New tool offers anonymity

By the time you read this you will be able to download Psiphon, software developed at the University of Toronto in Canada that will allow a user to jump over or tunnel under a government firewall, guaranteeing that it will immediately be banned in a number of countries.

It works by allowing one user in, say a country without any restrictions, to set up an account for someone in a country that has them. The target user can then surf the Internet without restrictions.

This raises the old issue of basic human rights versus the right of a nation state to impose restrictions on them. Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights states that "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

The biggest violators of this paragraph are typically listed as China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Egypt. Other countries block access to sites like human rights groups, news services or gay and lesbian organisations. Thailand through the ICT Ministry also decides what sites people can and cannot visit.

Since the system works by setting up a secure connection between one user and another it will be very hard to detect on an individual basis and the alternative is to block wholesale access to countries.

You can get a copy at psiphon.civisec.org but be aware that by using this product you may be violating local laws in your country. Personally, I believe that the Internet should remain open although I am not fond of some areas like gambling. But it should be the right of each individual to choose what they do online.

The best thing about working in the field of computers is that you are learning all the time. My thanks to Chetan Patel for sending me information on an alternative to Adobe Acrobat as an Adobe Acrobat file (PDF) reader.

Go to http://www.foxitsoftware.com and download the Foxit Reader 2.0 for Windows. There is also a version for Linux and mobile devices. Install and try opening a file with Adobe and then Foxit. In my timing tests Foxit was on average four times faster to load. If you go pro you get editing tools and the ability to convert files to a PDF.

Another reader, my buddy Steve from Jomtien, pointed me to secondlife.com. I had not heard if this before. Second Life is a 3D digital world imagined, created and owned by its Residents. It is kind of like a MMPORG but you get to create your own environments and own your own space where you can do business or just have your own privacy.

The current Second Life population is over 1.7 million and people are already selling their creations on e-bay. This is effectively the first virtual world of any serious scope where you have avatars and interact with real people. The world contains regular events like games, parties, meetings and contests.

Industry news

A 4GB USB flash drive for 2,880 baht. I saw this amazing price at Hardware House at Fortune Town on my last visit. The floppy drive is well and truly dead.

If you missed it, Microsoft Vista is now available to companies. Apart from McAfee other developers including Symantec, Trend Micro and CA are not yet ready to deploy their security solutions under Vista. Microsoft however is predicting that organisations will adopt Vista as twice the speed they adopted XP.

On my recent wanderings around the usual places I saw four different versions of the Vista DVD ready for use PCs. No these were not official Vista DVDs but the other kind. Seems like it will be "business as usual" with Vista as it was for XP.

In other Microsoft news, Birmingham City Council dropped its planned open source project for library PCs after finding that an upgrade to XP was less expensive. It is hard to get the pricing facts but the consensus is that Microsoft may have offered the council special pricing on XP to sway their decision.

More proof that the US Patent Office needs to be kept out of the Internet. Patent No. 6,988,138 granted to the software company Blackboard is titled "Internet-based education support system and methods" and essentially covers the ability to grant different people, such as students and teachers, different access rights to online resources such as grades, files or quizzes.

Not only must there be a gazillion examples of prior use out there the granting this patent is just plain idiotic. Not only does it potentially interfere with open-source projects like Sakai, Moodle and ATutor, it will infringe on just about every other piece of online software currently in use. Let's hope that the US Supreme Court will make some helpful ruling on the obviousness of technology patents.

The MPAA is at it again, this time it's Paramount. They are claiming that even if you have purchased a DVD you cannot load it onto the portable player you have just purchased. If this suit is successful it will mean that you will have to purchase a different copy of the movie to play on each of your devices and essentially invalidate any concept of fair use. There are so many reasons that this is just plain wrong.

Nintendo sold 600,000 of their Wii game consoles in the first eight days. Sony is not telling how many PS3's they have sold but have a target of a million by the end of the year. Microsoft has sold over six million Xbox 360's since they were released in November 2005. Too early to say who the biggest winner will be.

Xerox is working on self erasing paper. An internal survey found that over 20 percent of paper printed hit the trash can the same day. The current prototype prints on a specially coated paper with a light yellow tint.

The result is a document that looks like it was printed with purple ink. The information vanishes in about 16 hours leaving the paper to be recycled up to 49 more times. I can see the new school excuses now "sorry teacher I had finished the paper but it just suddenly erased itself," replacing the good old dog-eating excuse.

Finally for this week I managed to get my hands on Dungeon Siege 2 available here only as an import. The game is from Microsoft's game company and is a huge fantasy game with multiple side quests, four different character types and three levels of difficulty.

I have only just started it but it is a good mixture of puzzle solving and hack and slash. You need to be careful in the hack and slash section as the monsters grow in strength as you progress through the world.

You can add characters to your group and even add pets that you feed on spare pieces of amour, weapons, potions, spells and anything else you can pick up. So far it has been a good game to play. It did not make the local market because Microsoft wanted to charge 2,000 baht for it or more than twice the cost of even the best games from other companies. 'Nuff said.

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