Thanks NSA for your great help. No, seriously!
Sometimes support comes in the most unexpected ways. Today the NSA, the super-secret spy agency that intercepts countless digital communications worldwide, greatly helped me, by providing evidence that a little project of mine is a really great idea that is sorely needed NOW.
Thanks NSA. I mean it. And the reason is that (full story here):
the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.
During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.
See what I mean? I really couldn’t have made up better stuff than this to prove that my proposal for a personal alternative to Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Facebook & C is a good idea that is needed now. That kind of large scale, automatic address harvesting would be impossible if those people used individual perclouds to read and write email, chat and so on. In order to achieve the same effect NSA, or everybody else, would have to visit and crack millions of individual small servers instead of telling a handful of private (mostly USA-based) private companies “hand over those address books, or else…”
The percloud is made to order to fight this kind of problems. Above all, it is much more focused, that is feasible in shorter times, than other valuable, but much more ambitious projects in the same space (to know more, check the percloud FAQ and/or my previous percloud posts. NSA was so kind to show you of one of the real world problems that the percloud could solve soon. This, however, will only happen if you support it soon. Any Euro is valuable. Your call now.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
To this end, I have already shared more than a million words on this blog, without any paywall or user tracking, and am sharing the next million through a newsletter, also without any paywall.
The more direct support I get, the more I can continue to inform for free parents, teachers, decision makers, and everybody else who should know more stuff like this. You can support me with paid subscriptions to my newsletter, donations via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.THANKS for your support!