DailyDirt: Just Because You're Paranoid, Doesn't Mean They're Not Watching You…

Computers

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Folks everywhere are understandably increasingly concerned about their privacy and who has access to their communications and online data (and metadata). Fortunately, there may be some technological solutions to help encrypt, or just make it a bit harder for “them” to spy on, your messages and private info. But even with fancy encryption algorithms, you can’t let your guard down — it might only take a $5 wrench and some unscrupulous tactics to break a password. Still, if you want “them” to spend five bucks on a wrench, here are a few things you might want to install.

• There’s a prototype browser extension called ShadowCrypt that claims it will let users send encrypted messages easily via any website such as Twitter, Gmail or Facebook. It’s open source — and bound to make tweets even more indecipherable than might already be. [url]
• Another security system prototype called Confinement with Origin Web Labels (aka COWLs) aims to prevent private information from spreading without explicit approval. It works by confining JavaScript with access control restrictions, and it works on Firefox and Chromium browsers. [url]
• There’s a crowdfunding campaign to support the development of a more secure communication platform that includes some ambitious goals. This group wants to make a secure phone someday, but it’s starting off with a P2P distributed file synchronization system to share info in a decentralized and presumably more secure way. The software is already working for tech-savvy users and is available for Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD and Solaris (really, Solaris?) machines. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: access control, crowdfunding, encryption, privacy, security, web tools