INTERNET RISING

INTERNET RISING is a digi-documentary investigating the evolving relationships between the Internet and collective consciousness of humanity. It provokes many questions about ancient and modern paradoxes of life, its pleasures and pains... and the gray area contrasts in between - but most of all it is meant to be an inspiring conversation starter.

INTERNET RISING is a labor of love comprising a rapid fire mashup stream of live interviews all conducted within the web sphere. The film's participants include many profound personalities and key internet influencers ranging from professors, corporate academics, futurists, researchers, writers, bloggers, media creators, activists, gamers, educators, scientists, artists, innovators - real humans, all of whom provide amazing insights into how our state of the world is changing and transforming via various forces of economic, social, geographic, political, philosophical development... all centered around technology's transformative and generative power.

On pseudonymous identities on the Internet

One month after the introduction of Google+, the debate on "real vs fake identities" goes on. I see a lot of that on Google+ and Facebook because I have many Second Life users in my network, and many of them have chosen to be pseudonymous.

I have written an article on pseudonymous identities on the Space Collective website (I prefer to write long articles elsewhere and post excerpts here). Excerpt:

I often voice my very deep concerns about our once free Internet becoming the property of nanny states and greedy corporations, and I think we must protect the Internet at all times. Our society is becoming a global nanny state and a dictatorship of self-righteous control freaks and idiotic "moral majorities", and we should keep and protect at least some pockets of personal freedom and privacy online.

Or else (see below). At this moment I am not affected by real-dentities-only policies, because I chose to represent myself via my legal name anyway. I must also confess that, sometimes, I am mildly annoyed by some aspects of my pseudonymous friends' behavior. But I am happy to accept a moderate level of annoyance for the privilege of living in a free society, and I try to be tolerant of others' little annoying habits because I hope they will be equally tolerant of mine. And I remember "First they came..."

Read the rest on Space Collective...

PS Today is the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web and we MUST NOT FORGET that the Web was "Born out the dreams of Libertarian hippies in 1970s California, and the anti-authoritarian aspirations of internet-pioneers." We must keep the spirit alive.

Bitcoin: a CryptoCurrency for a free Internet

Bitcoin has been covered by the popular show Security Now on the TWiT network: Security Now 287: BitCoin CryptoCurrency.

I have posted to blip.tv an edited version of the video (the original has a CC license), with only the 45 min dedicated to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer digital currency. Peer-to-peer (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or keep track of transactions. Instead, these tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network. Bitcoin has been created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto as one of the first implementations of a concept called cryptocurrency, which was first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list. See also the Bitcoin page on Wikipedia.

I have been playing with Bitcoin for a couple of years and I have a few hundreds of Bitcoins (which have recently reached parity with the US dollar as reported by Slashdot). So far I have used it mainly to experiment, but recently I have purchased the first "real" service with Bitcoin. I really hope Bitcoin will be successful.

I think Bitcoin is important. We must protect the Internet and the right to free speech, pseudonimity and anonimity online, and we need a untraceable anonymous currency. Of course I realize that anonimity and cryptocurrencies can also be used by bad people to do bad things, but I think the benefits outweigh the dangers.

Protecting the Internet

Mullvad "simply bypasses everything between your computer and the real, unrestricted internet using an encrypted VPN tunnel. Anyone trying to monitor your internet connection will only see a strongly encrypted stream of data to one of the Mullvad servers. Anyone trying to trace the source of a communication will not see the true origin but only a Mullvad server. The technology used is OpenVPN using 2048-bit RSA and 128-bit Blowfish encryption."

Today I have started using Mullvad. I have chosen this particular VPN mainly because they accept payment in Bitcoin, the new decentralized P2P cryptocurrency which I hope will have a very big impact. After a few hours of use, I am quite happy with Mullvad. My IP is now in the Netherlands, and my connection seems as fast as usual.

I used to be a PGP user a few years ago. I had not used PGP for a few years, but today I have reinstalled PGP (actually GPG) and created a brand new key.

I am just a fat middle aged guy who uses to go sleep at 10 and does not have much to hide, so why am I using strong privacy tools? The answer is simple: I want to protect the free Internet that we love. I think the open and free Internet is one of the best things that have happened to our species, definitely one of the best things happened in my own lifetime. Now I see that the open and free Internet is under attack by big governments and big corporations that want to control it, and I think we should all fight for our right to privacy and free speech, even those of us who don't have much too hide. If many people use privacy and anonimity tools, the Internet will be much more difficult to control. See also my article on We must protect the Internet and the very interesting comment thread on the Space Collective site.