Encrypting your online communication - A reaction to Prism and the NSA

I previously talked about my helpless anger regarding Prism, the NSA, the arrogance of the US' government and my mistrust of my government's activity's with regard to this affair. I have observed an interesting reaction to the situation. The German online newspaper I like reading, Spiegel Online (or short SPON) is now giving guidelines on how to encrypt your e-mails, so that it is less easy for the secret services of this world to follow your every communication.

I think it is great, that a newspaper with such a long reach (most read German online newspaper) is giving guidelines on how to encrypt your mails. A feat that most "normal" users would find daunting and confusing.

The problem is, though, that for this to work, one would need to give a decryption key to the recipient of the mails (no you can't send it by normal mail, that would defeat the point). Being the sceptic that I eternally am, I highly doubt that the general population will ever get to the point where this is the norm.
The majority of people will not do it. If it is due to lacking know-how or plain laziness is up for discussion here. I am sure that if I started to encrypt my mails right now, I can only think of very few of my contacts that would follow through with this. In fact, many of my "computer-literate" friends wouldn't bother with it at all. For pretty much either my reasons or laziness. I'm almost so certain, I would bet on it.

I am tempted to start a survey on this topic and ask friends... If anyone reads this, I would be very interested, so please do add a comment at the bottom.

New Year's Resolutions 2013 – No More Facebook

Much has happened since my last post to this blog and this is, of course, in no little part due to my laziness. I just had “better” things to do or as a friend of mine put it once quite fittingly. “Having no time for one thing, just means that you would rather spend your time on something else.”

So for awhile, I simply “rather spend time on something else”. The reasons were different. The main one being the demise of my pet project. The music player (see various posts here [1]) for roleplaying. The player was built on the idea of tagging, but my approach of using an md5 hash was just not working right. It was slow and sluggish and it took about 10 seconds to start with about 5 songs and an eternity for about 1 GB worth of music and sound effects. I couldn't improve it for reasons I don't want to get into.

Once that fell through, I decided to improve using Udacity [2] and hone my skills (if one could call them that) by helping on the Mozilla Project [3] in the Automated Testing team (A*Team) [4]. This proved to be such an enjoyable experience that I have stuck with it since August of last year and spent most of my free-time on their IRC channel trying to learn more about it and the way they run their projects. By now, I have come to hate git [5] and only just about accepted mercurial [6] as version control software.

Anyhow, three paragraphs just to explain why I stopped blogging. Sheesh! Onto the real reason for this blog entry. It is the new year which I passed in lovely Vienna with my darling wife and a good friend from there. During that time, a certain resolution ripened with me. I want to opt out of this facebook harrassment (from now on referred to by its french joke name fessebouc; la fesse = buttock, le bouc = goat; Why I do that? Because I can). Everyone sees it as this fantastic tool, but over the course of last year, fessebouc has annoyed me greatly with some decisions they made.

It started off harmlessly enough with them wanting to change my user interface to this timeline idea [7] that they fancied so much. They first asked me if I wanted it, as in “Do you want to try our new and great timeline”, to which I said No. Several weeks after, the same request came, to which I said again No. Why change something that isn't broken, for crying out loud. And then shortly after, they just changed it. Just like that. All illusion of being able to decide it myself gone by virtue of their little display of power. I am sure they thought that “he won't mind anyway, the old chap.” ... Well, I did mind and it pissed me off so much that I wrote a complaint in which I said, that these sort of measures are more likely to drive me away than endear me to fessebouc. Of course, there was no answer. Not even a hint.

Well, that was me already annoyed by them. But then there followed a consistent stream of these things that were handled the same way. First a mail saying that if you don't want it, say so, with the subsequent change to it anyways. The more outrageous changes were, however, yet to come! Let's start with forcing anyone to use their real name [8, 9 for policy]. Why on earth?!? No conscious thought were given to those rather sensitive cases where someone may truly endanger himself by publically stating his opinion in countries where freedom of speech is not as existent as in the western world (as an example of the merits read this article [10]) or the much quoted teacher-pupil relationship problem. This is a very sensitive area as adolescents may unknowingly endanger the teacher's career by bringing him into a dicey situation. If they want to become "friends" with the teacher, is s/he supposed to block any attempt or is it no problem? Using an alias would be a good solution for a teacher in this case to avoid any such issues with accepting pupils as friends. "Friends" - Such a freely used term nowadays. When before it defined a close relationship with someone who is not the partner nor has familial ties to the person, now it can describe someone who is not even an acquaintance. But I'm getting diverted from the real issue here.

Now, looking at the above problem, one may think: “No problem, I just set my privacy setting so that people can't find me with a name search.” Well, the clever people from fessebouc thought of this, too, by getting rid of this possibility and making every profile available for all search engines [11,12 for German]. Again, why on earth?!? To me, this really was the final nail in the coffin.

Thus on New Year's, I came to the conclusion that I will stop using it. It was a nuisance and e-mail spam that I accepted for the greater good of keeping in touch with people who seem to only live in the world of fessebouc and are only reachable through it, but this is it. I have had enough. I am aware that it is here to stay and unlikely to go away. I am also aware that not only fessebouc adopts dubious policies regarding privacy in the digital space, but in this case, I can do something about it and I don't want to play any part in it anymore. I will also try to discourage people from posting pictures of me on it. If you, as a fessebouc user read this, please consider this a polite request to refrain from posting pictures with me in it on fessebouc (or any other media as a matter of fact without my explicit permission). Thus, my New Year's Resolution for 2013 is to leave fessebouc and be done with it. May it go its merry way, I hope it falls flat on its face (which it most likely won't) and that the people responsible for these decisions understand that the privacy of the individual should be respected even though the majority of people “doesn't seem to mind.”

References

[1] http://nebelhom.blogspot.be/search/label/Music%27N%27SFX
[2] http://www.udacity.com/
[3] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/
[4] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Auto-tools
[5] http://git-scm.com/
[6] http://mercurial.selenic.com/
[7] http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline
[8] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/08/facebook_real_names/
[9] http://www.facebook.com/help/292517374180078/
[10] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/02/07/google-executive-wael-ghonim-admits-he-was-el-shaheed.html
[11] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/facebook-changes-privacy-settings-again/
[12] http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/namenssuche-bei-facebook-privatsphaere-einstellungen-werden-simpler-a-872932.html

A kingdom for a sarcasm tag...

I have noticed a lot lately that these days people write in chats and forums the way they speak in every day life. First and foremost, to myself, who was tortured... sorry... "classically educated" until I wrote everything correctly (within a minimal margin of error) both in English and in German, this is plain horrible.

I will not go into the details why I find it cringeable when native speakers do not see the difference between there and they're or when I need 5 minutes to wrestle the hidden meaning from a three line forum post. I will go into something, that has been holding me back quite a bit. Namely, the fact, that it is impossible to use different intonations, which would make, for example, the difference between a serious and a sarcastic statement.

I admit it, I love sarcasm and irony. It is said that "sarcasm is the lowest form of wit." But quite frankly, I had the feeling that, so far the people I have met who said this, didn't really know how to use it or didn't understand it. Sarcasm when used correctly (same as irony), can make someone, who has been spouting utter nonsense, aware of his mishap without having to potentially humiliate him in front of others. In the same vein, it can be one of the best retorts ever. I am a very sarcastic person and I enjoy it. It makes me smile. For example, one of the main characters in the Guy Ritchie film Snatch, Turkish, is a sarcastic bastard and I love that movie for his quotes alone. The rest is just the cream on top :D

Anyhow, back to the point. In forums and chats, it cannot be used, because you would have to highlight it somehow. I would very much favour a forum, where you could use intonation tags. Using a different font (switch from Times to Arial) or something like that, I don't care what, but it would be awesome. True, part of the sarcastic appeal is, that it remains hidden to some, but c'mon a slimmed down version is better than nothing :).