freenet

Again I will talk about some site that I had visited long long ago; actually this time it is not a site. It would be better to call it an "internet within an internet" as its creator calls it.

After all of these years, I remember the times that I was so paranoid about leaving my trail on anything on the internet. To this quest, I was researching about anything related to anonymity, secure communications, computer security and such. This may seem weird for some of you but those were the days when people have worries about giving their personal information to web sites, such as their emails. Nowadays, everybody seems to have forgotten about privacy. I wonder at which point this transformation has matured, clearly I missed it as I was not watching internet carefully after those years.

As I said freenet is a P2P network which lies in the application layer of the internet. Its main argument is that without true anonymity freedom of speech cannot be exercised. This is mainly true. But there are some points that I don't understand in this view.

First of all, speech alone cannot organize people and cannot enforce governments to agree with people who have those concerns. You can say that with a medium that you can express yourself, you can build a virtual space that have its foot also in the real world. Yes, it is true. But when your organization grows any stronger it HAS to have some presence on the streets and this is where the real power struggle starts.

Coming to the technical details, I think it runs over TCP/IP. To join the network, you need to know three hosts already in the network. Ideally, these must be hosts that you actually know. But mostly this would not be the case, so you join a specific IRC channel and find three people randomly. Then your freenet node begins to communicate the freenet through your new peers, of course over time your peers will evolve. All communication is encrypted and routed anonymously to help protect your identity. Also the data that you temporarily store in your computer as a part of your cooperation is encrypted.

Actually, I feel like writing more about this issue. Maybe next week.

Condoleezza Rice Faces Her Own Hand

 

At a congressional hearing, an anti-war protester had shown her a pair of bloody hands to remind her of the millions of deaths caused by US policy.

The woman is a member of a peace organization: CodePink

mint.com

If you had tried numerous accounting tools but had eventually given up because you need to add transactions manually, you have found your solution - at least in USA.

Using mint.com, you can track your money automatically because mint.com have deals with many banks and retrieves your earnings and payments through a digital channel. For example, using the details of your ATM spendings, it can build a pie chart dividing the spendings into several categories.



Also you can aggregate spending and payments of all your bank accounts into one single account and see your total easily.





Like every new thing we face nowadays on the internet, I think at first people might have doubts about privacy issues with mint.com, but as time passes by, anyone who is out of these services will begin to think that they *may* at least try them.

IMHO, this is a very important issue to investigate; what is the driving force that make people use these type of services that have a high chance of privacy issues, while they know that they may be slipping private info and may result in tracking their life?