve used it on and off for some years and am now more settled on it as my desktop of choice as an OpenSuSE user. There is often a question mark over the staying power of Free Software projects and that perception is often used to attack these projects. This milestone for the KDE community shows this question mark for the inaccuracy that it is.

All that remains is for me to offer my own congratulations to the KDE community, here’s to at least another 15 years!

I checked Slashdot earlier today and found that Richard M Stallman is under fire for comments regarding Steve Jobs.  The exact comment is posted below and a short Google will provide enough commentary via a variety of websites and comment section flame wars to keep you reading for quite some time.  I’ve italicised the controversial section.

“Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.”

Click here for the original

Let me be frank, I value my freedom and as such I run Linux as my main desktop O/S.  I can see where RMS is coming from with regards to the whole “computer as a jail” idea, it harks back to the bad old days when when parts of the internet were walled off and proprietary, for example Compuserve.  I have not bought an Apple device for some years, after buying MacOS X for my blueberry iBook and then quickly  having support dropped by just about everyone, when 10.1 arrived.  This left me facing a bill of over £100 to carry on using the machine, even though I was already a paying customer and the software wasn’t technically out of support!  I seethed, then installed Yellow Dog Linux, gave Apple two fingers, and never looked back.

I should disclose that I have an iPhone but only as my company provides and requires it, their standard is Apple phones and that’s it, my own mobile is an Android device.  So what do I see?  To my eyes, iTunes is well designed, iTunesU certainly seems interesting, but the content is available elsewhere on the open Internet.  Also, while Apple are accused of restrictive DRM, I can play my iTunes purchases on OpenSuSE Linux with no problems.  I am however looking for an alternative to Amazon / iTunes.

Anyway, back on topic.  While I can empathise with where RMS stands, I see his comments as badly timed and frankly, there was no need to say it like that.  Though I will observe that in his next two sentences RMS does separate the man from his legacy, or as the Christians say “love the sinner, hate the sin”.

Steve Jobs went too early, it wasn’t a nice way to go (is there one?) and at this moment in time our thoughts should be with his family and friends.  A civil discussion of his legacy as regards our freedom can wait for another day.  I’ll air my own views in due course, but not yet.

Well, I do need to post more often than monthly don’t I?  It’s been a busy few weeks and mental energy has been slowly flowing back after a few changes.  Hopefully this will mean more to say on my part and also bring forward some planned changes to my SitQuietly software.

I was thinking of commenting on the unfolding situation in Greece, the Greek parliament is in emergency session tonight and the stakes are high. But there is nothing to add, nothing further to say.  Sometimes all you can do is watch silently, I’ve said everything I have to say on this.

I want to go a different way tonight, a way that cleaves (I hope) nearer to the middle path.  A lot has been said about energy in the last couple of years.  The oncoming peak in our civilisation’s available net energy supply (also known as “Peak Oil”) has been playing in the background of the current clutch of crises like a pianist in a dingy backstreet bar.  The common scenario seems to be that we return to a pre-industrial existence, almost like the wild west but with a little electricity and a few lightbulbs along the way.  Set against this is the hope that some sort of “Star Trek” style technology will save us and let us carry on as before.  To be frank, I think both viewpoints are a little overplayed.  So I’ll stick my neck out and say what I see, everyone else seems to be doing it, so I’ll jump in as the water seems to be fine.  This is a general flavour of the direction my thoughts are running in.

So, what do I see?  Change for sure, we can’t go on as we are, that much is certain.  But I see a different future, industrial society and high technology are still here, but they look very different.  I see technology being more expensive, scarcer, and not disposable any more. We will have to repair, to mend and make do more.  More things will be done manually, private cars will be scarcer, cities walkable and public transport will be forced to improve.

Industry will still be here.  We will still be able to smelt metals, produce solar cells and silicon chips.  We have the beginnings already, solar furnaces can produce solar cells and silicon chips of superior quality to our current ones[1].  Part of the changes I see is the migration of these sort of industries to hot equatorial countries to take better advantage of the stronger sun.

Of course, energy will be an issue and energy efficiency will be the name of the game. As I said above, the power use of labour saving devices will be a no-no so we will return to doing a fair few things by hand.  No tumble drier or dishwasher, and the electric mixer will likely be replaced  by a hand whisk!  Newer technologies are emerging that allow power to be drawn from our movements, there are wearable solar cells, kinetic chargers and hand or foot cranked chargers for devices[2,3,4]; this could be a lot more common.  In addition, we will make more use of walking and cycling.  The huge supplies of fossil fuels that power our cars and planes will not be anything like as available, and the alternatives don’t have anything like the juice to fit the bill; at least not until we eventually get fusion online.  I’m not holding my breath for that one, in case you hadn’t guessed.  I can see the biodiesels and power dense liquid fuels being used in construction machinery and other applications that need that sort of horsepower.  Our power needs will be met by a diverse range of technologies; solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, nuclear and no doubt others.  Let me be clear, there is no single magic bullet, how you are powered will likely depend very much on where you are and what you are doing.

Raw materials will likely be recycled, or mined from landfill [5].  Given that our cars and many aircraft will be largely redundant by this time, recycling them will free up a significant amount of raw materials.  I do have more to say on this subject, but am out of time for now.  I’ll try not to leave it so long next time!

References

[1] – The Bright Future of Solar Powered Factories.

[2] – Engineers Create First Motion Powered Nano Device.

[3] – 15 cellphone chargers that harness kinetic energy for a clean recharge.

[4] – Freeplay Energy. See FreeCharge 12v and Clamp Charger, but all products are good examples.

[5] – Landfill mining (Wikipedia).