Technology – Page 13 – Into the Woods

Some thoughts on E-readers

iPad 1, Kindle DX, and, above, my now obsolete Sony Reader

Long have I craved an iPad and an Amazon Kindle. But there were things that the abbey, both house and grounds, needed much more. Luckily a friend in California took pity on me and gave me his iPad 1 and Kindle DX, for the cost of shipping, because he now has an iPad 2 and a newer Kindle. So finally I’ve been able to try these things out and contemplate their possibilities.

While it’s interesting to have a debate about whether printed books are dead, that’s really nothing more than an interesting debating question. What’s important is simply this: All serious readers are going to own electronic readers. Millions of them already do.

The other important point is that the economics of publishing has been radically changed, because the cost of publishing has been greatly reduced. Would I care if Doubleday went out of business? I wouldn’t care at all. I wouldn’t miss them a bit. Good riddance. In spite of the whining of the publishing industry, they no longer add much value. Their distribution channels are no longer important because of Amazon and because so many bookstores are closing. And I don’t buy the argument that they nurtured new authors. To the contrary. They made it impossible for many good authors to break into the market. Those new authors can now afford to publish.

To readers, it means that more books than ever will be published. It will be more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, but the Internet makes that sifting process easier with mechanisms such as on-line reviews and ratings, or forums for people with particular interests.

The cost of publishing is so low, in fact (and we should have anticipated this) that spam books for the Kindle have now appeared, clogging Amazon’s book lists and making it a headache to shop for books.

The iPad

It’s hard not to love it, but many things are annoying, especially to a computer nerd like me. When you make some things super simple, it’s guaranteed that you will make other things super hard. The iOS operating system, for example, is a multi-tasking operating system. But you can have only one thing running at a time, and that one thing gets the entire screen. But then, what happens when you put away an application? Is it still running in the background and keeping your processor, and your Internet connection, busy? If it is, how do you make the application quit? The answers to those questions are not simple, and getting control over what’s actually running on your iPad is not simple. Nor is it easy to find answers to these questions.

It’s easy to see why the nerd community has made such a big deal out of “jail breaking” these devices. It would be very difficult to use the iPad as a general-purpose computer, thus protecting the market for laptops. Apple wants to keep iPad users contained within their little eco-system.

Apps

I’ve heard all the buzz about apps. It was very clever of Apple to develop the concept of apps, because it has created a huge market with all sorts of niche applications. But 99 percent of apps, as far as I can tell, are junk.

One of the best apps I’ve tried, actually, is the Kindle app for iPad. If you buy a book for Kindle, you can download the book to your iPad at no extra cost. Amazon even tracks what page you’re on in both devices using Amazon’s free wireless pipe. So if yesterday you were reading a book on the Kindle, and today you want to read it on the iPad, you pick up where you left off on the Kindle yesterday.

The Kindle

As almost all the reviewers have said, the Kindle is a better book reader. You can’t have color on the Kindle, or fancy graphics, or video, but you do get very sharp text. I also love the fact that, with every Kindle, you get a wireless connection that Amazon pays for. Not only does this wireless connection let you shop for and download your books, Amazon also lets you use the connection to browse the web (in a somewhat limited browser). You can use the Kindle as a portable email device, free. It’s hard to beat that.

The Kindle is an amazing marriage of tech-savviness and market-savviness.

But if you have to choose between the iPad and the Kindle and can have only one, I’d go for the iPad, then get the Kindle app for the iPad.

eBay’s app for iPad is excellent, by the way, as is the Netflix app — all the movies you can eat on your iPad.

The main problem with reading a book on the iPad is the constant temptation to check your email or browse the web.

Retired? Who’s retired?

Having retired from the publishing business, maybe it was inevitable that I’d get back into it. A few months ago I took on an editing and publishing project as a little sideline — editing and doing the book layout (both print and electronic) for four psychologists who are self-publishing a corporate training manual. The extra income will help me get some projects done here at the abbey. I’ve got ink in my blood, and I’m eager to explore the possibilities of electronic publishing.

What’s involved in electronic publishing? The key application is Adobe InDesign, which is used for print publishing. It’s also the application with the best support for electronic publishing. It can create the ePub documents required for the iPad as well as the document types needed to publish on the Kindle.

What does an abbey-dwelling monk need these days to make, and illuminate, books? An iMac and Adobe InDesign, plus an iPad and a Kindle for testing the finished books. Though since the 1980s I’ve never been without a Macintosh, I’ve wanted the other things for quite some time, and finally I’ve checked them off my list.

The Internet as it used to be

Warning: This is a nerd post!

People sometimes ask me how long I’ve been on the Internet. I’ve been on the Internet since the mid-1980s. Then when people ask me what the Internet was like back then, I find the question almost impossible to answer. It’s simply too geeky for most people to want to bother to understand. Telehack.com has reconstructed the Internet (using large archives of text files) as it appeared around 1991. In a second I’ll explain how you can try out the early Internet on Telehack.com’s simulation.

First of all, the early Internet (or Arpanet, as it was called in the 1980s) was text-based. Everything happened on a command line. Also, you had to thoroughly know Unix and have access to a Unix system that was connected to the Internet. It really helped if you were an engineer. If you weren’t an engineer, you sure as heck needed to know some engineers (luckily, I did).

At the campuses and big research labs, there were early forms of local-area networks. Most long-distance traffic, though, was carried over the long-distance telephone network. Unix computers knew how to call, and connect to, other Unix computers as needed. Long distance costs were very expensive then. Luckily, my computer never had to make those long-distance calls. The phone companies operated Internet computers, and if you asked nicely and knew the right people, the system administrators of those big phone company computers would call you so that you didn’t have to call them. My computer, which was named gladys, had close connections to a computer named pacbell (run by Pacific Bell in California), and ihnp4, run by AT&T/Bell Labs in Indian Hill, Illinois, near Chicago.

My first email address was “ihnp4!gladys!dalton.” As new standards for addressing were developed, this could later be shortened to “dalton@gladys.” The standard that brought the .com, .org, .edu, etc., extensions had not yet been developed.

Anyway, if you go to Telehack.com, you can try out some of the early Internet commands. Type your command at the blinking cursor. If you type the command “hosts”, you’ll get a scrolling list of the major computers on the Internet, in alphabetical order. You’ll see my computer, gladys, in the list, and yep, gladys passed muster as a major computer (she was an AT&T 3B2 running System 5 Unix). Try the command “finger dalton@gladys”. You can also try the command “ping gladys”.

If you type the command “traceroute gladys”, you’ll get some idea of how data was passed from computer to computer on the early Internet until it reached its destination. The route from telehack to gladys could be expressed as “telehack!mimsy!ames!pacbell!gladys”. This means that telehack and gladys did not talk to each other directly. Rather, telehack knows mimsy, and mimsy knows ames, ames knows pacbell, and pacbell knows gladys. “Ames” is Ames Laboratory.

You’re probably wondering what “ihnp4!gladys!dalton” means. Bell Labs’ computer ihnp4 was probably the No. 1 best-known, best-connected computer on the civilian Internet. Everybody knew who ihnp4 was. So what that old email address means is, if you want to send something to dalton, send it first to ihnp4. Then ihnp4 knows how to communicate with gladys, and dalton is a user on gladys. Early email addresses could get quite long with lots of “!” separators if you were way out on the fringes of the Internet. Gladys was a lucky computer. She spoke directly with the big guys, and so my one-hop (ihnp4!gladys) email address was a very high-status email address in those days.

Typewriters: A new symbol of cool

Back in November when I had my IBM Selectric III reconditioned, I speculated that there ought to be clubs for typewriter enthusiasts. As I posted at the time, “I’ve been thinking that there ought to be typewriter clubs these days — for people who still have and use typewriters and who send each other typewritten notes in the mail just for the heck of it.”

Today the New York Times confirms that this is the case. Nor is this a case of old folks like me being sentimental about old technology. Today’s typewriter clubs, according to the Times, are mostly young folks, members of the literati and technorati. They have typewriter sales, as well as “type-ins,” and they send each other notes by snail mail (as I have been doing with a few old friends).

Most of the renewed interest in typewriters seem to be focused on manual typewriters, particularly portables. But it’s the Selectrics and the office-size typewriters that I really love.

Be sure to look at the photo side show attached to the Times article.

My faith in the younger generations just went up a couple of notches.

On thinking ahead

I bet that some of you who live in California are feeling a little paranoid right now. Can you trust the authorities to tell you what the radiation levels are? And maybe you went looking for iodine supplements and couldn’t find any because it had sold out. You’ve got to think ahead, folks.

Several years go, I bought old Civil Defense radiation detectors on eBay. They’re from the 1960s, but they’d never been used and were in great working condition. They were inexpensive then. If you can find them right now, I’m sure the price is sky high. As for iodine tablets, why not just keep kelp tablets on hand, which you can get at health food stores (though I’m sure kelp supplements are sold out right now as well).

Here’s what you need to do. When this crisis has passed, start looking for radiation meters. Keep in mind, though, that there are several models of the old Civil Defense radiation meter. The one you want is the CDV-700, which is a true Geiger counter and is the only one sensitive enough to measure background levels of radiations. Other meters, such as the CDV-715, are less sensitive and would be helpful only during high-radiation events.

You also need to educate yourself about radiation — the types of radiation, what the normal levels are, how to shield against radiation, and what the dangers are at increasing levels of radiation. This small document is a good place to start. Print it out and keep it with your radiation meters.

Here in North Carolina, I can assure you, background radiation is normal, about .02 milli-Roentgen per hour.

It’s no so much that I’m paranoid that I have things like Geiger counters, though it’s true that my trust in any kind of authority approaches zero. A bigger reason is that I’m a nerd, I have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and I love to measure things. I have all sorts of measuring instruments — oscilloscope, magnetometer, capacitance meters, inductance meters, frequency meters, and so on.

But as an ham radio operator, I also have an altruistic motive. I ought to be of service to the community during a crisis, able to provide information and communication.

It’s good to know some science and have a few tools.

The meter shows the current background radiation, March 20, 2:45 p.m. — .02 milli-Roentgen per hour.

Hand-me-down technology

Bought on eBay: $24.99

I love old technology. Sometimes old technology is better than new technology. It sure is cheaper.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been making some improvements in my telephone situation. I did not rush out and buy the newest telephone toys. Instead, I defined my needs, did some research, and then shopped for bargains on eBay.

Those who sell technology, of course, are always trying to convince us that we must have the very latest. Verizon, my cellular carrier, has a program called “New Every Two.” Every two years, Verizon will give you a new cell phone — for free, as long as you sign a new contract. This serves two purposes: It helps teach us that technology is obsolete after two years, and it keeps people locked into contracts.

Do I need an iPhone? No, I do not. If I were still in the corporate world, maybe it would make sense. But here in the sticks, and as a retired person, my needs are different.

Now that I have dial tone on the phone wiring in my house (thanks to a Telular SX5T bought cheap on eBay) and can connect any telephone I want, this is how I saw my needs for one of the three phones in the house: 1. Cordlessness; 2. I wanted a phone compact enough to carry outdoors, since people my age have been known to fall or otherwise need to call 911; 3. I wanted something that would speak the name of who’s calling, so I that I know who’s on the line before I answer the phone.

There is one device that meets all three of these criteria, and they don’t make them anymore. That’s the Uniden ELT560 cordless phone. I believe it’s the only clamshell “flip phone” ever made for cordless (as opposed to cellular) service. It can be loaded with customized ring tones that you can record yourself, and it uses caller ID to select the appropriate ring tone. I made recordings of myself saying the names of my regular callers, so instead of ringing, the phone repeats the name of whoever is calling. As a clamshell, it will fit in my pocket with its keys safely covered, and it has the range to work pretty much anywhere on my property. The cost on eBay for “new old stock” was $24.99.

I’m a gadget freak, so this is how I keep my gadget costs under control. I buy old stuff when old stuff will do the job. Often, the old stuff is superior.

Fixed-position cell phone service

The Telular SX5T fixed wireless terminal

Because I’m a communications nerd, and because of the problems that go with being well wired when you live in the sticks, the communications devices I use are not typical. Though I could get an ordinary land-line telephone easily enough, I’m too far from the central office to get DSL, so I figured, why bother getting a land line and putting up with yet another ditch across my yard if I can’t get Internet service on it?

I’m very happy with my 10-pound Motorola M800 digital bag phone. It’s on the Verizon network, and for more than two years it has been my only telephone. Its audio quality is almost as good as a land line, and with its external antenna, etc., it will get a strong signal where more portable cell phones fail. But a 10-pound cell phone is not exactly convenient as a home phone. I have to run up and down the stairs to answer it. I also wanted a telephone that visitors can use that behaves exactly like an ordinary telephone. For safety, in my opinion, visitors ought to be able to dial 911 from a familiar phone. And of course I’d like to have telephone extensions in the kitchen, bedroom, and radio room.

A company named Telular makes excellent products for this, and I knew that the Telular SX5T was what I needed. The concept of how it works is simple enough. It’s a cell phone, with a good transmitter and a proper external antenna, but there’s no handset and no buttons. Instead, you plug it into your house’s telephone wiring system. The Telular SX5T then puts a dial tone onto your house wiring, and any phone in the house can then make and receive calls. It works just like a regular phone. You can even use it with fax machines. You can have up to five telephone extensions on the house wiring that the device plugs into.

I’ve kept my Motorola bag phone active. I “added a line” to my Verizon service, so the bag phone and house phone share minutes on a Verizon family plan.

The retail price of the Telular unit is $700 or more. However, they often can be bought on eBay at a very steep discount.

My vintage, cinnabar-colored Bell System telephone, which I used for many years in San Francisco, is now working again. It doesn’t even know that it’s now a cell phone.

Typewriters rule!

Before computers came along, no possession was more important to me than my typewriter. I have been fascinated with typewriters — or anything with keyboards, really — for my entire life. I got my first typewriter when I was about 10 years old. My father even had an old touch-typing textbook, so I taught myself to type correctly right from the start.

In the 1980s, after I had computers and printers, I got rid of my typewriter. But I always longed for an IBM Selectric, particulary a Selectric III. The Selectric III was the very pinnacle of typewriter technology. I finally acquired one in 1997. The San Francisco Examiner had a whole pile of them abandoned in the basement, so I rescued a Selectric III. It worked pretty well for a while, but eventually, unless they’re kept oiled and maintained, Selectrics get sticky and stop working. Mine needed to be soaked in a bath of cleaning solvent, then put back together, lubricated, and adjusted. It was a splurge, but I finally got this work done. My Selectric III is now working like new.

The work was done by Bert at Executive Business Machines in Winston-Salem. Bert has been repairing typewriters for 65 years. He got started with IBM Selectrics in the 1960s, when he took an IBM class on Selectric repair. I also found out from Bert that he used to repair typewriters for the Winston-Salem Journal. That’s the newspaper where I got my first job and where I worked until I moved to San Francisco in 1991. So, without knowing it, I’ve been using typewriters maintained by Bert since 1966, when I first went to the Winston-Salem Journal as a weekend copy boy.

I’ve been thinking that there ought to be typewriter clubs these days — for people who still have and use typewriters and who send each other typewritten notes in the mail just for the heck of it.

Bert with my newly reconditioned Selectric III

Apple TV: kiss your cable goodbye

Cable companies like Time Warner and satellite companies like DirecTV are some of the most exploitive and hated companies in the country. Apple is one of the most loved companies. With the new Apple TV, Apple will give those nasty companies a rare new dose of competition.

I often ask people how much they pay for cable. Most of the time, I hear numbers like $90 a month or even more. Some people don’t know for sure how much they pay because they’ve bought bundles.

Last week, Apple announced that it will start shipping a new $99 Apple TV box later this month. I had been tempted to buy the older Apple TV for $229. Two things deterred me: the $229 cost (TV is not worth very much to me) and the fact that the old Apple TV box didn’t support Netflix. Isn’t it amazing how Apple knows what I want?

As far as I can tell so far, there are two major changes in Apple TV: 1. The new Apple TV does not have an internal hard disk. Instead, everything is stored on your computer and delivered to the Apple TV box over a Wifi network. 2. The New iTunes 10 includes “rental” of TV shows for 99 cents.

I’m fascinated that the new Apple TV box supports Netflix. Apple must have decided that Netflix is going to own the movie-streaming business, though Apple offers high-definition movies and Netflix does not. Is Apple planning to dominate the Internet delivery of TV shows the way Netflix dominates with movies?

I expect to see a lot of people cutting off their cable or satellite service and instead ordering the TV shows they want from Apple, à la carte. One’s movies would come from Netflix. As for the local stations, they’re totally useless except for their weather reports, and you can get that for free with a small antenna. In other words, higher quality, lower cost, with no money wasted on garbage you’re not interested in. You don’t have to have a Mac to do this. iTunes is available for Windows.

A postscript: I don’t have either cable or satellite TV at Acorn Abbey. The cost is too high, and most of the programming is useless. But I’d happily pay 99 cents for those things that I really want to see.

And a political angle: This is one of the reasons the big companies with near-monopolies on Internet service are so opposed to net neutrality. They want to be able to stifle this kind of competition from companies like Apple.

Keeping Facebook in quarantine

I was surprised at how many people were interested in my recent post on Defending your privacy on the Web. When I posted it, I was afraid that it might be too long and too technical and thus too boring. But in addition to the comments on the blog, I had a number of responses in private email. So I will continue to think about privacy issues and how to get around Big Brother’s spying eyes on the web.

The Washington Post signed up to share data with Facebook several weeks ago. Now I’m appalled to see that the New York Times also is in cahoots with Facebook. Think how nice it is for advertisers if your Facebook data can be used at places like the New York Times to target you with advertising. Facebook knows your real name, who your friends are, what you like and dislike, etc. Targeting ads is not in itself offensive. The problem is having all this information falling into the hands of corporate America, which will use it to build dossiers, including your name, on individual Americans. These dossiers can be sold to whoever is interested — like potential employers, or the government.

How can you avoid this?

The first Facebook rule is this: Never, if you value your privacy, sign in with your Facebook ID to any sites other than Facebook.

Second, punish nosy, intrusive web sites such as the New York Times and the Washington Post by creating anonymous new logins. Here’s how.

1. Go to www.random.org and generate a random string for your sign-in ID, something like “RtAgr4MN”. Why a random string? It’s not necessary, but it’s a nice touch, and it gets you thinking about how randomness protects your privacy. Random data, by definition, contains no information at all.

2. Register at the site with your new sign-in ID, and give a fake (but workable) email address at www.mailinator.com. Your email name at mailinator.com can be the random string you generated in step 1 above. When the New York Times registration page asks you demographic questions about your age, etc., just make something up.

3. So that you won’t forget your new sign-in ID, edit the name of your bookmark to the site so that the bookmark name includes your sign-in ID.

4. For an extra level of anonymity, do Step 2 using Tor, the Onion Router. If you don’t yet know what Tor is, do some reading on the Tor web site. Tor is actually very easy to install and configure. Tor is much like a single-hop proxy server such as proxify.com, except that Tor uses multiple hops to hide your real IP address. Tor also is a free, open-source system. That is, corporations don’t own Tor.

I’m assuming that you’re already using the privacy steps I outlined in my previous post on privacy and that, when you sign in to a data-collecting site such as Facebook, you do so only in a separate browser. And of course it isn’t just Facebook we have to watch out for. It’s any of the sites whose revenue model is based on collecting, and reselling, personal data on its users. This includes Google and Yahoo, but the riskiest sites are the “social networking” sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are clearly making a big push to get themselves enmeshed with popular web sites such as the New York Times.

As much as we might like Facebook, remember that it makes its money by collecting and selling information about you. As for Twitter, as far as I’m concerned it’s completely useless, and I have no idea why anyone goes there. But Twitter was developed, of course, to profit off snooping just as Facebook does.

Defending your privacy on the Web

The social and political classes in George Orwell’s novel 1984

We’ve all been told that there is no such thing as privacy on the Web. That is true. Still, we are not helpless. Recently I got quite angry after I learned about a whole new category of privacy threat on the Internet — shady private organizations that collect data on you and then give it, or sell it, to the government. Glenn Greenwald posted an article on this a couple of weeks ago.

This motivated me to put a little time and research into figuring out how to attain a reasonable level of privacy on the Web with a reasonable effort. I was not interested in what I’d call a paranoid level of privacy. That would take a great deal of effort and would make it much harder, and less fun, to use the Internet. But surely, I thought, there is a reasonable level of defense that anyone could achieve with a little study and some changes in how you set things up on your computer.

There are three broad categories of privacy and security risk on the Internet:

1. Illegal activity. This would include password “phishing” scams, spyware, viruses that take over your computer and turn it into a “bot” under the control of spammers, etc.

2. Activity that is legal but extremely intrusive. This includes efforts to track you and identify you on the Internet, the better to target ads to you or to sell you something. This is extremely common, and it’s getting worse.

3. Tracking aimed at the ability to build dossiers on millions of Americans, names and all, that can be sold to the government or otherwise used against you. It was this type of activity that Greenwald (Greenwald is a Constitutional lawyer) was writing about in the link I posted above.

For category 1, your best defense is to keep your computer up to date with security fixes of the type that are regularly released by Microsoft and Apple.

For categories 2 and 3, there is much you can do to defend yourself by making some changes in how your configure your computer.

I’m going to list some steps that I took — and that you can take — with a brief description of the privacy threat and how the threat can be reduced. Please appreciate that I can’t answer questions about how to make these changes on your computer. Instead, you should do your own research and learn about how to manage these things. Then you’re on your way to empowering your own self defense.

1. Use two browsers. One of the ways that snoops can figure out your identity is to snitch your identity from sites that you sign into. I am particularly wary of Yahoo, Facebook, and Google. If you are signed into them, they know who you are. Clever tracking cookies can then identity you by name on other sites. For example, recently the Washington Post’s web page started displaying a new feature that shows (among other things) what you and your friends on Facebook have been reading on the Washington Post web site. The Washington Post was quick to put out a disclaimer about why this is no threat to your privacy. You decide. As far as I’m concerned, it’s yet another reason to ignore the Washington Post, which (to my judgment) is no longer a real newspaper but merely a mouthpiece for the Washington establishment.

So here’s what I did. I use a Macintosh, and my regular browser is Safari. I downloaded Google Chrome to use as a second browser. One browser is my “identity” browser, and the other is my “no-identity” browser. When I sign in to Facebook, I do that in the “identity” browser, Google Chrome. But I don’t go anywhere else in that browser. Someone could glean my identity from Facebook and track me all day, but they’d only discover that I didn’t go anywhere but Facebook.

I do the rest of my browsing in Safari. But when browsing in Safari, I never sign in anywhere. The other important step is to delete all your cookies. Now, cookies may do a couple of things for you that you like, like enable a web site to remember that you’ve been there before. But it’s actually pretty easy to browse happily without those minor conveniences that cookies can give. Mostly, cookies are there to support the business models of the web sites you visit, whether legitimate or snoopy. But I don’t care about anyone’s business model on the web. I care much more about my privacy. Delete your cookies frequently, even once a day. If you haven’t looked at your cookies in a while, you may be stunned to find that you have thousands of them. Cookies are being used more and more, and mostly they are being used against you.

2. Use a DNS other than your internet service provider’s DNS. I cannot explain here what DNS is or tell you how to change your computer’s DNS settings. You must do your own research and understand it well enough to make this change for yourself. My ISP is Verizon. But that doesn’t mean I have to use Verizon’s DNS. I use Google’s free, public DNS. Though I am increasingly suspicious of Google’s commitment to privacy, their written privacy policy for their public DNS does explicitly say that they won’t match your DNS lookups with other data that Google may have about you. They also say that they destroy their DNS logs on a regular basis. Based on what I know at this time, I’d rather have my DNS data logged at Google rather than Verizon. And besides, Google’s DNS service is better than Verizon’s. Here is a link to information on Google’s public DNS.

3. Get Adobe Flash under control. I’ve mentioned previously how Adobe Flash has become one of the most obnoxious players on the web. It’s for good reason that Apple’s Steve Jobs is doing battle with Adobe over Flash. Flash eats your bandwidth with unwanted fancy ads. It eats up your computer’s processing power, and, if you’re on a laptop or a handheld, will run down your battery quickly. Even worse, Adobe Flash operates totally outside of your browser’s security features. Flash’s default security settings are wide open. By default, Flash can set its own “Flash cookies,” which are much harder to find and delete because your browser doesn’t know about them. Flash permits web sites to store data on your computer. Flash even may permit some web sites to use your internet bandwidth for “peer assisted networks.” My guess is that, 10 years ago, Flash already had everything that is of interest to you as a web user. Their development effort, clearly, is focused on giving advertisers and the operators of web sites the tools they want to track users, gather data on users, and focus advertising on users. I don’t care about any company’s revenue. I care more about my privacy. So I took these steps:

a. Get a Flash blocker plug-in. For Safari, I use ClickToFlash. There are different Flash blockers for other browsers. Do some Googling for “flash blocker” plus the name of your browser, and you’ll find a way to keep Flash from running in your browser unless you explicitly give it permission.

b. Delete your Flash cookies. You may have hundreds or thousands of them. On the Macintosh, you can find them in the file system at ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects. Drag them all to the trash. They are not benefiting you in any way. They are only benefiting someone’s revenue model. If you use a computer other than a Mac, Google for “flash cookies” or “flash shared objects” and see if you can’t find some instructions. Remember, I can’t help you with this. I’m only suggesting that it’s something you might want to research for yourself.

c. Change the default settings of Flash on your computer. To do this, you must go to Adobe’s web site. Lock it up as tight as possible. None of those features benefit you in any way. They all benefit those who want to track you or make money off you. I believe that Adobe intentionally makes it difficult to change the privacy and security settings in Flash. Adobe is one of the meanest players on the web today. They do not deserve our support.

4. Use a proxy service. Using a proxy service full time, at least in my judgment based on what we know at this time, is probably more trouble than it’s worth. Still, if I wanted to do something on the web that might be considered suspicious or that I think might attract attention (for example, visiting the WikiLeaks web site), then I would use a proxy service temporarily. Again, you must do your own research, but proxify.com is a good place to start.

Good luck and happy browsing. And please remember, I can’t answer questions or help you make these changes on your computer. I’d rather see you empowered to handle your own self-defense on the Internet. It’s a jungle.