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The Problem:
One of the issues with email or instant messengers presently is the number of intermediates the communication goes through, each of which could potentially read your messages since they are generally sent in plain text.

The Solution:
To drastically reduce the possibility of Internet communications being intercepted, a joint webmail or online document-editing, or filesharing account that supports end-to-end encryption would be the best.

There is an old chinese proverb that says "有志者，事竟成, yǒu zhì zhe, shì jìng chén," which in English translates to mean "As long as you have the will, you can succeed."

For bloggers in China where Internet censorship is a daily fact of life, and whose posts often risk being filtered, or getting deleted by the government censors, this old Chinese proverb has taken on a new meaning. In the case of some Chinese bloggers, "where there is censorship, there is also a will to circumvent."

As you may know, emails are sent, received and stored on email servers in plain text. This means that when you send an email, there are as many opportunities for someone to read your mail or cache it for later reading as there are nodes along its path from your email server to your recipient's email server. Thus emails are generally not private or secure communication channels at all.

Here are some tips to make emails more anonymous and private.

"Anonymous" proxy servers are not really anonymous. The word "anonymous" is used here in reference to the property of the proxy not to forward your Internet Protocol (IP) address to the website you are visiting through the proxy server. In other words, the website thinks the request for information is coming from the proxy's IP. However, in many cases, even this isn't true of "anonymous" proxies.

For those who are using other browsers such as:

- Internet Explorer (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx)
- Apple's Safari (http://www.apple.com/safari/)
- Opera (http://www.opera.com/)
- K-Meleon (a lightweight browser built on Mozilla's Gecko engine: http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/)
- or Konqueror (Linux KDE browser: http://www.konqueror.org/features/browser.php)

Security and privacy add-ons are often not as readily available and often cannot protect engine-based vulnerabilities for other browsers. However, they each have different features that may attract specific users. Rather than to propose ways to improve privacy and security by changing specific settings for each browser, I suggest using a method that should work for any browsing application: a local ad, cookie, and javascipt filtering proxy.

Here are the tools I use to browse the Internet everyday in a safer, more private manner and why. There are many avenues for you to choose from, I chose this one because it enhances my privacy without really hindering my browsing. Alternatives will follow in my next post.

Hi, I'm a technical researcher at the Citizen Lab and I will be blogging about tech tips and tricks to have a better, safer, more anonymous and uncensored Internet experience. This blog is intended for all Internet users, beginners and techies alike.

The Tactical Technology Collective is an important member of the CiviSec community. Their mission is to "advance the skills, tools and techniques of rights advocates, empowering them to utilise information and communications as a critical asset in helping marginalised communities understand and affect progressive social, environmental and political change."
http://www.tacticaltech.org

Over the last week of June 27-28, diverse groups of citizen bloggers, civil society organizations, and free speech activists from around the world gathered in Budapest, Hungary for the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit. A yearly summit, this year's Global Voices summit focused on the theme of “Citizen Media and Citizenhood, and explored fundamental issues surrounding the actual, and potential role of citizen media producers in the public life of the countries they live in." For more information see http://summit08.globalvoicesonline.org/about/

I have the current pleasure of working with Al Alegre in the context of ONI Asia. Al lives and works in the Phillippines, and is extremely active in the world of digital media and technology, especially where it relates to civil society and human rights and freedoms within Asia.

Al is involved in many projects, one of which I draw your attention to now. The project is called Websining, and is a flagship project of the Committee on Visual Arts, National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Phillippines.