Here is a quick SSH tip that I only discovered a month or two ago despite years of using SSH on a daily basis. When SSH freezes, as can sometimes happen if the network connection drops, it is possible to kill the connection more elegantly than just by closing the terminal tab (my previous way of dea …

A recent leak published in the Washington Times seems to point to the Obama administration backing down on recent proposals to include backdoors in encryption products following pushback from the public, crypto experts and some of the big US tech companies.The memo, which was published last week, …

There are strong opinions on whether to run your SSH daemon on ports other than the default 22. On the pro side, the argument is that most automated tools only check port 22, so you reduce your exposure to random script kiddies by not running it there. That’s just security by obscurity say t …

ICANN, the not-for-profit public benefit corporation which coordinates the naming system of the internet recently announced some disturbing plans to take over the running of domain privacy services and to stop those services from providing, well, domain privacy.Here’s a good tl;dr from t …

I have a thing about old clips non-technical folks talking about the intertubes. Witness, for example The Kids Guide to the Internet from 1997. Here is a great piece from the archives circa 1994. I love the idea that @ is the about symbol. And that you don’7 need a phone line to …

Snarkasm, aka @wendy_ferguson on Twitter suggested this telling video, which is a 1967 glimpse of the home office of the future.Cheesy lounge jazz and anachronistic gender politics aside —the husband will arrange the financing of the wife’s purchases — the content is rather …

My new favourite video is this historical document, circa 1997. An almost unbelievably straight, white bourgeois American family espouse the virtues of cyber surfing in virtual reality.Whilst the outfits and the tech are certainly amusingly anachronistic, what the film really reminded me …

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, …

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 …