I like to use my real name everywhere. But I can afford to that because I am in a reasonably safe place. But there are people who rationally fear retaliation from employers, bad police, bullies, or the rogue state. So it makes sense to stay anonymous.

It is very difficult to stay anonymous online. I believe there is no way you can remain anonymous forever. Finding you depends on how much time, intelligence, computer power and motivation your opponents have. Identification can only be delayed for practically long time depending on the steps you take.

This how-to is not probably complete. My knowledge is quite limited. But if I ever want to remain anonymous, I would follow all of them. In fact I follow most of these steps just to be safe online.

I have tried to make it as simple as possible for non techies. But there are pointers for the geeks to follow into the rabbit hole. They are usually marked with [g] for geek alert.

Trustable Fake Identity

There are two ways to remain anonymous online. Say if you are a blogger, your username could be so obvious that your adversaries will know you are trying to hide or you could use a very realistic fake identity which will confuse them. I would go second way. But I would give a thought about country, city, religion, sex and other identifiable characteristics of my identity before I decide on upon one. It’s very important to create a trustable fake identity. It’s not an easy job. So work on it.

Computer OS – Linux

The most important thing to remain safe online is to keep your computer safe. You need to be able to trust your computer to do the right thing. I use Linux (Debian/Ubuntu). I trust them because its open source and most of the vulnerabilities are available in the public domain. So I know whats going on in the system.

So use Linux as much as possible. If you can’t avoid using Windows or Mac try dual booting or a live CD. Linux like before is not very difficult to use these days. Distros like Ubuntu are very user-friendly. Try it.

Tails is a live CD or live USB that aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously almost anywhere you go and on any computer. All connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor network. The OS leaves no trace on the computer you’re using unless you ask it explicitly. It uses state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to encrypt your files, email and instant messaging. It’s an all in one package which is very useful non geeks. Install it on your USB and use it.

For highly paranoid ones there are distros like TinFoilHat [g] available. It even protects you against electromagnetic radiation eavesdropping [g].
Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I have seen number of users reading my feed on outlook. Its been increasing month by month. So I thought there could be many more users who will be interested in reading feeds in outlook. The recent version of outlook, i.e outlook 2007 has feed reader built into it. Using which you can read the posts just like mails.

This is useful as most of us, corporate users have outlook installed by default. You don’t have to fight with your IS/ITS department for a new software or you don’t have to keep your browser always open.
Your browser should recognize outlook 2007 as a feed reader when you access a feed. You can easily subscribe from there. Read the rest of this entry »

I am attending FOSS.IN/2008 virtually through twitter (unfortunately I could not attend due to work pressure). Here is my contribution to the FOSS world as part of FOSS.IN/2008.

Go to jFotoNotes project page

jFotoNotes is java implementation of famous FotoNotes in php. A variation of FotoNotes is also used by flickr. Fotonotes is a standard, specification, and collection of scripts for annotating images. In jFotoNotes I have used the same JavaScript libraries but I have completely rewritten the server side components in Java.

Yet another browser to code for? I guess it will obey ECMA-262 rev3 so don’t worry too much about incompatibilities as of now. Lets see the positive side

1. Its an open source, you get to participate and allows you to write plug-ins
2. Each tab is a separate process.so the effect of one tab is not seen in another tab.
3. Within each tab you have separate thread for JavaScript. So your JavaScript execution will be fast.
4. JavaScript now runs inside a virtual machine called V8. The JavaScript is compiled to machine code before running. Now that’s an advantage for heavy JavaScript applications like Gmail. Where most of the JS resides on client side and simply gets the JSON from server to show the data. You don’t have to re-interpret the JS every time. Compile once and keep running again and again. Your apps will be super fast now. Now GWT developers don’t have worry about JS performance.
5. Rendering is by webkit which is again open source.
6. Looks like they have better garbage collection algorithm for garbage collection. Which will again makes my work simple.
7. Gears is part of browser now. Your offline apps will have better performance now. Think -> Gears API is loaded as soon as browser is loaded, JavaScript is compiled to m/c code, runs in separate process and thread. What more you want? Your offline application might be as fast as any native application if not faster.

Anything else you want to add.

I use hell lot of open source projects. Most of them are written by individual developers or a small team of enthusiastic developers. They usually are not paid to do the job (some companies do pay to code for Open Source projects). They don’t get anything in return other than fun of coding and *high* that so many are using it.

I was thinking about appreciating their work. I am not very rich as you would know. But I should be able to buy a beer/coffee to my developer friend in any part of the world. In most part of the world you will get a beer or coffee for $5. Not very heavy on my wallet. I have sent few beers to Zooomr and phpmyadmin before. But now I want to make it a custom to send *somebody* every month.I am starting this month’s Coffee Project of The Month with PhpMinAdmin.

phpMinAdmin is a MySQL management tool written in PHP. Conversely to phpMyAdmin, it consist of a single file ready to deploy to the target server. Its so simple and elegant that you can maintain your mySql database from your mobile phone. I use it on my mobile with OperaMini. It just rocks. It can perform everything that you want to do with your database. Try out the demo application to experience the simplicity. All you need is to download a single php file and upload it to your server. phpMinAdmin is one of the finalists in Sourceforge Community Choice Awards-2008. Jakub Vrána is the project admin and sole developer of phpMinAdmin. Thanks for such a great piece of code Jakub. All the very best for awards.

You too can send some beer/coffee to him at his sourceforge page. I am sure he will love it.