While considering the Mozilla foundation’s entry into the mobile phone market, I came across Seth Rosenblatt’s article, “Firefox OS faces brutal road ahead” at CNET News, but they have Telefonica signed up and are launching in Spain, and Latin America; they’re made by Alcatel. Will open-source and privacy be the competitive weapons it needs to succeed where Blackberry and Nokia are failing? Quartz argues that real web services will be the competitive advantage, creating the largest developer community. Actually I doubt it; the carriers will insert their spyware and closed garden stores, it’s too hard to avoid Google and despite Blackberry’s last wrong turn they competed and lost on privacy. …
An honest man
Earlier today, BoingBoing broke the story that Ed Snowden’s secure email provider, Lavabits was shutting up shop. The BoingBoing story has Ladar Levison’s words of non-explanation. He was made an offer he had to refuse. This was covered by arstechnica, in a story called “Lavabit founder, under gag order, speaks out about shutdown decision”, dated 14th August. …
Citizens not Suspects
The Guardian reports that Privacy International are going to court to get the UK Government banned from using the USA’s ‘intelligence’ obtained via their Prism programme, and to suspend the UK’s equivalent programme, the GCHQ’s Tempora programme.
Privacy International argue that the UK agencies’ use of NSA supplied data is illegal since there is no warrant and no notification and no appeal; which is a problem when there is no ‘probable cause’. In order for GCHQ to intercept someone, they’d need a warrant issued under RIPA. This looks to be an example of the two agencies outsourcing the surveillance of their own citizenry, since they are prohibited from doing so. i.e. GCHQ is spying on Yanks, and the NSA returns the favour by spying on Brits. Both agencies need a warrant to spy on their own citizens, but not on foreigners. …
Have the US killed their cloud business?
As the proof that Governments are spying on social media users is found, we should all take measures to make it hard. I am sure that they’ll try and outlaw encryption next, but they might have a problem with that since it’ll kill e-commerce. Talking of killing e-commerce, a number of commentators, including David Kirkpatrick posting at linkedin are asking if this will cause Europeans and their Governments to withdraw from the US cloud providers.
The Swedish Government, for instance have already decided to abandon Google’s web services. …
Stable doors and missing horses, tightening up on personal I.T. security
One conclusion I have come to after the weekend since the securocrats, like the copyright monopolists seem to never give up is that we need to equip ourselves properly. I plan to train myself to use ixquick’s search engine, and open a jabber account. ixquick do not require a login, and thus can’t tie an IP address to an identity and they do not log what is done. They are planning a secure mail service. They are a Dutch company, with a US subsidiary. I wonder where the computers are? Is this over the top, or will Firefox private windows be enough? …
Will US companies keep our secrets?
A tweeted conversation between Tom Watson MP and Chris Gerhard, in the afterglow, of the Guardian’s running a story that the FBI are looking for warrant-less and secret intrusion into an email provider’s customers. …
Distributing ideas
The site, “If this then that” offers trigger actions as a web service. It works with objects it calls recipes and channels.
Recipes are the “if this then that” relationship, and channels define the this and that. It has a long list of pre-canned channels and recipes, but sadly NOT an output RSS/XML channel.
I have today, just created a trigger that takes my blog feed and posts it to facebook. Obviously I need to test it. This is part of the exploration on how to rebuild my personal streams which have been damaged by Facebook, Google and Twitter’s attempts to enclose our speech into their “secret gardens”.
Hurrah for Feedly
I have been playing with feedly as replacement for google reader. I am rather taken with it. It’s a browser plugin and an app. on many mobiles.
As with other replacements, I have reorganised my feed tags/categories to create better groups. I have dropped a bunch of feeds that I wasn’t reading or were broken. Its “Today” feature allows me to keep up with the news. It’s availability on the phone helps with this, because I don’t have to open a laptop, I can read my news without getting a seat on the train. Feedly encourages me to treat news as a ‘river’ and so my reader is not cluttered with loads of stuff that I might want some day which I am learning to like. It lacks the social features that google reader had at it’s best but they’d walked away from them. I have made some suggestions at their user voice site. I am impressed. I hope they adopt some of the ideas that I have suggested or supported. A twitter client would be good, but I can live without it.
My wiki project page is here…. …
Help, looking for an XML widget for wordpress
It seems the big boys, i.e. google, facebook, who it now seems own friend feed and twitter are all changing their services and APIs. Friendfeed has stopped parsing twitter because of the API changes, it also seems to have stopped polling my delicious feed. My home grown mingle is still polling my bookmarks, blogs and pictures, but it’s lost my google reader news posts and you tube favourites some time ago; google turned them off as they sought to make Google+ a secret garden. My booklist site, living social, packed in a while ago. All in all, my efforts to collect my contributions on the internet into a single place are falling apart. …
A bad week for RSS
I reckon it’s been a bad week for the open web. Google have announced they’re shit canning not just Google Reader but also CalDAV and Twitter ran one of their API Version 1.0 blackouts. Both offer alternatives; I am unsure that they are as open as their predecessors. Twitter certainly are withdrawing support for RSS, and Google have over the last 18 months been rebuilding their technology as a secret garden. …