Heads & Tails (1.2)

Facebook has now embraced the Tor network

HUMAN LIFE is full of ironies. A friend of mine, who lives in Europe, is terrified of identity theft and religiously shreds his snail mail and deletes his email. Another friend, this time in the states, is angry at his government's Big Brother approach to citizen management. He's especially upset by the NSA's mass-monitoring of electronic communications. But of course it's a world-wide phenomenon: under the umbrella of 'anti-terrorism', governments everywhere have been inventing ways to spy on people, and been trying to control what a person can or can't do on the once-freer Internet. As an unexpected result, we are being collectively taught to think like activists and hackers.

Now private networks and the murky dark corners of the web are beginning to appeal to us all -- those of us with dark hearts and also those of us who breathe in the light.

The TOR network is not new (it already has around 2.5 million daily users) but it has been gaining popularity for a while, especially because of governmental attention paid to wikileaks, sharing sites, and the emerging acceptance of bitcoin. This morning TOR became famous (or infamous) because of the news that Facebook has embraced it.

TOR is an anonymising platform, one designed to protect you whenever you go online. Your name and details can be hidden, as well as your address and location. By address I mean not only where in the world you are, but also the mac address of your machine.

The accommodation by Facebook would seem at first to be odd, since surely the whole purpose of using social media is to be social; but there is of course a difference between social and sociable.

If you're interested in trying out the TOR browser, I suggest you download and install a complete OS that sets it all up for you: Tails. [This is why this article is named Heads and Tails (1.2); Heads is Facebook and Tails is... duh...]

Tails and the new Facebook portal work fine together. Tails is a live OS: it's designed to run from a flash drive and when you go offline it removes all traces of your online activity. Tails can be found here.

Browser Wars (new edition) Opera alpha

The Browser Wars continue with Opera's "pre-alpha" release 10.5. Basically this a techie/geek release--not for real everyday use, not even really for testing--just to show off some new stuff; but it's FAST! Faster even than Google's Chrome. Because it's an unfinished release, pix are not fully rendered, but there's a gr8 r-click tool that enables you to open any open page in another browser of your choice [I've been wanting this feature to reappear since I first used it with Cyberdog back in 1986 or so]. If you're up for some fun, try it out. Available now (as they say) from Opera's site.

new Flock Beta released

The long-anticipated release of Firefox appeared recently (v3) and now the Flock version is out in Beta (v2).  It might still be a bit buggy (natch, that's why it's still a beta), but then again it might not; try it out and see how it works for you on your setup. The Firefox build is fast, so the new Flock should be a lot faster too. (I'm running Flock 2 Beta on an Apple Mac G5 laptop, OSX Tiger, and it's OK for me.)

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Flock is the new Dog

Back in the mid-1990s, Apple and IBM joined hands for an exciting new concept called OpenDoc. The idea was to focus on a task rather than on the applications etc needed to complete the task. It was a heady, radical, holistic kind of idea that brought integration centre-stage to the world of computing. Microsoft killed off OpenDoc by leaning heavily on both IBM and Apple, but not before Apple had shown what the concept could do by building an all-in-one Internet Suite called CyberDog. CyberDog was light-years ahead of anything else around at that time and in many ways we still haven't equalled it but Flock is coming close and is quickly reminding me of those exciting days. The way that Flock is personal and the ways in which so many things are integrated under the same hood was exactly the CyberDog way of doing things.  And that explains partly why I love Flock so much and how this one product has got me genuinely excited about the Web again.

Blogged with the Flock Browser