Accessing web mail securely and ads free

When it comes to privacy i am a total freak. Some might reason that perhaps this is because i don't trust my Internet service provider( ISP) and they would be right. I really don't trust my ISP.
Many people are in the illusion that when they are using web mail they are secure and the traffic between their browser and the server is encrypted and the data is safe from prying eyes (I have actually talked to quite a few people who believe this). The data between your browser and the server is not encrypted in any sort of way. The login information might be encrypted in some form of another but never the data. The service in which complete encryption is provide is usually paid. Worried? Don't worry there is a way in which you can use your mail securely and whats more it is completely ads free.
Most popular email service providers yahoo and google (gmail) for example provide you ability to access to your email account using POP. This allows you to access your mail from an email client (outlook, thunderbird etc.) directly and unlike web mail the traffic between the client and the browser is completely encrypted and is very secure. To start using pop all you need is an email client. You can use outlook which comes bundled with every version of windows. Click here to know how to configure outlook to access yahoo and here to configure outlook for gmail. The more adventurous of you people might want to try thunderbird for accessing your email.

Related: How to tell when someone is reading your email | Add encryption to your webmail | Add encryption to messenger

How to tell when someone is reading your email

Sometimes it happens that you suspect that someone is reading your email and but you don't have any proof that someone is actually reading your email. You can verify this by following this simple three step procedure:-

Step 1:- Create free accounts at any email service of your choice and at sitemeter.

Step 2:- From the new email account compose an email to your email address.

Step 3:- In the email put the html tracking code you get from here.


Now whenever someone sees your email this will be tracked by sitemeter and you can easily verify that someone has read your mail or not.

Note:- If the person has turned of images then this trick will not work.

Add encryption to your webmail

Free email services are great. The only thing they lack is an encryption facility which is provided by default by any business level email service. Due to this the emails can be read by any middleman using a packet sniffer.

Now you can use FireGPG to encrypt your email messages. It is a firefox extension which adds support for encryption to email messages. For this it adds an entry to the context menu for easy accessibility and the encryption is done using GnuPG.

FireGPG

Currently only gmail is supported and support for other email service is being added.
Related: Encrypt your chat messages

Increase your privacy in firefox

Stealther is a firefox extension for those people who like me are very concerned about there privacy. It gives you the ability to disable any sort of browsing history or information maintained by the browser for a particular session and converts firefox into an ultimate stealth browser. It is different from other extension due to the fact that the information which was there before enabling stealther will remain there and is not deleted. Only the information for the particular session is deleted. Get it from here.

Now universal automatic face recognition courtsey polar rose

Polarrose is a swedish startup which promises to allow the user to identify a face from all the photographs distributed over the internet. This means that you would have to just give the photograph of the person you want to find and polarrose will give you all the photographs of the person, distributed all over the internet. Imagine what would happen when you give the photograph of your girlfriend and find her making out with your old class mate :D. This has already stirred a huge privacy debate when the The Harvard Law Review, a journal for legal scholarship, recently published a short piece on the privacy implications of such online photo-tagging. See the slashdot thread for more.

Still using YM, AOL or Gtalk? Think again

Before starting on what are the disadvantages of using these let me give you a brief intro on how the internet works. The internet is a group of small networks which are connected together into the internet. Whenever we send data the data passes through various routers (controlled by different organizations and individuals) to reach the destination.

INTERNET TOPOLOGY

The messengers we use don't provide any support for encryption. The initial login details used are encrypted to some extent but the rest of the data is not encrypted at all. People who have access to the routers can simply use a packet sniffer like wireshark to see the data. As an example let us see what appears in the sniffer after i have sent the string "How are you :)" on yahoo messenger.

PACKET SNIFFING

Clearly, a user who cares about his privacy would not like this kind of stuff to happen as this allows other people to steal the private data which users are careless enough to share on these messengers.

The alternative to this would be use third party encryption addons to these softwares like rocksyahoo , aim encryption . However, there are several problems with these approach. Two of the main problems are.

1. You would have to seperate a seperate plugin for each of the seperate messengers you use.
   
2. These types of plugins are not available for all the messengers (eg. gtalk).
   

The alternative would be to you use a simple, multi-protocol, multi-platform and very famous open source messenger known as Pidgin along with the encryption plugin. This extension adds a secure encrypted layer over all the protocols supported by pidgin. Thus a user can communicate with other people securely. There are various other benefits of using this messenger which a person comes to know after using it. You would also like to add the guification plugin which is a must have for it.

Notes:

1. You might have to enable the encryption plugin through the plugin menu. Click Tools -> Plugins -> Pidgin-encryption to do that.
   
2. Whenever chatting simply click the little lock on the upper right corner of the window to enable encryption.
   
3. If the other user doesn't have the plugin he will see the following message ” *** Encrypted :: Send Key”. You would have to disable encryption at that time.