A Special Kind Of Proxy

GoogleSharing is a special proxy service that doesn’t hide what you are searching from Google. Instead, it obscures where the requests are coming from. GoogleSharing is not a full proxy service designed to anonymize traffic. It is exclusively intended for certain aspects of your communication with Google. So there are no “alternative” websites to visit. Your use of the web need not change at all.

How does it work?

How does it work?
The GoogleSharing system is a custom proxy with a Firefox Add-on.

The proxy

The proxy generates a pool of GoogleSharing “identities,” each containing a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several browsers.

The add-on

The Firefox add-on watches for requests to Google services from your browser… and will transparently redirect them to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of identifying information and replaced with a GoogleSharing identity. Then this request is forwarded to Google, and the response is proxied back to you.

If your next search is given a different identity,

TechCrunch and Your Right To Free Speech

First Amendment rights apply to the government, not to private companies. Nor to anyone or anything else that is not the U.S. Government.

This was an excellent and educational article from TechCrunch.

TechCrunch explains Free Speech

“You know something I love?

The US Constitution. Not because it’s one of the most artfully drafted pieces of legislation on the planet, covering the spectrum of rights due to every man, woman and child in the United States and yet still with less legalese than the average EULA.

Not because of the wonderful stories that surround its creation … “

via TechCrunch, Read more….

The Erosion of Online Anonymity

The Erosion of Online Anonymity

Why the 20th Century Is Different

What is different about the 20th century?

Why is there a crisis of identity and moral relativism despite all the goodness and achievements?

This is the Dream Time by Robin Hanson is written from the point of view of our distant future descendants looking backward.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

They try to understand us by identifying the defining behavioral trends of the 20th century:

• Demographic transition We took far less than full advantage of the reproductive opportunities our wealth offered.  Instead, we spent our wealth on purchases that we thought would elevate our social status or acceptance..
• Obsession with super-stimuli Our evolved survival instincts were overridden so that we chose taste without nutrition. We spent vast sums on things that didn’t actually help on the margin, such as on medicine that didn’t make us healthier, or education that didn’t make us more productive.
• Extreme mating patterns Capricious and casual attachments that are a normal part of adolescent growth into maturity remained lifelong habits. Extreme gender personalities were common.
• Idealism We acted on strange religious, political, and social beliefs.
• Governance Democracy was our preferred political system. Leadership and policy was driven by the casually considered opinion of the median voter rather than the considered opinions of our best experts.
• Many pivotal historical choices were made quickly and emotionally History hung by a precarious thread on a few crucial choices. Some of these choices were strongly influenced by rather strange delusions e.g. rampaging robots. Our delusions may have led us to do something quite wonderful, or quite horrible, that permanently changed the options available to our descendants.

Legacy

Perhaps the most enduring memory of our explosively growing Dreamtime will be a legacy of adaptive behavior (with mostly harmless delusions) become strange and dreamy: Call it “un-adaptive behavior”.

A possible future

It remains to be seen whether adaptation will reassert itself. What would that imply, if one were to believe these conjectures about humanity and society during the 100 year interval ending in 1999? Adaptation ascendant would solidly connect human behavior to reality.  If this is to be the case, we should start seeing evidence of such as we traverse the twenty-first century.