Imagine being called into questioning for sites you browsed twenty years ago. Imagine being asked about online statements you made years ago. Imagine not being able to access a computer and speak your mind for fear of being held accountable by some secret gulag.

Now wake up, and realize the United States government doesn’t want you to be able to say anything securely anymore. They want to ban every last piece of software that protects personal privacy, and begin secret spying immediately.

Eliminate Encryption, Eliminate Privacy

The New York Times is now reporting a drive by the FBI to make all encrypted products created within the USA have back doors. These loopholes would allow Federal Agents to peek behind any encrypted message, and read what message is being sent.

The real criminals can afford to use strong encryption. The people who would be exposed are the common citizens.

We currently offer all three types of Open Source encryption targeted by the FBI for locking within the DemocraKey. Our initial goal was to create a portable software layer for freedom of thought an information. It seems government leaders don’t want free and anonymous access to information. Which I had assumed was crucial to a Democratic Society, or even a Representative Republic such as we have here.

Regardless of semantics, these idiots are pushing for access to all information, and the complete elimination of privacy. Of course, we’re not guaranteed any rights to privacy online by the Constitution, but I’m convinced privacy online would fall under papers secure from unreasonable search.

The problem here is, in the digital world, there’s no way to tell when our privacy has been violated. The best we can do is encrypt our documents and make it more difficult to invade our privacy. Taking away encryption leaves us all completely open to unreasonable searches of our every online move. Incredible.

But the concept is difficult to grasp at first. We are all being fed a bunch of lies to sell the idea of security. The biggest of which is that encryption protects criminals.

Criminals Don’t Use Encryption

From Wired:

Moreover, cases of encryption tripping up law enforcement are extremely rare, according the government’s own records. In 2009, for instance, the government got court approval for 2,376 wiretaps and encountered encryption only once—and was able to get the contents of the communication. Statistics for other years show no problems whatsoever for the government.

So who’s really being targeted here? We can’t help but believe that the common citizenry is being targeted here; because what government wouldn’t love instant access to all your personal data? And the data suggests that criminals aren’t the real reason.

Fighting Back

If you haven’t yet done so, I encourage you to let everyone know about this critical issue. We literally have an attempt on our personal privacy at the highest levels. The government has already admitted to snooping unencrypted internet traffic, and once a back door has been implemented, all “secured” traffic would do the same. We would, in effect, be exposed to permanent wiretaps while online. Our every action online would be traceable for our entire lives. Things we said or saw twenty years ago could be held against us years from now. Things really are that serious.

I encourage everyone to download encryption software now. The pieces of software specifically targeted by the government were TOR, PGP, and OTR. All three of these pieces of endangered software are available within every DemocraKey. If you have the money, I encourage you to invest in a personal privacy suite before it becomes illegal.

In selling the DemocraKey, I’ve often debated whether or not I should include hardware based encryption. Basically, hardware encryption means that your encrypted data is inaccessible via software. Instead, the drive itself encrypts and decrypts all your files. In theory, it sounds like it’d be an ideal situation. Rather than relying on your software to work correctly, you simply let the hardware encrypt your files.

And I would have the DemocraKey run on AES-256 hardware encryption, if it actually worked in practice.

See, a lot of companies have been making claims about the security of their hardware encryption, but it’s been beaten publicly, badly.

Take the Supertalent Luxio.

For all intents and purposes, it has hardware encryption (good), and it automatically locks people out of the usb key if they try a different password too many times. (Also good).

However, in practice, the USB drive is less secure than a purely software solution would be. In fact, because the hardware is mis configured in this case, we can access encrypted data, and lock the end user out of his own key!

There are no silver bullets.

Even though I’d love to make the DemocraKey a 100% hardware based encryption system, I’ve yet to see a working implementation of hardware encryption. They’ve all been flawed. And that’s one of the problems with security, especially on computers. Nothing ever works the way you’d expect it to.

So for now, the DemocraKey stays as a software only solution. You buy a key, and you get the software installed via a trusted party, on a fast usb drive. Or, you download the software and do so yourself. Either way, hardware encryption isn’t buying you much, except for a higher price.

Quick guess, how many human senses are there?

If you said 5, you’d be wrong. There are at least five, of course, that we traditionally know as sight, smell, sound, touch, taste. But in addition to these traditional five, there are also the lesser known ones, with great potential for future output / input devices for computers. Intrigued?

Balance and Acceleration

Thanks to the vestibular system, we can tell when we are off balance. We can also tell which way is up, and which way is doing. In computer terms, this is our human accelerometer.

This tells us which way we’re moving, and lets us feel the force and direction of acceleration.

The vestibular system is already being incorporated into computer machines. Think of
The Back to the Future Ride. This ride incorporates vestibular stimulation by moving the ride forwards and backwards. This increases the reality of the experience, and makes it feel as though we are flying.

Thermoception

This is how we can tell if something is hot, or cold. Future devices could incorporate a way of telling the status of the computer based upon a heat map.

Get an email? Rather than seeing a new icon pop up on your computer, why not have a blast of warm air through your keyboard? It wouldn’t add any new information to the limited bandwidth available through your screen. And yet it would provide you instant feedback.

Is your computer using a lot of CPU resources? How about networking resources? Why not have a heat map to instantly tell which pieces of hardware are under what type of load?

Kinesthetic Sense

Close your eyes and clap your hands. Kinesthetic sense lets you know where your body parts are, relative to one another.

What’s incredible about this sense is that by manipulating it, we can change how big or small your physically feel! Imagine being able to grow to the size of a planet in a simulation, or the size of a whale! This experience will be possible with the manipulation of our kinesthetic senses.

In fact, there’s a neat experiment you can do to play with your Kinesthetic sense. It’s called the Pinocchio Illusion.

Pain

Believe it or not, pain is distinctly different from the feelings of touch. In fact, there are even at least 3 different types of physical pain. They occur on the skin, in the joints and bones, and in the body organs.

So what sort of a twisted machine would manipulate pain as a way of communicating with a human?

Why not have a device for battle, to manipulate feelings of pain without the side effects of death? The military could use pain and kinesthetic sense to transform people into the machines which they inhabit. A scary thought maybe, but a potentially real and important application.

Direction

We sense the magnetic field of the planet. We can tell our direction based upon this very subtle field. This blows my mind, and of course, it has one very specific use case to our future devices.

In space travel, even though most humans wouldn’t be in charge of navigation, having a sense of direction may be beneficial. Of course, that’s just guessing, but I think it could be a potential application.

Honestly, I think this is one sense we especially dull down in our urban/suburban lifestyles. We don’t normally rely on a sense of direction in our every day functions, the same way someone in the forest would.