I’ve got a black feeling this morning after reading that the Supreme Court is requiring all US companies to store employee email and instant messaging. It’s fucking ridiculous, not only in burden of cost for companies to store that data, but in the loss of privacy and reality of it’s usefulness.

Anyway you look at it, it’s a punch in the balls for personal privacy. Slap a jock strap on that shit and be a man. Start using encryption. Check out GPG for encrypting email and personal files. If you use Thunderbird as an email client, there’s a real handy plugin called Enigmail that makes phasing in encryption pretty damn simple. For Instant messaging, switch to GAIM (cross-platform), Adium (OSX) or Kopete (KDE Linux). All three have some form of built-in encryption or plugin available. Adium and GAIM both can run OTR, an encryption and plausible deniability plugin. Kopete uses GPG to encrypt and as far as I know, there’s not another client that does that (there’s a plugin for GAIM, but I hear it doesn’t work well with more recent versions).

All these programs are free and open source. If you’re not using anything, I’d suggest you seriously consider it. For web browsing, think about using a proxy, like Tor or if you have the skills or patience to set it up, SSH tunnel to an outside server running squid (here’s a link to how I do it). If you don’t have access to a server like I’ve got, you can run squid on your home computer and connect to it from work. If you don’t have a static IP at home, you can use a free service like No-IP to get access. ISPs don’t like customers running servers out of their home, but if you SSH tunnel it, your chances of getting noticed are pretty nil. I tunnel squid to a remote server I keep and it works very well. I also have Tor installed on all my machines and run it as a server on my remote machine to give back to the network. It’s doubtful you need a proxy for all the web browsing you do in the course of a day at the office, but the option for security and privacy is good to have (not to mention the ability to get around restrictive firewalls).

If you don’t care about all this, so be it. Maybe that’s fine for you. But, depending on who you are and what you do in your life and for a living, you might want to take heed especially if you give a damn about your personal rights and privacy.

It’s important to be productive in your day.

daveb: Are you getting bombarded with mosquitoes at home?
Cupcake: no. mosquitoes? here? now?
daveb: My apartment is up to my BALLS in mosquitoes
daveb: I actually have to have a mosquito net over my bed to sleep
daveb: and no, I’m not coming down off a nasty meth binge
daveb: I am itchy though
Cupcake: what is that about? mosquitos I ain’t got. verbally abusive and possibly crack addled neighbors, yes.
Cupcake: mosquitoes, no.
daveb: Jesus’s nuts, they’re driving me up the wall
daveb: I guess it’s the weather or something, but i’m killing like 6-8 a night sometimes
daveb: standing in my tighties, clutching a swatter and cursing god
Cupcake: do you have your windows open? It’s cold, dude.
daveb: Open, closed… i don’t fucking get it
daveb: Oh, so I had a slight accident with the beard trimmer, netting me a delightful reverse Hitler.
daveb: so, I shaved…sigh
daveb: No more Moses-mode
Cupcake: hooray. now put yer specs back on and we’ve got a deal.
daveb: No specs. Spectacles are the power-tool of the devil
daveb: But I swear, it’s like a fricking epidemic
Cupcake: have you hit up Joyce yet or are you still light on sugar?
daveb: Maybe it’s a plague from the G to the O-D for slipping out of Moses-mode
daveb: Joyce? Oh the bakery. I don’t do it. THERE’S CHILDREN THERE.
Cupcake: I’m sure G-D and the Department of Health is pleased with the flea dip.
daveb: I went once but there were four (FUCKING FOUR, WTF?!?!) of the beastly fuckers running around with gooey fingers and snot askew.
Cupcake: if you don’t look children in the eye, they usually don’t attack
daveb: daveb does not do.
daveb: screw that. I eat children
daveb: the only child I like is the kind that don’t leave stains on my shoes after I step on their heads
daveb: whoops…did I say that?
Cupcake: are you afraid they’re going to wipe snot on you or request a paternity test?
daveb: Oh jesus
Cupcake: DADDY!!!!!
daveb: I will drop no offspring
daveb: christ, I might have to flog myself for even thinking about offspring
Cupcake: that is very un-moses like. don’t you need to produce a whole tribe?
daveb: Moses packs a posse. No need for children
Cupcake: please, some day I’m going to see a littlle bug-eyed kid with a devilish grin giving some cherub an atomic wedgie shreiking about spackling, and I’m going to know exactly what happened.
daveb: Oh hells no
Cupcake: oh shit i just destroyed my printer
daveb: AWESOME
daveb: the trees thank you
daveb: printers are evil
daveb: I destroyed mine years ago
daveb: I don’t use paper at home
daveb: I go straight up semaphore
daveb: Sometimes a little morse…
daveb: and by the way…I am NOT fucking crack-addled
daveb: The first rule about daveb is that daveb RULES
Cupcake: oh fuck me it did it again
daveb: i’m going to lose a finger. i know it
daveb: DO IT