Better Email - without surveilance

I spotted this idea called BitMessage. It's a completely new way to exchange email, and it completely defeats any attempts to intercept the messages.  By using a peer to peer network, without any mailservers, there is no-one that you need to trust, so systems like the US NSA and UK GCHQ PRISM surveillance programs shouldn't be able to collect information from it.

Bitmessages are not email, but they do something like the same thing, you need a special application program to use it, but there is no sign-up or registration, once you have the app installed you're good to go.

The app is currently available for Windows, OSX, and Linux, but as yet nothing for Android and i-whatever.

You can bitmessage to me at this address:

BM-2DBjcihFsQoWieWz49ZCzhfczDQmRadkem

Memorable isn't it? :-)

Better browsing - without surveilance

Long long ago, in about 1997 or so, one of my colleagues at work showed me a shiny new toy he'd found on the Internet.  It was called Google.   I've been using it ever since.

My use of the internet was very early, as a manager in the research department of ICL (then a $4B turnover IT Company) I had access to the internet from a very early date.  It was called ARPANET then.  I've grown old as it has grown up.

But now I am starting to feel as bad about Google Inc. as I once did about Microsoft, their ethics are deeply suspect.  Once they were a champion of good business, but there is something in American thought that gradually erodes ethics in business (as in politics) to the lowest legal level.  "If it's not illegal, let's do it" seems like the best way to go, these days.

Now, I have discovered startpage.com which uses Google's search engine, but anonymises the query, so Google gets no information from it.  The query is not tied to your IP address, and the company running startpage makes promises about not keeping your data themselves.  Wikipedia tells me that the company is Dutch, and also has it's own native search engine ixquick.com.  Whether this company: Surfboard Holdings B.V.  will eventually succumb to the might of Google Inc. is still to be seen, but I am going to use it for a bit and see what happens.

Both ixquick and google-via-startpage put my current project the British Synaxarion on the first page of results (after the irrelevant ads) with the search term 'synaxarion'.  So I'm happy with that.