The Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in 1985 to promote software freedom. In the 30 years since it was founded, it has battled for the rights of users to control the software they run, rather than the makers of that software — still an critical fight today.The FSF’s newly rel …

Very exciting news this. There is going to be a (an?) Hacktionlab this winter once more. As often happens the event will be held at Bradford’s 1 in 12 Club — one of the longest running Anarchist social spaces in the UK. This year we will all no doubt raise a glass to our fallen comrad …

It has been just over a year since the Snowden revelations first confirmed what many of us had suspected for some time — the NSA and GCHQ were in the personal data collection market in a big way. And it wasn’t just targetted data (like of criminals or terrorists, for example) they …

The Domain Name System (DNS) is like a phone book — you send a query to a server that says what is the number for charlieharvey.org.uk? and it sends back an IP address. Nowadays lots of people use either their ISP’s DNS server or one of the public DNS servers like Google’s 8.8.8 …

Not long ago I went to a rural tech gathering called Barncamp. It’s a weekend of DIY skillsharing, tech and activism on a farm in the Wye Valley. Free world films used some Barncamp photos I took in this video scrapbook of the camp. Enjoy. …

tl;dr GCHQ/NSA seem to keep encrypted data but throw away spam. I made a tool that lets you hide your encrypted data in spam. In recent weeks it has emerged that GCHQ and NSA have been spying not only on their political allies, but on the population in general. Many of us are shocked, if unsur …

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 gotchas with Riseup.net’s crabgrass install is that it is very much a pull technology. You have to remember to check your Crabgrass. I am forgetful sometimes. So I made a script called crab2mail to pull your crabgrass inbox into your email …

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 …