This is a rewrite of an article that first appeared in the Internet Showdown issue of New Internatoinalist magazine. I have expanded some sections and rephrased others.Perhaps the most important reason to use Free Software is that it allows you, not a corporation, …

I recently featured, with Hazel Healy and Amy Hall in the New Internationalist podcast. I talked about privacy, the battle for a free internet and Free Software amongst other stuff. You can read more in the December Internet Showdown issue of New Internationalist magazine.The blurb from …

Online privacy and anonymity should be important for all of us. Doubly so for activists who are likely to get up the noses of capitalist business and the police. Ideally, then, the websites of protest groups ought to steer clear of technology that shares the identities of visitors with advertisin …

One of the things that most of us do every day is searching for stuff on the web. Modern search engines are great for finding random wikipedia entries or videos of snowboarding crows. But search engine companies aren’t entirely respectful of our right to privacy. In fact they make a living by …

Online privacy is extremely important to me and I do my level best to maintain your privacy when you use this site. However, I do collect some data to help me run the site better and to figure out what bits are good and what bits are crap. I never share any information that I collect with anyone, es …

Activists and other people are frequently targetted for surveillance by power in its various forms - governments, police, media and corporate power. Increasingly this surveillance takes place on line. And so it makes sense to set up your firefox browser to be as resistent as possible to such surve …

Note: This article originally appeared on the New Internationalist Tech Blog and is reused under a Creative Commons Licence Given recent revelations of police spying on activists, the takedown of the fitwatch blog and the increasing use by police of social networking tools like facebook …

I was just now trying to see how the New Internationalist website might look from Canada, to test some GeoIP set up that we’re working on. So I used a trick that I mainly use when I’m browsing the interwebs from public WiFi networks. Given the emergence of tools like Firesheep, whic …

I mentioned on 2010-10-10 that I’d revoke my old B1233772 key and transition to 196AA973. I have now …