Duncan Mac-Vicar P.

(blog de Pablo Morales)

Las pizarras interactivas, son en el mundo, una realidad que paso a paso se va incorporando en nuestras salas de clases, si bien, nuestro país esta muy lejos de utilizar esta tecnología masivamente, existe algunos instituciones educacionales las están ocupando.

Estas Pizarras, también denominadas Pizarras Digitales Interactivas (PDi), funcionan con un ordenador conectado a un video-proyector(data), que proyecta la imagen de la pantalla sobre una superficie, desde la que se puede controlar el ordenador, hacer anotaciones manuscritas sobre cualquier imagen proyectada, así como guardarlas, imprimirlas, enviarlas por correo electrónico y exportarlas a diversos formatos.

Horacio just sent me the link to Allpeers, a nice Firefox Extension that promisses no more attachements in emails, and allow to share files with the people you want in a easy way and using efficient P2P technology.

I went to the website to get more details. So here we go:

Spyware, according to FAQ:

AllPeers does not and will not contain these software pests. There are no Adware, Spyware or any other nastyware in AllPeers.

Now, the privacy page says the typical blah blah:

When you register to use AllPeers, we collect the following information from you, and you need to give it to us in order to use our service: (i) username, (ii) password and (iii) email address. We do not look at the content of any message or files you share through our service. However, we sometimes collect anonymous information about your use of AllPeers. We need this information in order to operate AllPeers, but we do not share it with anyone. If we ever did contemplate sharing it, we would ask your permission first. We will use your information to authenticate your use of the service. Occasionally, we may use your email address to send you notices directly regarding AllPeers.

So, I was a bit exceptic. What do they collect? Even if they promisse to not share such information. There are goverments forcing to log such data in order to get it later with any excuse. Sounds crazy, but, bad people use anonymous systems for bad things. But bad goverments use people’s information also for bad things.

Then I saw:

AllPeers is a privately held European company with offices in Oxford, United Kingdom and Prague, Czech Republic.

The company being outside the US. is great news. That is the main problem of Google, no matter how hard the try to not be evil, they are a threat, being such society database in a country which goverment is every day more hungry for such data (yeah they even want MySpace data). Now, the UK s not doing really well in this topic.

What do you think about Allpeers? Oh, it runs on Linux too. How will it compete with built in instant messaging file transfer?

How to represent complex ideas and data in a graphical way? Check out this site

It was interesting to find there the subway maps I always find impressive.

here ( german version )

Can you believe the photo above is not a photo, but a drawing?

Leo, in our daily link exchange sent me this blog with lot of examples of drawing using the gradient mech technique. All of them are made with Adobe Illustrator. I am really impressed.

Many years ago, people predicted that snail mail would decline as result of the growing usage of email. Well, e-commerce has resulted in millions of packages being sent by snail mail and postal services are making more money.

This is interesting, because in another market, music and movie entertaiment, they have been unable to come with something innovative, and instead of helping the boost of digital entertaiment, they tried to protect the CD and DVD markets via lobby, abusing and spreading , uncertainty and doubt about copyright laws, and making customer their enemies. Whose have made digital music a profit, are not the same ones selling CDs. They failed to understand what customers want and keep trying to sell people something they now use only as fan collection items.

The internet will never make a company die. The internet kills markets at the same time it creates new ones. Whose die are the ones not wanting to accept it, and therefore not moving fast enough.

“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.

SUSE, Lucent Technologies, Siemens, Fraunhofer Institute … Formerly a typical blue-collar region, the Franconia area around Nuremberg is trying hard to transform itself into a high-tech center. Some 90,000 people now work in the approximately 2,000 IT companies located there.

Read here.