Friday, November 29, 2013

Good News!

"Congratulations!  Thanks to you [me] and 2975 other backers, Lavabit's Dark Mail Initiative has been successfully funded."
 
It will be very interesting to see what develops.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Google vs. Bing?

To protect my privacy when I surf the Web, I use a proxy server that I set up on a Linux virtual machine which is hosted in the cloud.  To the best of my knowledge, the virtual machine is hosted on a physical machine in NYC. 

Interestingly, Google is confused by this setup.  Here's a screenshot of Google News.  Notice that it is placing me in Kendall Lakes (FL?).  That's fine.  I don't want them to know where I am!





More problematic, however, is that often when I do a Google search, I get this back instead of a results page:


Does this mean that if they cannot track me, they aren't going to let me see the results?  I'll never know for sure.  That's when I go to Bing.  Bing is content to show me results when Google isn't.



Tuesday, November 05, 2013

Dark Mail @ Kickstarter

The founders of Lavabit and Silent Circle have started a new Kickstarter Project to develop a protocol for default, user-friendly, end-to-end encryption of email.  They are calling it Dark Mail, "because Black Mail has bad connotations."

I am supporting this project.  I encourage you to as well.  Find out more about it here: http://kck.st/HrENd0.  The window to sign up closes November 22nd.