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How to Keep the NSA Out of Your Computer

How to Keep the NSA Out of Your Computer
John Hersey Editor's note: Clive Thompson answered readers' questions about this article on Reddit on Aug. 28. Click here to view the conversation. JOSEPH BONICIOLI mostly uses the same internet you and I do. He and his fellow Athenians built it. Indeed, the mesh has become a major social hub. The Athenians aren't alone. THE INTERNET may seem amorphous, but it's at heart pretty physical. Meshes evolved to tackle this problem. "When people see the price they get from the mesh, they're like, 'Ten bucks a month? In some ways, a community mesh resembles a food co-op. In other cases, meshes are run like tiny local businesses. WHILE MESH networks were created to solve an economic problem, it turns out they also have a starkly political element: They give people—particularly political activists—a safer and more reliable way to communicate. As activism has become increasingly reliant on social networking, repressive regimes have responded by cutting off internet access. Related:  Digital citysolutions?

P2P-Urbanism: Backed by Evidence | The Wealth of the Commons After decades of central planning that ignored local conditions and the complex needs of final users, and then tried to do away with the commons for monetary reasons, people have forgotten the principal geometrical, human-scaled patterns that generated our most successful urban spaces throughout history. There has been an important loss of the shared knowledge that once let people build humane environments without much in the way of formal planning. The general form of urbanism implemented during the 20th century and the beginning of our own 21st century was large-scale, centrally planned development. Different methods of design came into vogue during this time, each explicitly trying to avoid traditional building forms and techniques that have been used for hundreds, if not thousands of years. This was done just for the sake of “not doing the same that we did in the past.” The combination of peer-to-peer and urbanism That is precisely where the recent P2P-Urbanism comes into play.

Shake internet trackers in 4 steps Their spies are literally everywhere you look. Google, the government, and scammers are constantly tracking your online moves. They want to know what you search for, what sites you visit, who you are talking to and what you are talking about. And it’s shockingly easy to find exactly where you’ve been on the internet for the life of your computer. Your hard drive, even if you clean it up, records everything you’ve ever done and every site you’ve ever visited. But you can stop the spying. Stop the spy bots. I would suggest repeating all these steps periodically, even weekly to make sure you are safe from the internet’s prying eyes.

the most reliable source of information on NDEs Transition Towns: Initiatives of Transformation | The Wealth of the Commons In 2006, when Rob Hopkins moved from Ireland to the small English town of Totnes with his family and co-founded the first Transition Town Initiative in the world with some friends, he surely never imagined what he was starting. Six years on, there are more than 500 “official” Transition Town initiatives in more than 38 countries, and several thousand more are in the process of formation in many cities, towns and regions across the world. The model of Transition transcends cultural barriers and languages, and works very well on all levels in between the regional and the personal. It is open enough to inspire people from Brazilian favelas to small towns in Sweden, and it offers enough common features to forge global connections in how these people think and act in their locality. At the same time, it encourages them to adapt their practical work precisely to their local circumstances, making each Transition initiative unique in its features and projects. Less is more

5 Fast Steps to Ensure Online Privacy | Independent Living News Health Preppers Food & Nutrition Privacy Energy Finances 2nd Amendment Being Somewhere - Low Impact Living When companies break the law and people pay: The scary lesson of the Google Bus Ever since Rebecca Solnit took to the London Review of Books to ruminate on the meaning of the private chartered buses that transport tech industry workers around the San Francisco Bay Area (she called them, among other things, “the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule us,”) the Google Bus has become the go-to symbol for discord in Silicon Valley. First a Google Bus piñata was smashed to pieces at a rally in San Francisco’s Mission district last May. Then protesters drove a fake Google Bus in the annual Pride Parade with props linking the shuttles to gentrification, eviction and displacement. The Google Bus (I use the term, as most Bay Area residents do, to refer generally to private buses chartered by employers, including Facebook, Genentech, Apple, Yahoo and others) means something different to everyone. The suggestion that people who object to the buses are confused, unintelligent or being misled is unlikely to endear them to the shuttle riders.

How To Stop People From Snooping On You With Facebook's Graph Search On Monday, Facebook officially rolled out Graph Search to everyone on the social network. The new search engine, originally accessible to only a select group after its introduction in March, lets you search through the mountains of information the site's more than 1 billion members produce daily. Starting this week, everyone with a Facebook account can find "friends from London who like 'True Blood' " or "married people who like prostitutes." In Facebook's attempt to connect friends and friends of friends to one another, your information, now fed into a search engine, is more public than ever before. If you're irked by the the idea of strangers finding out personal details of your life with a few clicks in a search bar, there are steps you can take to ensure your privacy on Facebook. Here's what to do: First things first. Take a look at "Who can see my stuff?" Under "Who can see my stuff?" Then you'll want to check out your tagged photos. Earlier on HuffPost:

: Free Your Mind : Foamy The Squirrel Public Safety and Wall Street | Limn Issue Number Two: Crowds and Clouds Compstat and the Real Time Crime Center are at the epicenter of Bloomberg’s New York. Emmanuel Didier explores how they are turning public safety into a commodity for Wall Street. In 1994, Rudolph Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York following a campaign centered entirely on the problem of public safety. He promised New Yorkers that he would restore the “quality of life” which had been destroyed by criminality. After the September 11 attacks, all the attention was shifted to the fight against terrorism, which completely overshadowed the link between Wall Street and the regulation of public safety in New York. Then, in 2005, new mayor Michael Bloomberg willingly accepted police chief Ray Kelly’s implementation of another device called the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC). The conference center of the Real Time Crime Center Another view on the RTCC Conference Center Compstat In concrete terms, the precinct commanders are at the heart of Compstat. Conclusion

How to protect your Facebook account from Rogue Applications A rogue application is a Facebook application developed by someone with fraudulent or deceitful intentions. The application often doesn’t perform its stated objectives. They are designed to obtain account information of the user, and they can be used to spread spam, scams or other malware to friends of the infected account. Profile Viewer AppsApps that redirect to phishing links and formsApps that lead to malicious downloadsApps that lead to survey scams The best way to guard against rogue applications is to avoid any third-party Facebook applications entirely. 1. 2. Here, you can click the Edit link to review the permissions of any apps you have installed or simply click the ‘x’ to remove them. Here you can see what Facebook data the application has access to, the last time it accessed your data, and you can set privacy settings for the application in question. It is a good idea to check these settings from time to time.

50 Quotes That Will Free Your Mind post written by: Angel Chernoff Email We are our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking. You have a train of thought on which you ride when you are alone and quietly thinking. If you truly want to change your life, you must first change your mind. Here are 50 thought-provoking quotes gathered from our sister site, Everyday Life Lessons, and from our blog archive that will help tweak your thinking and set your mind free. You are only destined to become one person – the person you decide to be.Do good and feel good. Your turn… What’s one quote or personal thought that has helped free your mind from negativity and restrictive thinking? Photo by: Martin Gommel If you enjoyed this article, check out our new best-selling book. And get inspiring life tips and quotes in your inbox (it's free)...

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