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Who I am, why I'm here.
Just wanted to say a few brief words about myself.
First off, I'm not a bodybuilder, but rather a privacy geek. I've long had an interest in privacy/encryption -- I was one of the early adopters of PGP back in the early 1990s, when it was a DOS/Unix command-line based program.
Over the years, I have watched, with a mixture of horror and fascination, as the various organs of the state surveillance apparatus have ramped-up their operations, increasingly broadening their scope over time.
Under the rubric of fighting crime (especially drugs and child abuse) and, much later, terrorism, the authorities have appropriated to themselves the right to spy on all of us. With the widespread adoption of computers, such surveillance is now easier than it's ever been.
I do what I can to fight this by teaching people how to effectively use the various privacy tools that are freely available out there.
To allay any potential concerns, I am most assuredly NOT here to sell anything. I have nothing to sell.... If you knew me, you'd realize that I'm the world's WORST salesperson. (I couldn't sell ice-cold water to people dying of thirst in the middle of the Sahara desert!)
The services that I use are free of charge, as is the majority of the software that I recommend. In general, I prefer to use/ recommend free, open-source software, but in some cases, I might recommend that people purchase from reputable sources such as PGP Corporation.
My only affiliation with any commercial sources that I may happen to recommend is that I either use them myself, and/or believe them to trustworthy, or I recommend them because they fill specific needs that some people may have that are either not met (or not as well met) by the open source offerings.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, there was a loose-knit group of people who called themselves Cypherpunks. Many of them had Libertarian leanings (which I do not share) but they envisaged a society where crypto-anarchy held sway; a society where a citizen had the power to control their own private information and government had little or no power to compel its production.
If anything, the Cypherpunks were far too idealistic, believing that, as in Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come".
All too naively, as it turned out, they believed that people would rush to adopt cryptography in order to protect themselves against an overweening surveillance state. They were the prototypical geeks; technically skilled, but without a fundamental understanding of human nature. What they didn't count on was that the overwhelming majority of the public in Western societies simply didn't care about privacy or government surveillance.
The Cypherpunks didn't count on sloth, on people being complacent, and completely unwilling to learn new ways of doing things. They were passionate about privacy, and it was largely beyond their ken that people could take the attitude:
"Why should I care? I'm not a criminal. I have nothing to hide."
I guess, in my own insignificant way, I'm still struggling to keep their dream alive.
Mirrorshades
First off, I'm not a bodybuilder, but rather a privacy geek. I've long had an interest in privacy/encryption -- I was one of the early adopters of PGP back in the early 1990s, when it was a DOS/Unix command-line based program.
Over the years, I have watched, with a mixture of horror and fascination, as the various organs of the state surveillance apparatus have ramped-up their operations, increasingly broadening their scope over time.
Under the rubric of fighting crime (especially drugs and child abuse) and, much later, terrorism, the authorities have appropriated to themselves the right to spy on all of us. With the widespread adoption of computers, such surveillance is now easier than it's ever been.
I do what I can to fight this by teaching people how to effectively use the various privacy tools that are freely available out there.
To allay any potential concerns, I am most assuredly NOT here to sell anything. I have nothing to sell.... If you knew me, you'd realize that I'm the world's WORST salesperson. (I couldn't sell ice-cold water to people dying of thirst in the middle of the Sahara desert!)
The services that I use are free of charge, as is the majority of the software that I recommend. In general, I prefer to use/ recommend free, open-source software, but in some cases, I might recommend that people purchase from reputable sources such as PGP Corporation.
My only affiliation with any commercial sources that I may happen to recommend is that I either use them myself, and/or believe them to trustworthy, or I recommend them because they fill specific needs that some people may have that are either not met (or not as well met) by the open source offerings.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, there was a loose-knit group of people who called themselves Cypherpunks. Many of them had Libertarian leanings (which I do not share) but they envisaged a society where crypto-anarchy held sway; a society where a citizen had the power to control their own private information and government had little or no power to compel its production.
If anything, the Cypherpunks were far too idealistic, believing that, as in Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come".
All too naively, as it turned out, they believed that people would rush to adopt cryptography in order to protect themselves against an overweening surveillance state. They were the prototypical geeks; technically skilled, but without a fundamental understanding of human nature. What they didn't count on was that the overwhelming majority of the public in Western societies simply didn't care about privacy or government surveillance.
The Cypherpunks didn't count on sloth, on people being complacent, and completely unwilling to learn new ways of doing things. They were passionate about privacy, and it was largely beyond their ken that people could take the attitude:
"Why should I care? I'm not a criminal. I have nothing to hide."
I guess, in my own insignificant way, I'm still struggling to keep their dream alive.
Mirrorshades
. Does it change anything that I'm a Canadian. As our legal systems are different.
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