Scarily accurate prediction of the foreseeable future back in 2005.
Posts filed under Privacy
Why Encryption Matters
John Oliver addresses the need for encryption in an hilarious way. The clip is ~18 minutes, but well worth it.
If you still think that encryption is only used for evil (terrorism, child pornography, etc.), and that governments / security agencies should need (backdoor) access to your data..... Well, I'm not gonna end that sentence.
Firefox v42 Tracking Protection
With the launch of Firefox v42 (and up) they introduced an adBlocker in the browser. The ad blocking feature is available (by default) during the use of Private Browsing.
But if you don't want to see those advertisements, and for some reason you don't want to use Private Browsing (like me), than you're out of luck (by default). There's no normal way to enable this feature without the use of Private Browsing (or use an adBlocker add-on for Firefox). Thankfully, Firefox uses a config module in which you can tweak almost everything.... including the Tracking Protection.
Google+ Custom URL
Google+ introduced a new (shiny) feature recently called Custom URL's. Up till now people had to communicate these long URL's if you needed to find someone on Google+. Mine for example is: https://plus.google.com/u/0/105217840082627216167/. Not a real slick way of presenting yourself on the Interwebs. When you log in to your Google+ account you get the option of getting one of those URL's for 'free'. It basically is your screen-name in the URL.
Mine would be http://google.com/+GuillaumeRaisonnable/. Would be, because, I'm not getting mine. The reason for this is that you need to leave your mobile phone number with Google for so-called verification purposes. By doing this I would be giving away another piece of privacy for something shiny. Something a lot of other people will be more than willing to do so. Just remember that the NSA never had it any easier since the arrival of social media to violate your privacy.