Internet Privacy
I have written before about the problem of privacy in the Internet Age, and things are just getting worse. Over at the informative NYT’s tech blog Bits there is a disturbing post describing how ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) are thinking about possibly monitoring your internet traffic and supplying advertising based upon your internet usage and whether anti-spyware companies will try and help you combat this (also see these other articles). So not only are they going to be snooping around, but they are going to bombard you with advertising on top of that. Probably the best way to combat this type of snooping is to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network). This is actually not such a bad thing to have if you use public WiFi networks. In a nutshell, you log onto the VPN and access the internet through their network with all of the information being forwarded to you in an encrypted manner through what is termed an “encrypted tunnel.” James Fallows discussed the use of VPN’s by people in China who want to overcome “The Great Firewall of China” in this interesting article, and it is a bit disturbing that we may have to use the same technique in America in order to guard our own privacy. Two VPN providers which were mentioned in an article which I read are WiTopia and PublicVPN, although I am sure that there are many more.