e-ignite

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) are an organisation that have been around for some time, and their aim is to fight for consumer’s rights regarding products and policy in the digital age. Despite being primarily American-orientated, the ramifications of their court cases, policies and appeals have international consequences.

I recently watched their Corruptibles video with great interest. It’s a fairly basic flash animation that outlines how new DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems could/will affect you in your every day lives. It’s worth a bit of a laugh, and it makes you think… but does it make you think what the EFF are trying to push?

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I recently made the switch from Squirrelmail (the default mail service with my hosting company) to Google Apps For Your Domain. This has allowed me to create a load of email accounts with 2Gb storage, full pop/smtp access and a Gmail interface for webmail. I’m most impressed, I have to say. The email service is hosted by Google itself, so will have full reliability even if my site goes down, and it seemed such a waste for me to be given the ability to create so many addresses and only need a few

So I’m not boasting about this in any way – in fact, I’m offering my regular users, viewers and readers an opportunity: How would you like a free email account? As discussed above, it has a full Gmail interface for webmail, pop/smtp access and (crucially) 2Gb storage – addresses will be anythingyouwant@e-ignite.co.uk (I’ll also help you set up free email encryption if you’d like)

Interested? Drop me an email.

Since my previous post on the irritation that is comment spam, I have had some time to play with protection methods. You’ll now notice an image verification code field underneath your comments – this should hopefully help out with the mass of spam I’ve been getting. It’s not ideal, and my sincere apologies to those with poor eyesight, but hopefully we can all share and discuss the privacy and security stories once more!

There is, unfortunately, one minor drawback: I have to use the default theme. As much as I liked the look of the blog previously, I’m a firm believer in content over aesthetics. But I’ll never say never… I may find a new theme at some point!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are taking the US Government to court over claims of domestic spying. It alleges that the Government’s new DCS-3000 system is an automated system designed to intercept and read emails (basically a new generation of the previous Carnivore system that performed the same task). The US Government declined to respond to a Freedom Of Information Request by the EFF, so it is being taken to court. You can read the full story here but the likelihood of success is fairly slim based on the EFF’s poor record of winning cases it takes to court. We can always live in hope, but it seems that personal privacy and the US Government are not currently compatible.

To make you feel even worse, the US Government have another system called RedHook that automatically intercepts voice phone callse and performs the same operations as Carnivore does with email. Are you sure you don’t need encryption!?!?

Further to an earlier post I made, it turns out that the US government has reached an agreement with the EU over the data it collects from passengers travelling to the US. According to BetaNews, the data sharing is to continue with one difference from before: The US government have to request the data before they get it, where previously it was automatically forwarded. Wow. Our rights are protected again. Sorry… I’ll stop the sarcasm.

I’ll leave you to decide whether this is right or wrong, but here’s something to consider – the data that is given to the US every time you travel there: Read the rest of this entry »