As part of the rant I looked at VPNs to enable online privacy. I’d read that it is an effective way to work around regionalisation, neutralised changes like SOPA would bring, and generally pritect your online identify more – and it needed a good test.

It worked. It’s nice.

The service I purchased gave me a stable and health VPN connection (speeds up to 955kb/s) which made all the auto-detect functions I visited see me as a user from Sweden. Australia to Sweden is a long darn way, and the internet was none the wiser.

• Visiting Google initially came up in a different language.
• Tracking IPs found only the VPN end-point.
• Bittorrent connections (for legal epubs by the way) were seeing the VPN IP.

An interesting trick I found too was using the Firewall rules in Windows 7 to ensure that your browser only worked while on the VPN. I did this by:

• ensuing that my home network was set as a private zone,
• configure the VPN connection as a public zone,
• setting up a new Firewall rule for Firefox (my browser of choice) so that it was not allowed to access the internet on the private zone,
• then setup a firewall rule for Firefox which allowed it to access the internet on the Public zone.

This has the effect of killing Firefox’s browsing unless the VPN was active.

But why you ask?

Well if you happen to be doing something suss (say bit torrenting), and you want to make sure that the application doing that suspect activity can only be traced to your VPN IP (in Sweden), then setting up the app (uTorrent et al) instead of Firefox in the example above will do just that. All BT connections will appear to be to Sweden.

Happy hacking folks, may your internet stay private.

A good place to start reading about how to use the internet anonymously is TOR, a special browser and apps for hiding your activity.

I’ve been getting oddly paranoid about behaviour tracking and internet tracing recently. The SOPA movement ping’ed my brain into a higher gear, so the niggling feeling over the last few years has changed into a serious consideration. My online privacy is a concern – especially if I choose to participate in movements or causes which are controversial*.

In my last post I mentioned using a VPN provider to avoid tracing, that is – changing where it appears you are surfing from so that your actions are more anonymous. It is not a perfect solution, but I don’t think that a real “perfect solution” exists. Somebody will always have your credentials, or a login name, an external IP, or whatever. To be totally free online you have to have no permanent presence, and that is not practical to me. Not practical for anyone.

What is practical, straight forward, and works a treat is a VPN service which you tunnel your online activity through. This way all the tracing goes back to their public IP, and your actual destination is impossible to determine from the outside.

With that in mind I went looking for a cost effective and reputable VPN service. It took a few hours of grinding through the web to find a good one, and I have yet to find one which is not reviewed poorly in some manner.

With a primary goal of online anonymity – one service stood out as the place to start without question: SuperVPN. They offer either a basic level of secure VPNs (using the PPTP&L2TP protocols), or a fully secure VPN service. I’m starting with the basic, and utilising a free option they offer (see below).

Before using them I trolled through the web digging for reviews and information. Most online services are written about these days, and its often easy to find a poor review. Thankfully these guys had no such reviews that I could find in 30 minutes or so of digging. I found mention of bad service, poor billing and all sorts of worries. Plenty of forum posts, plenty of geeky opinions; all of which served to help expand my knowledge of how this type of service can work or can fail.**

I did find a number of negative reviews about some other providers, particularly the folks at Hide My Ass who (apparently) recently gave private information about their user-base to US authorities for the purposes of tracking down a member on the hacking group Anonymous. I have no idea if that information is correct, but it is concerning. A VPN service who give out person details is exactly what we do not want.

It brings the point back to the fact that nobody is actually trustworthy on the net. We’re not quite yet at the “trust nobody” paranoia stages, but I think for every step that we take which increases our dependency on being online (think about all your daily activity) there is a corresponding risk. You’d be well advised to do some digging, read around, and if you’re really lost as a geek friend. We love this stuff, and might have pragmatic advice for your situation.

SuperVPN also have a pricing model for the paid services which is competitive, they state openly how the plans work, and have an easy to read website. I was staggered by the number of other VPN services which presented an unprofessional website – totally the wrong approach to take. Most VPN providers offer some sort of service for hidden torrents and downloading, and as you’d expect this will make those companies of particular interest to the media companies. Super VPN also have a free option which covers only a few of the lesser VPN protocols - perhaps do what I am doing and start there.

As the market in VPNs expands I’m expecting a lot more players to enter the market, but even now it is not cost prohibitive as a test case.

I’ll re-post when I’ve tinkered with the service enough to know how well it flies.

* For the record I’ve yet to do anything online even slightly suspect, but as the legislation changes being prepared will be handy. I’d love to know more about the inside of the ultra-cool hackers, but I’m a bit chicken and time poor to do it well.

** There is no real substitute for doing the research yourself. Please start reading about online privacy, so you know when you are making an informed choice.

Fundamentally the proposals are seeking to inhibit distribution of copyrighted material, using a really vague set of criteria which will have the flow on effect of blacklisting many sites which are totally legit.

Satire, critical review, freedom of speech, poorly conceived internet memes,  and happy snaps with brands in the background will all be open for turn down. Worse – the companies which host the material (Facebook, youTube, WordPress, etc…) will face legal challenges. You as the user will suffer.

Its a cluster-fuck of an idea. Sorry for the language, but – that is how impressively stupid this concept is.

I think the idea of censoring the internet is a joke as it will irritate everyone, have major impacts on businesses and individuals, and not protect against piracy. Oh, what, wait – you think it will help? Really?

Then shut up and read.

How to ignore the legislation once passed:

Step One – find a country with far more free ideas for information distribution. There are heaps. China rings a bell, but they’ve got their own Internet firewall issues, and we all know that China is Un-American. Instead try any country in Europe, perhaps Sweden, or some such. Anywhere that thinks Wikileaks is OK will probably be fine.

Don’t even bother trying Australia, our media ownership rules are so borked that we’re likely to just turn the internet off instead of apply some common sense. And we’re 10,000 miles away from anything fun too.

Actually try somewhere that also offers private bank accounts – they’re bound to be dodgy enough to stick it to the USA’s new laws.

Step Two – purchase a dedicated VPN service to a provider in that country. Its anywhere from $10 to $5 per month. And when the entire population of the USA can’t watch YouTube the prices will drop due to massive competition. In 6 months you’ll pay $25 to US$30 for a Year subscription.

How do I know the price will drop? Look at the pricing of Internet bandwidth in the USA. Actually don’t, keep concentrating on this.

Step Three – reconnect to the new Internet, and all your traffic cannot be traced back to you via your ISP, and the countries which thought you were American or whatever, now only know that you come from some tin-pot country where the Internet is still free.

Thats it. Re-open what ever you were doing, and keep sharing. I’m sure a new www.Facebook.ru will be started shortly, and we’ll all be posting junk there in no time.

Net effect = lots of irritation. Loss of revenue. Loss of jobs. Less freedom. More lawsuits. Same allowance for piracy. Same downloads from dodgy places.

Brilliant.

Now go type “SOPA” into Google and learn how to make your voice heard. Soon you may not be able to.

The creators have answered all the obvious questions (many platforms, moderate compatibility, DRM and free, and offline/online) in reasonable and commercial ways. It has a robust FAQ and help area, provides a sample interface for what the app is like, and is well designed.

I’m pondering an eReader of some sort at the moment, and I’d have to say that the idea of having one repository which can be used on any of my devices is just the perfect way to go. One device to rule them all, one device to bind them….yup. I wants it.

It also helps that these folks are not only Australians, but also from Fitzroy in Victoria, a place I’ve lived and still love to this day. So yes, call me a screaming fan for anything this high quality done in Melbourne, especially when it looks this strong.

From a CMS perspective you can see why this hangs off a good content management system; you develop a smart back end to process the content, then delivery is all about the platform specifics. Mark-up an interface for selection and bingo (bingo being months if not years of development). The fine folks at Fusion (where I worked a few year back) did something similar for a Uni’s online course catalogue – and it was a darn successful product too.

My only peev would be the bloody name – where I can say and type Bookish easily, Booki.sh is off to me personally. Its like dotNet development rather than .Net development – brain hurts.

So go visit Bookish and see what these clever people have done. I’m kind of jealous.

Thanks WP, what a nice ironic message about my blog stats. I’ll have to invest in some funky google ad words, or get a cross-link to something really trendy.

Nah, bugger it. Perhaps I can offer a service to hipsters to allow them to not be indexed, so they can stay non-mainstream. Those hipsters need to remain uncool, and it looks like I’ve got a hidden talent.

I wanted something that I could update when a thought or action was give to me straight away, something that I could re-sort and change quickly, edit on the fly, and would remind me based upon priorities and actions.

I found Remember the Milk.

It is darn simple, has some nice features, supports almost every platform you can think of, and is free for the basic version. And free is plenty if you’re using it every few days.

The feature I’m going to play with next is sharing a list with somebody (so they can add/edit) and publishing a list (so they can view only). This seems like a crazy-8s fantastic way for me to know exactly what we need to buy when I get to the super market – as both my wife and I could update the same list.

A darn good app, and totally nerd worthy.

I was a little surprised that this needed to be said, as I think it is almost a blinding flash of the obvious. Most people who work in a digital or online world would also be familiar with the risks of living in that world. Many years ago the worst thing you had to worry about was a barrage of spam from sharing an email address, but now that almost everything is indexed, our most peripheral and random thoughts are available for everyone to review.

It is kind of an arrogant attitude though to assume it is obvious to everyone (shamefully I had this initial view), and it makes me realise just how many folks are “facebook enabled” but not thinking about how else a digital lifestyle might influence their careers. Scary really. The same folks who are commenting publicly that they hate this, or like that, might find that ten years later their attitude has changed, but the Internet archive is not reflecting their new values.

Not just text and chatter, but images too! The thundering amount of strange and useful photos you can find on people online is a disaster. I’m not quite ready to go all Howard Hughes and lock myself away, but I am darn keen to keep my digital personality within my control.

If you need convincing then search for your name or common email addresses (you have more than one right?) through Google. A regular online contributor will find many cross references to their work. You might find things like sporting results if you play in a public team, posts or comments from blogs, societies you have assisted, or even (hopefully not) a few scathing comments.

By way of example the first few images found for my name are the avatars and bio pics I’ve chosen for a few social networking sites and that is good. At least I chose them. What I did not sanction was that another Andrew Breese, an American, obviously likes to party and has a group photo posted. I share his name, so I guess he might be as frustrated by sharing my bio pic too; but this is classic internet indexing and association beyond the control of either of us.

The truly unlucky might find Facebook or other social tool with something to say about them. You might find that your digital persona is not what you would wish it to be, regardless of how much good work you’ve done.

It is not all fear, uncertainty, and doubt though. You cannot control what is said about you online by strangers, but you can regain your personality back by publishing some authoritative sources. Engage in some counter-spin. Consider joining a social or professional service which allows the creation of a profile. Create that true presentation of yourself, keep it humble and straight forward, and always present facts that you know are beyond dispute.

This way you control the spin. The false or harmful records will always be present, but you are offering an official view. An alternate to the strangeness that can be populated through the web.

Consider tools like LinkedIn (et al) as personal ads. If your profile is present it is likely that a potential employer will browse through it to get an idea of your personality and ethos. They will have your CV already, and the material presented in your online profile should enhance that story. You use it to widen your background, and not worry about padding your CV away from your core competencies. Heck I’ve also used these tools to dig up information about employers too. You can surmise the background and a lot of other useful information on somebody, and that background might make a difference in getting to know the person, and establishing a basic rapport.

Obvious? Yes. Useful too. Happy searching.

Security on webmail comes down to the user

It is odd when a web based email service has to add a “my friend was hacked” feature. A blog from the Hotmail team and Dick Craddock announces it, gives an overview of this feature, and a short explanation of how it works.

It is actually a good idea to help get onto hacked accounts sooner, and also perhaps help the detection and removal of the accounts where this is easy to do. Good to that Hotmail are doing something to deal with the problem.

I’d argue that most webmail systems could do with something like this, as we’ll see better and better hacking across all the providers the Gmail users should not get too cocky about the poor Hotmail users. Despite all its flaws (which have probably been addressed since I last used it years ago) the hotmail system has been running for a very long time.

Nothing will be a better measure than actually not using passwords that are easy to hack, and like you’d expect the article includes the obligatory default messages about password complexity and all that good security info. Nice little feature Hotmail, well done.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m pro-social, I really like what social awareness and open dialogs can do for businesses, there is a definite reason to get involved, and value that can be returned in both satisfaction and money. It is worth doing well, especially if it can be well resourced. It just feels like the ground swell of understanding is at that sickly sweet spot where we all understand the basic idea, the complex aspects are gaining ground, but our terminology has not evolved enough to create effective new terms. We’re in hype and I’m not a fan of hype.

To me it seemed to all start with the “x“, that frustrating butchering of English to give us X-treme products (graphics cards, motherboards, and wind surfers). Branding and marketing hell. Then somebody discovered that “e” was under utilised. e-phone, e-pc, … all rolled forward through the brightly coloured infomercials. The end of the “e” product was too shortly followed by the “i” products. The iphone led the charge, and we were swimming in a much wider array of offerings which sought to hook in to the hype. I barely got my hands on a laptop before the next generation added a different leading character of the alphabet, and a new swirl and lens flare affect which made my older unit seem rather outdated.

We saw digital become web 2.0, which then created and then smashed expectations for some businesses. The DotCom (why on earth is it spelt out?) era trained the public to be skeptical, but I think some folks have forgotten the pain of the past.

I cannot help but feel that the first tech bubble will be a doddle to what happens when the stock market actually realises what value Facebook can actually offer to investors – some values floating around are in the $84 to $100 billion. That is just too much money for an application which can be devalued by changes in public perception (like the anti Facebook folks), a few service delivery or privacy issues, or some strong competition from the likes of Google+ (or should that be written as GooglePlus). Think about that figure – more than the GDP of 22 countries akin to Vanuatu as one company. Really? No hype at all?

It has gotten to the point where the tag social is added to almost everything in an attempt to prove that somehow the offerings are current and valid. If you have a media company these days you have to be shunting social into your tags to get the right rankings. That in turn provides a positive feedback loop where attention goes where the money is spent, and we feed the banter as much as the organisations who have capacity to deliver. However having social debunked as a buzzword will mean that when it is used it will be useful. It is like when the term integration replaced innovation many years ago. A snazzy tech start-up would have to include these terms in their website so that they were perceived as competent. In those days it was just required, but after a while it said very little. Who would own up as not being innovative? Now we look for the specific methods, forms, and technologies used in the integration before deciding if the organisation is useful.

Lets get back to talking about what can be done, what has been done, and talk through the actual value. This blog might have a bloody tiny readership but I do not think I am alone as a professional working in around social and the other popularist buzzwords, who are sick of trying to deconstruct or interpret what an offer might be because a buzzword has been applied.

• Is it a social campaign, or a campaign which uses a range of technology and media? And why?
• Is it actually a cloud solution, or a distributed scalable hosting solution? And why?

Look at actual capacity to deliver a return, stability and breadth of experience, and knowledge and passion for continuing to effect change. If anything the term I think has most resonance for me in recent years is disruption.

The desire to disrupt the way we were doing business or talking to customers & consumers. The acceptance of the disruption as a normal part of the flow; and the planning around how we deal with that ongoing flow in the short to long term. When you embrace an level of disruption you are accepting that change will occur outside your normal comfort areas. It changes the way we think, as planning becomes tactically adaptive as well as projected strategically (yes, more buzzwords).

There is value in what social is both forcing and bringing to us as a culture – and I think that value has always been present but rather hidden, somewhat low key. But we now have a way (via new apps, bandwidth, and awareness) to expand our reach and potential influence, and with that organisations are changing to suit too. It is mostly positive, and hopefully we have some other diverse terms to share with each other, so that the events can be classified and understood as more than just social.

I just need to get to one of these groovy breakfast/brunch catch-ups more regularly; perhaps the project budget will extend a little…sideways.

Happy socialising folks, may all your launch events be catered.

*Cloud is another great tech term that means a slight change in technology, but is more a change in perception of delivery, rather than a revolution or true innovation…perhaps for another time.

Pros:

• You can tell when that release was built. eg. v2011.7.13 or even 20110714.

Cons:

• No tracking of the style of the build in terms of major or minor release. eg the difference between v23.1, 23.2, or v24.
• No match to a typical SDLC process, or common source management methods.
• Which means no real idea of the baseline feature sets which can be the cause for a patch vs major vs minor change in an application.

I recently saw this in some bid material, and it stuck me as a very short term way of thinking for software.

Far better to plan for many releases, and many versions. I’ll concede that sometimes it might be a passable idea when the application is only going to be updated infrequently, and the changes will be minor it might be ok – otherwise it’s horrid. Wikipedia has more, but you get the idea.