Taking Back The Web (2.0)
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by willist
So much of this course is about the additional power we have voluntarily but often unwittingly handed over to private organizations and government. I’m of course talking about the Facebook tagging, Twitter updates and BlogSpot blogs that have got employees fired, ended relationships, and launched criminal charges against civilians.
I think all of us have become more interested in privacy online, and also the copyright and ‘Terms of use’ we are being subjected to. This got me researching a number of different (mostly indie) movements around the web to throw-off online marketing networks, employers, and government institutions.
The first things I came up with were a number of ‘VPN’ and ‘Proxy’ server solutions such as MegaProxy and Hotspot Shield. These services channel all your requests to destination servers, thru their own server network. The trouble is a number of corporate and government websites have the ability to filter these networks through their IP address, and block access.
An alternative to the Proxy is an Open Source ‘Tor’ Project. Basically what Tor does is route all your Internet traffic thru a number of relays (other people’s computers) and then sends the request to the destination you intended. In other words you might be surfing the web as if you were a user in Turkey, whilst a user in China, may be surfing as if they were a New Zealander. This service has proved pretty invaluable for citizens and journalists in nations like China, where web content is vigorously restricted.
Finally, the Opera browser developers are working on a new hosting service for your own computer called “Opera Unite”. Basically it allows you to host your own Facebook like profile on your own PC. This terribly Voice Over’d video explains it better than I can.
I really like the concept behind 'Unite', but as with all these services the biggest issue seems to be bandwidth and connection reliability. Who wants a Facebook profile that shuts down when you turn off your computer. Especially when corporations like Facebook are willing to foot the bill themselves.