Yesterday, a friend of mine received a letter from Videotron, his Internet service provider, telling him that he should stop downloading copyrighted content. He immediately called me in panic, not because he is afraid of Videotron’s menaces (he is in law school), but because he is worried that someone is observing what he is doing on the Internet. I have to say that I would also be worried if I received a letter confirming me that my ISP is spying on me. So like I said, he called me asking me for ways to protect his private life from piracy from so called anti-piracy groups. I thus decided to make a list of programs I know of that can help you protect your personal data from your ISP and/or external observers.

Tor
Tor is free software that helps you protect your privacy online. It is an implementation of onion routing that allows you to browse the Internet anonymously. It is a decentralized network, meaning that anybody can create an anonymous server and add it to the network. To make a long story short, onion routing systems work by encrypting packets multiple time using different keys from different server in the network. The packet is then sent to the first server who can decrypt the first layer to find who to send the packet to next. The following servers then do the same thing until the packet reaches its final destination. This way, each server is only aware of the server that comes just before and after it. It is thus impossible for a single server to tell who the packet comes from and what is its final destination. From an ISP point of view, the packet just looks like it is going to a random server and its encrypted content looks like gibberish. Tor is probably the most popular anonymity network and it is the one I was using when I started college. A good front-end for the system is the cross-platform controller Vidalia.

JAP/JonDonym
JAP, the Java Anon Proxy, is similar in design to Tor. It also uses multiple layers of encryption to anonymize the users. The main difference is that JAP servers are not anonymous. When you use the service, you can choose between different Mix Cascades of server. This allows you to choose who you trust and who you don’t. This is a major difference with Tor, with which you don’t know who owns the servers and if they are keeping logs. However, this has a downside. Since everybody knows who owns the servers, this leaves them vulnerable to attacks from hackers or the government. There is also a known backdoor implemented in the software following an intervention by the German Federal Criminal Police Office. It is still a good service though, and one that I used for my last year in college after the IT service found how to block Tor.

I2P
I2P stands for the Invisible Internet Project. It is also a system that keeps its users anonymity using multiple layers of encryption. It is a decentralized network, like Tor. However, it encrypts the data from the beginning to the ends. It even keeps the sender and the destination secret to the middle servers. It can easily be integrated into different software to anonymize their activity over the Internet. Supported protocols include regular TCP/IP communications through I2PTunnel, a simple tunneling application to browse the web, BitTorrent, eDonkey, Gnutella and more. However, it is still considered as beta so there may be some bugs left.

Peer Guardian/MoBlock
Peer Guardian, for Windows and Mac OS X, and MoBlock, for Linux, are open source IP filtering programs. These programs allows you to create a list of IP addresses that you don’t want your computer to connect to. You can easily find extensive lists for anti-piracy groups on the Internet. These lists includes IP addresses from the MPAA, MediaDefender and other groups which use peer-to-peer network to find people to sue for copyright infringement. This way you can make sure you share only with real peers and not people who wants to spy on you.

VPN
If the solutions above are not enough, or if you don’t want to sacrifice speed by going through an anonymous network, then subscribing to a VPN may be a good alternative for you. A VPN, a virtual private network, is similar to a home network except that it sits on the Internet instead of being local. By connecting to the network, all outside requests you make through the network uses the network’s IP address. This means that it is impossible to tell who the original requests come from, only which VPN it comes from. Also, from an ISP point of view, all the requests look like they are directed to the same address and the content of the packets is usually encrypted. An example of a VPN provider is IPREDator, a service offered by the founders of The Pirate Bay. For an extensive list, your can google for VPN providers.

Most file sharing protocols also allow encrypted transfers. Just look through your client’s options. Even though the encryption is pretty weak, it can mislead your ISP filtering system into thinking it is regular traffic. Another useful tool to help you navigate anonymously is FoxyProxy. It is a small Firefox addon that eases the transition from one service to the other. This way you can switch from normal browsing to anonymous browsing in a single click.

So don’t be a dummy and protect your privacy!

As you probably have already noticed, depending on your sense of observation, I changed my blog’s design again today. The main reason for that change is that I wasn’t satisfied with the header and sidebar of the past theme. So here it is, a new theme, minimal again, but effective. There are absolutely no images in the whole design except for the RSS icon. I kept the footer unchanged since I like its look and feel and I couldn’t find anything to ameliorate.

But since I am not a professional designer and I can’t write a full post about the characteristic of the layout I chose or the typography concepts in use, I will write about the Wordpress plugins I use in the theme. As you may already know, this blog is driven by Wordpress and plugins play a big part in this CMS. However, I am not a huge plugin user, but there are still 10 that I consider essential to a good blog.

Askimet
The first in my list is the only one that actually comes with a fresh Wordpress install even if it is desactivated by default. Askimet is one of the most powerful and useful plugin. It is a spam filter that becomes especially handy when your blog starts showing up in search results. With approximately 99% of the comments posted on my blog being spam, I can’t live without this one.

All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack, as its name says, is a plugin that faciliate the search engine optimization of your blog. Using a simple administration interface, you can change the title of your pages with simple rules and it automatically adds various information to your pages headers like keywords or descriptions.

Google Analyticator
I first installed this one in a moment of lazyness. I didn’t want to manually integrate the Google Analytics code into my footer template in case I change theme in the future. However, it is when I visited the settings page that I realised all the power the plugin offers. Not only does it allow you to embed the analytics code automatically in your blog, but it also offers a variety of advanced options to tweak the service to your needs.

Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is a complement to All in One SEO Pack. Don’t be tricked by its name, it doesn’t only generate and submit your blog’s sitemap to Google; It also does so for Yahoo!, Live Search and Ask.com. This is a really good plugin if you want your blog to come up in search results. It also leaves a lot of place open for the user to customize the creation and the submission processes of the sitemap.

ShareThis
ShareThis is an essential for social bloggers. Like AddThis and other similar services, it makes it easy to embbed links to delicious, digg, Twitter, Facebook and other social services to your posts. The difference between ShareThis and these other services is that it does it better. The way the plugin is designed lets you position it wherever you want and change its appearance to match with your website.

Simple Tags
Simple Tags is a ninja plugin. In no way your user will ever notice you are using it, but that doesn’t mean it is not useful. It allows you to manage your tag really easily in the administration interface. You can mass tag as well as auto tag your posts using different auto tag services. On the front-end side, it offers more functions to display your tags the way you want, whether it is in a list or in a cloud.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved
This one is a must for coders. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved is the most complete code highlighting plugin I found. It supports a wide array of languages and offers different color schemes to match your design. It also displays your code in a concise and effective way. If you write code often, you need this one.

Twitter for Wordpress
For the Twitter fans out there, this plugins allows you to integrate the twitterfeed of any public profile. It lets you choose what information to grab, what to display and how to display it. Twitter being pretty minimal, the plugin is also pretty minimal, but it does what it should do and it does it well.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
Another plugin for the lazy bloggers, Wordpress Automatic Upgrade does what it says it does, it automatically upgrades your wordpress install when a new version comes out. It does so step by step, asking for user input between each step to make sure nothing goes wrong. It also gives you links to backups of your database and system in case something breaks during the update process.

WordPress Related Posts
The final plugin in my top ten list is Wordpress Related Posts. This one is a plus for your reader and yourself at the same time. It displays links to posts similar to the one currently displayed by analysing the tags and categories of each posts. This hopefully keeps visitors for a longer time on your blog, giving them more to read.

So this is it. A new interface and a new awesome list of wordpress plugin. I hope you enjoy your new reading environment and never forget: stay KISS!

I just camp back from Startup Camp Montreal, the fourth iteration of the event, but my first ever. The presentations were pretty interesting, even though some were of average quality. However, there was a lot of place left for networking. The whole startup community of Montreal seemed to be there, as well as a lot of investors. With over 400 participants, it was the largest Startup Camp ever done in Montreal. Here is a brief overview of the presentations.

The first person to talk was Michael Montano, a young entrepreneur from Toronto. He is the co-founder, with Christopher Golda, of Backtype, an application to find, follow and share comments on the web. His talk was about their experience in building their product. Backtype is in fact their second project, a project they built through the Y Combinator program. He first talked about ideas and how they are all usually seen as bad when you first propose them. You shouldn’t be rigid when it comes to you first idea, but instead try to release fast so you can get feedback to orient your product. He insisted on the concept of rapid iteration as a way to adapt to customers needs. Failing to do so may take you out of business pretty fast by a lack of interest on the costumers side. He also talked about the need to create value for the users before trying to acquire value. In other words, make a good product before worrying about your salary. Here are some good websites on the startup and the venture world he suggested during his keynote. I chatted a bit with him afterwards and it was interesting to hear how he managed to work on his company while still going to university.

The other keynote was by Carl Mercier, a serial entrepreneur from Montreal. His last company, Defensio, was bought recently by Websense inc. As such, he decided to talk about how he built and sold his different startups. He used a bootstrapping strategy for all of his 5 companies. This means he didn’t take any external investment and paid all the expenses with the gains. As such, he insisted on the need to have a working profit strategy. Don’t aim to big and instead, try to make something that works and generate some value. Like Michael, he doesn’t think there is such a thing as a generally accepted revolutionary idea. Instead of waiting for the great illumination, you should start fast and market your idea. As he said, developing your product his 100% of your business, but marketing his the other 100%. He also talked about the bad effects of taking external investment. His main argument was that by accepting investment, you take an additional burden on your shoulder. You have to please your investors by selling at a higher price or by growing faster and as such, you lose some control over the orientation of your company.

The first company to present was Sitezoogle. They sell a website building software targeted at niche market like music bands or dog breeders. They are looking for help to enter other niche markets.

The second company to present was Control Yourself, the company behind identi.ca and other social networking software. Evan Prodromou, the CEO of the company, made it clear that he is not Evan Williams and that identi.ca is not Twitter. He explained their business strategy and how they plan to sell their platform as a service to bigger companies and organisations. He is currently looking for investment to expand from a centralized system to a distributed platform.

Then came Praized Media, a company that sells software as a service to help merchants and publishers enter the social networking world to ease the communication with their costumers. They recently signed a deal with Yellow Pages to add a social search function to their website. They said they have other big customers and platform integration in mind, identi.ca being one.

The following company was Klaxa. They offer a software solution to help telecom companies manage and debug their network. The key points of their product is its ease of use and its big bug database that helps network technicians solve possible problems fast. The CTO, Stephane Monpetit, has more than 20 years of experience in the telecom industry and they are currently looking for $1 million in investment.

The last, but not the least, was Twtapps, a company that develops application for Twitter. Felipe Coimbra, the CEO and single employee of the company, built multiple applications that can be used to add functionalities to the minimal Twitter platform. He uses a freemium business model to try to make the company profitable. His most popular application, twtpoll, was featured in TechCrunch and is now widely use through the Twittersphere.

The latest rumor on the Twittersphere is about a possible buyout of Twitter by Apple for $700 million in cash. That is a lot of hype. Especially when we consider that even the owners of Twitter value the company to “only” $250 million. But can this holds? Following my article on Web 2.0, here is my prediction for Twitter Inc.

First of all, I have to say that I love Twitter. I think it is a really useful tool for the rapid spread of what I would call bleeding edge knowledge. It is easy to find and spread the latest news in a variety of domains, mostly through links to interesting blog posts. My fears are for Twitter Inc, the corporation behind the service.

Lately, Twitter has been opening its API like no proprietary web service before. Back in September, when I started working with their different developer tools, the only option available to me was to use an API key to make requests using a limited sets of functions. Today, with the integration of OAuth to the API and the development of other useful tools, connecting to Twitter has never been easier. It got to the point where the user has dozens of alternative to the official website to connect with its fellow twitterers, some of which are way more advanced than the original web interface or target specific aspects of the Twittersphere. Based on recent statistics, less than 75% of the users post their updates via the web client. The question is: is this a good thing?

From the point of view of the user, it is the best thing that could happen. Opening the API to developers worldwide means faster and better innovation. Twitter’s users are prosumers that don’t passively use the end product, but also develop it based on their needs. The peer pioneering behind Twitter lead to the creation of whole new services, like Twitpic, that integrates seamlessly to the main service via the open API. This means more alternative for the end user and, as a result, a better experience.

The conclusion is the same from the service’s point of view. By opening itself to the world, Twitter gains new features and users everyday, making it more useful and purposeful. Clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop make it easy to reorganize and mash the data available on the Twittersphere, keeping only the parts that are relevant. You can easily find what is most discussed by visiting Twitscoop or automatically post with Twitterfeed. It is these services that make the Twitter service more than a 140 characters blog.

The problem is with Twitter Inc. All these API requests have to be managed by some central system, a system that happens to be owned and operated by Twitter Inc. Every request has to go through one of Twitter’s server, creating operation and maintenance costs that they have to pay to stay online. They could have tried to payoff their bills with ads like other Web 2.0 companies, but not only do they don’t display ads, but they soon may not even display any content at all. As I said before, less than 75% of the users use the official web interface. That means that more than 25% of the users don’t even bother going on the Twitter website and this number is growing. By decentralizing a system that, in is nature, is centralized, Twitter Inc is facing the risk of becoming a simple content provider for more advanced clients or at least, to lose potential profits to someone else. Even worse is the fact that its problem, the widespread availability of the content, is also its strength. Even identi.ca, a free and open source micro-blogging platform, seems to have a better business plan with its status.net initiative. So how can Twitter be worth $700 millions? Hype. But hype is not enough in the long run. With a loss of control over the distribution of its content, Twitter will have to find alternative way to start making money or it will become part of the past.

We plan to build Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

About Twitter

I hope for them that this is not just a dream.

Have you ever been obsessed by a question? One of these existential interrogation that continuously stays in your head and that you can’t get rid of without answering it? Well last week, I had such an interrogation. For the whole week I kept wondering what would happens if a T. Rex fell. With its short arms, it would probably hurt itself badly, wouldn’t it? Well, after watching the whole Jurrasic Park trilogy, I realized that my interrogation was totally pointless. Why? Because there is a larger dinosaur than the T. Rex called the Spinosaurus. This new information totally changed my world.

Talking about changes, you probably noticed that I changed the design of my website. I wasn’t happy with the color scheme anymore so I changed to something lighter. Again, I am not a photoshop pro so I kept it simple with a minimalist look. It should also be easier to browse. The rest of the website should follow soon. I am still working on bits of the wordpress template, but as soon as I am happy with the result, I will start working on the other parts of the website.

On another note, I finished my first year at the university of Waterloo. I am going back home tomorrow for my first work term. I will work as a software developer for Artificial Mind and Movement, an independent video game studio in downtown Montreal. It should be great. I will be part of the Wii/PS2 engine team, so I should do more technical work than what I am used to. I hope I will learn a lot. It also means a change of language. I will get to practice my C++ a bit more. As I like to think: there is nothing like practical work to learn a new language. I hope I am not wrong…