Duncan Mac-Vicar P.

This is how justice in Chile works. A criminal arrested on Wednesday, was left free yesterday morning. He robbed another house and shot 5 times to a policeman. Article here ( sorry, spanish only).

One of the sins of the left wing in Chile, they managed to get people transform their homes in jails and live like prisioners, and criminals walking free like birds in the city.

Judges should pay their mistakes. That`s their job. We are delegating the criteria to keep dangerous people in jail to them. You can do a mistake, that is normal, you can’t guess the future. But judges in Chile seem to be unable to get even one right. Those should be fired. Period.

On the good news deparment. Socialist senator Jaime Naranjo, presented a law project to make the law harder for those injuring or killing cops. If you don’t know Jaime Naranjo you will remember him as the congressman who hired his own wife using the money they get for their congressman job basic costs, and then negated on live TV knowing that woman.

I hope this gets into a law soon. Right now if a policemen touches a idiot burning the city and throwing rocks in a protest, usually the policeman gets fired and the whole police is marketed through those left wing organizations like Amnistia International as “repressive”, but if a policeman is hit by a rock or injured or killed nobody cares.

On the other hand, I keep receiving spam from the chilean bookstore company Antartica. This spam is sponsored by the useless law authored by right-wing senator Jovino Novoa. This law is as dumb and useless as the CAN Spam Act in USA. It only makes spam legal. Why the senator proposed opt-out instead of opt-in?

“Durante la discusión del proyecto en la Comisión de Economía, se evaluaron ambas posibilidades” explica el senador Novoa. “Entendiendo que ambos sistemas tienen sus ventajas y desventajas, decidimos aprobar el opt out, que permite un primer envío de publicidad para que el consumidor, posteriormente, decida si desea o no seguir recibiendo dicha información” agrega.

Esta elección, señala el parlamentario, favorecería en cierto modo a las empresas chilenas. “El opt in, o de autorización previa, perjudicaría a las empresas chilenas, ya que las empresas extranjeras no tendrían problema alguno para enviar spam desde fuera” indica el senador , explicando que de este modo se consideró al spam como una manera de ayudar a las Pymes “ya que para ellas, éste es el medio más barato de dar a conocer sus productos o servicios” expresó.

I found a nice article written by Carlos Osorio about this point and another one on Derechos Digitales. Senators are making everything so complicated, just showing ignorance (just read the point about users asking the isp to block the IP of the sender). Opt-in is the only solution that respect my rights. If I want crap on my mailbox I request it. Period.

Senator Novoa, please STOP sponsoring opt-out, it does not work. And you state it yourself in your blog, it does not work, but your “patch” to the law will not fix it. Email address is not sensible data (why).

Google checkout has been launched. It allows any online shop to handle checkout and payment trough google. It seems pretty convienent as you won’t need a unique password for every website.

Now they know what you buy, so they can cross more information in their database.

What is the problem:

• _Google account _ has turned to be the password I use more. I use it for my homepage, chat, email. And it is becoming a kinda of Microsoft passport in the web. Proprietary and centralized. I would like to see support from Google for some distributed and open identity system like OpenID or whatever works.
• With the fact that USA walks slowly towards a state where the goverment and corporations have more and more power. The president decides what is legal or not. Intrusive laws are passed and the excuse of terrorism is valid for everything (even when it is obvious that those laws come from corporate lobbies). I am every day more worried about having all my personal data under those laws. Just because a matter of principes. I just don’t trust where is it, even if there is nothing important there. Google, that is a serious problem for you. I can trust you but not where you are.

Appart of those problems, the idea is great. Want to sell something? Just implement the shopping cart, and leave checkout to Google.

From slashdot:

“The San Francisco Chronicle reports that AT&T has revamped its privacy policy, in an effort to head off future consumer lawsuits, with changes taking effect this Friday. AT&T is introducing a new policy that gives it more ‘latitude’ when it comes to sharing your browsing history with government agencies. Notable changes include notification that AT&T will track viewing habits of customers of its new video services Homezone and U-Verse, which is forbidden for cable and satellite companies, as well as explicitly stating that the customer’s data belongs to the company: ‘While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T. As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”

Full story (San Francisco Chronicle)

No, I was no kidding in my last post, I am starting to see a strange direction in the U.S.

“I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about.
I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say ‘Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?’”

–Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Since some time I am spending lot if time trying and following some projects related to privacy, mostly inspired by daily news about how corporations and some countries try to control what their citizens do and not do.

The situation in countries like China and USA is becoming somewhat dangerous. Some topics are being used now as a excuse to control the population like real communist dictatorships. The excuse is always what the “bad guys” will do with those tools. Give me a break.

Other source of pressure come from the guys that were unable to keep with change and lost their business of selling CDs at high margins at expenses of artists, and now they pretend to keep their business at expenses of people freedom instead of being creative with their business model.

Another point is the storage of historic user data. Most people trust Google, I do too, but Google is a massive data center with data from the whole world, and it is becoming a threat only because where it is located.

After some research and surfing, I came to the following projects that will help you keep the goverment’s nose out of your business. I don’t really need those tools because I don’t have anything anyone would be interested into (hey, I am even lacking new ideas those days ), but just the pleasure to transmit data without the soviets being able to trace (ok, or at least you make it hard to) it, is a reason enough to support those tools.

Filesharing

There are a cuple of nice projects here. But also most of them are useless. Freenet is probably the most known, but it really looks more like a research toy than a real application. For a nice comparision go here.

GNUnet has nice features, but lacks a good KDE front end to use it. Also, it is slow and that makes it not usable. Another alternative is MUTE, which seems more user oriented. There is a nice KDE frontend called Kommute.

MUTE and Kommute are not really easy to compile and setup for newbies. I already packaged GNUnet for SUSE users, and you can find the package in the filesharing repo in the build service. Kommute and MUTE will follow soon in the same repo.

Data privacy

Not too much to dig around. TrueCrypt is open source, has a nice license, and provides nice features like two levels of plausible deniability, which might be useful in case a user is required to reveal the password. SUSE users can find it in the privacy repo in the OpenSUSE build service.

Another option is EncFS which uses the FUSE (filesystem in userspace) layer. The nice thing is that you can encrypt a directory without needed to make a volume, but file sizes and number of files are still there. The packages included is some distributions, including SUSE 10.1.

Anonymous surfing

This project is the one that surprises me most, because it works. Based on the Onion routing algorithm originally developed by the U.S. Navy (heh) this project is now supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (they provide some legal information about it), the TOR project provides anonymous surfing.

What is really nice is the already existant tools. A few minutes of surfing led me to FoxyProxy, a firefox extension that makes Tor usage with firefox piececake. Also, I found TorK, a KDE tool to configure Tor.

Tor is already in the privacy repo mentioned above, and expect TorK soon.

As I said, most of this tools are quite useless for me now, but I will try to keep supporting spreading them and making them easy to use.

Chile’s spanish is full of local slangs. Here there is a guide to it (english):