Salon.com > Mathew Honan

Who nabbed Indymedia’s computers?

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 20:30:00 +0000

Hep Sano is remarkably calm. Sipping an iced tea at a brewpub in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, she dispassionately recounts Indymedia's alarming situation -- the unexplained seizure of two of the media organization's computers by an unknown government at the behest of the FBI.

"We want to set a precedent," says Sano. "The damage has been done to us. But we're hoping to get something that says, no, the FBI was wrong. You can't just go in and take a server in another country for unknown reasons without saying who did it."

The facts of the matter are scanty. On Oct. 7, Rackspace Managed Hosting, an Internet service provider based in San Antonio, was served with a subpoena ordering it to hand over two Indymedia servers physically located in London. Rackspace immediately fired off an e-mail to Indymedia informing them about the servers and noting that it was required to comply, according to something called the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, an international agreement that sets out "procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping, and money laundering."

Don’t be afraid of the big bad Gmail

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 19:30:00 +0000

I'm not scared of Gmail. I'm not at all worried that my privacy is about to be invaded by the world's most popular search engine company. Call me brave, call me crazy, but I'm not. Nor should you be.

Gmail is the new Web-based e-mail service from Google that offers a gigabyte of storage space to users. Google announced Gmail on April 1 and has been handing out a limited number of beta accounts since then. The company still doesn't have a firm release date, but says it will most likely be within the next three to six months. More beta users are being added every day. On April 20, Google began divvying out Gmail accounts to "active" users of its weblogging service, Blogger.com. A representative of Google says that there are currently not quite "tens of thousands" of Gmail users, and that it wants to try to incrementally roll out more accounts. If it's as good as Google search -- and it is -- it won't be long before that number hits the tens of millions.

I was fortunate enough to be one of the early beta testers. Here's my report on how it works, and why you shouldn't let it frighten you.

The enigma of Earth Station 5

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 19:01:00 +0000

For the past few months, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been slapping American MP3-swappers with lawsuits in an effort to deter an activity that the entertainment industry claims is costing it millions of dollars. But now, somebody is slapping back. Earth Station 5, or ES5, is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network based in the Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian Territories. The backers of ES5 say that the program can provide complete anonymity for its users via third-party proxy servers (computers that provide a kind of neutral buffer between a file downloader's home computer and the network); has, on average, 16 million members connected to its network; will never contain stealth adware or spyware programs; and -- because it is headquartered in the Palestinian Territories -- is immune from the legal grasp of the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).