In geek terms there would appear to be a disturbance in the force.
In the world of RSS feeds,
I moved from GoogleReader over to the Older Reader, obviously I was not alone, apparently their subscribers went up from around 10,000 in March 2013, to nearly 400,000 in July 2013. Probably a good problem to have if you are charging, but a bit of a nightmare for a free service. Their blog is wonderful reading,
I would hesitate to guess what proportion of Google Reader subscribers joined The Older Reader, at a complete guess a quarter to one third, which would put the total number of people using RSS at just over a million worldwide. Off the top of my head that is surprisingly low, being in a house where two out of four use RSS. Perhaps RSS is a generational thing, with not much take up amongst the under thirties and the over sixties.
Anyway, The Older Reader has increasingly been subject to outages, which their site endearingly responds to by having random photos of kittens. There were major outages when they moved material over to a new server rack and solid state drives started failing. Then they announced that they were shutting down altogether to all but original customers and a few limited exceptions. This week it has been announced that they have got support by a bigger player, and all their data has crossed the Atlantic from Europe to somewhere in America. Not sure where in Europe or where in America, it does seem a little cryptic.
Of course there are alternatives to The Older Reader, inoreader gets a mention, and was recently added to the possible subscriptions within the iOS app Feeddler. Not sure how any service would cope with an additional 100,000 subscribers within a month though. I am still running NetNewsWire but as it does not offer syncing between my laptop and iPad, it is not getting much use.
Secure emails services diminish
The other disturbance in the geek force has been that lavabit the super secure email service, as used by Edward Snowden, has just closed down altogether, presumably following interest from the NSA that lavabit are not allowed to talk about. It might re-open, but the clear implication seems to be that if you do not want the US government to be able to read your emails then do not use an American company for your emails. The similar privacy respecting email service Silent Circle also closed down in advance of a presumed visit by the NSA.
Various issues arise,
Should anyone worry about the US government reading their emails ?
Well as Cardinal Richelieu said
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”
And seeing as he was an adept Machiavellian figure he ought to know.
On the face of it, if there are appropriate checks and balances, and responsible American officers in law enforcement, after due appropriate judicial process, can eventually obtain access to my emails, then it is not a worry. On the other hand, if just anyone who wanders into any office of the American government, can just browse through anything that anyone anywhere has written, print copies and leave them on a bus for fraudsters and crackheads to read, then it is of concern. Particularly if it is possible to just go on a fishing expedition, doing searches for anyone who has ever mentioned chernobyl, or used pgp.
What does this mean for the future?
I cannot imagine that businesses or governments outside of America are terribly comfortable with the idea of Americans browsing through all their emails. As above, the best option seems to be to wholly avoid using American companies. There is not a huge choice, but a quick web search suggests the following Swiss providers,
Mykolab https://mykolab.com
Both are commercial services, the Mykolab offers more eyecandy and more functions, but is pricey, Swissmail looks like a throwback to the eighties when we used to code pages by hand, and does not offer too much, but is a lot cheaper.
In the end, you pays your money, and makes your choice, free services with big brother looking over your shoulder or pay for some privacy.
Rather than worrying about how private your email provider is, you could use something like gpgmail (for mac) so that mail is encrypted when it leaves your laptop, and decrypted by the recipient. There is a certain amount of faff involved, with public and private keys, and you both have to be using pgp so it is not for the casual user, but in fairness, if most of your emails are to a handfull of people, it is fairly easy to set up and once set up, can be fairly seamless. Just how secure it is depends on how paranoid you are. If you want to commit details to memory and enter them every time you read an email then it is so secure that someone could steal your laptop and still not read your emails. In espionage terms, where the effort involved in accessing information is too big, you resort to nicking laptops, installing keylogging software, tricking targets and the like. The sort of measure that you would use for serious targets, but not for a fishing expedition.
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