Projects You Should Keep Your Eye On
The Digital Survival website was created in order to help the average individual stay private, secure, and free. Your affairs should be just that: your affairs. Governments, massive internet companies (Google, Facebook), and internet service providers (Comcast, Verizon) simply should not be concerned what you’re doing on your computer in the privacy of your own home.
Ideas like Chomebook take off because they’re cheap, fast, and (supposedly) help people be more productive. All those premises are probably true, but many of us have reconsidered what we are trading for those conveniences. As a wise man once said we trade security for convenience. Now that big data has come along, now people mostly trade privacy for convenience.
Almost all of us rely on large companies in certain capacities. Whether it’s our mobile phone service (AT&T, T-Mobile), our computer operating systems (Windows, OSX, Android), or our e-mail.
I get it. Not everyone cares about these issues, which is all right. Everyone has a right to simply not be concerned about issues that others may consider to be of grave importance to the history nations. However, I urge you to care about them.
That’s enough musing for this entry, now to the point: if you’re concerned about aforesaid things, the following projects are the types of things you should be keeping your eye one.
Stage7 is written by none other by myself, Maffblaster, who started Digital Survival. I started this project for a few good reasons. If you don’t follow the link to see the “expanded list” of reasons, at least know this essential: choice in free software is a very important thing and should not be infringed upon. Gentoo Linux retains the spirit of how free software should work therefore providing the end user with maximum choices both efficiently and (relatively) simply. Although some would disagree, one of the things Gentoo lacking is nice installer, which is what Stage7 hopes to become.
Mailpile is e-mail software that is designed to provide an easy to use, but good looking, web interface to people who want to host their own mail servers at home. Written by a few Icelandic guys, the project should turn out being very useful as long as 1) they can figure out some major bumps in the road with GnuPG and 2) they don’t give up. They have the potential to help me continue to be a funder of crowd sourced software in the future if they deliver the product they promised to deliver.
This project is very interesting to me because it’s authors are basically re-designing internet’s underlying structure. I’m very optimistic about CJDNS. It’s creator is pulling massive amounts of work into the project on a daily basis and it has an active community which is excellent for the health of an open source project.
Tor has been around for while and has the most frequent media exposure out of any of the projects mentioned above. The Tor network has continued to improve since its start. A growing number of people run Tor relays at home, which helps increase the anonymity of the users and provides more bandwidth.