the dao of flow

It’s good to see that there is a growing movement that aims to free the online identity and the social graph from silo platforms with dubious privacy agreements and to offer decentralized entities as new harbors. While I like the idea of the Diso Project that tries to implement decentralized social networks by extending server-located [...]

There were two other HAR presentations that I like to recommend: At first Roger Dingledine explained the performance issue of the network privacy tool TOR in his talk and the ways of dealing with this in the future. He had a lot of small anecdotes about the project that made the talk really interesting [...]

As reported yesterday, the German province Bavaria officially gave the police the right to use tools to scan computers of potential criminals starting from August 1st (the media call these tools “Bundestrojaner” – ferderal Trojan horse – in this case “Bayerntrojaner” – Bavarian Trojan horse). Looks really like another chapter of “We lost the war” [...]

Here is just a quick link to an article about privacy and security by Bruce Schneier at Wired. He explains the wrong perception regarding the trade-off between these two values.
The debate isn’t security versus privacy. It’s liberty versus control. [...] If you set up the false dichotomy, of course people will choose security over privacy [...]

Happy new 2008 1984. Germany has now the data retention but this doesn’t mean that we cannot fight back. Via Roland’s delicious links I stumble across Anonymouse.org. This proxy lets you surf any page anonymously in a very easy solution if you don’t want to set up Tor or JAP. Only disadvantage is it’s low [...]

I wrote some time ago about the new law for data retention in Germany. It passed all hurdles and will come into effect starting from the 1st January 2008. The connection meta data (phone, cell phone, internet) of all citizen of Germany will be stored for six month then. A law suit against this [...]

The Google Blog informs us that the Google Privacy Channel has started offering advice how to enhance privacy when using Google products. Well, nice try but I hope Nat Torkington is right and we can see soon the Google Privacy Dashboard
… where consumers can view all the information that Google has about them, request the [...]

I guess you didn’t miss the big hype about Googles OpenSocial (link doesn’t work so far), which is a set of open API standards for social networks. I like Google for using open standards and working with and not against the community. But regarding this opening of social networks (same for FOAF/XFN) I have [...]