In this and two following articles I'd like to take a look at three different areas of personal data storage, how I see a majority of people handling these three issues and what my personal theoretical approaches regarding them is. This is going to be purely about data storage and security, not transport security, which is another topic on its own.

The questions mainly are:

• Where am I supposed to store my private data?
• Is my data secure?
• Who can access my data?
• Is security based on trust or actual scientific security (encryption)?

First of all, the three distinctions of data storage I'd like to make, and also how I'm splitting the articles, are the following:

• Email storage
• Preference storage (application preferences, browser syncing, phone syncing etc.)
• Personal data storage (photos, videos, documents, contacts, calendar, etc.)

Let's start with email storage. Where are your emails stored? The vast majority of Internet users have an email account with one of the big free email providers or they might have an account that is provided by their Internet Service Provider (ISP). Maybe you even use some shared web hosting somewhere which comes with shared email servers. Whichever of these is the case: your emails are effectively stored with a third party, an ISP that is not you.

Let me ask you this: where is your mail stored? And by mail I actually refer to physical mail: letters. Where are they received? Surely you have a mailbox at your home, or you might have a post-office (PO) box. Most likely you'll be receiving your mail at your mailbox in front of your house and then store it safely inside your home. Would you want your letters to be sent to a third-party that is sending you a copy but also storing all your letters within their own house? Probably not.

I believe we have a major misunderstanding how we are treating Email currently. We are giving away our email data to big companies that make a living with it (among with other services). Always keep in mind that you're most likely not the customer when using a free service, you might be the actual product. If events in the last years regarding the NSA and Edward Snowden have shown us anything, it's that our data stored at big ISPs is most likely easily accessible by governments.

Instead of using such a centralized infrastructure, we should be decentralizing Email in the same way our usual mail system works. When you go back looking at the development of email, it actually was meant to be exactly like that.

My suggestion for email therefore is this:

• Get your own domain name to use for your email address. Be aware that public email providers like gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc. are the ones in charge of their domain names and can cancel them or your email address at any time. You should be the one in charge of your own domain name.
• Run your own email server at home. While this might sound difficult, a lot of services and communities try to make this as easy as possible. Some examples would be iRedMail, Mail-in-a-Box, Synology Email Server and YunoHost. In case you've heard about or own a Raspberry Pi, there are two major projects making self-hosted services, including Email, on a Raspberry Pi as easy as possible: arkOS and FreedomBox.
• Use a third-party email server only as a backup mail server. In case your Internet connection at home drops and your mail server is unreachable, configure a third-party email server as a backup, so your emails will be delivered regardless. In a best case scenario, you can set up a friend's home email server as your backup server and vice versa.
• Use end-to-end encryption such as GPG to protect your emails even if someone else is able to access them.

This just a very brief overview of why I suggest hosting your own email server. There are lots of other things to consider and running an email server is by no means an easy task, I understand that.

As a concluding suggestion, I'd like to introduce the website PRISM Break which lists free and open alternatives for all kinds of proprietary and closed solutions. Specifically for mail servers: PRISM Break Mail Servers

In my next article I'll be taking a look at preference storage, where to save application preferences, what to do with browser syncing and phone syncing.

Article NSA parody logo cc by EFF. Article title in reference to "All your base are belong to us".

You might have heard about the legal case going on and on with The Pirate Bay for years already. Basically the music industry and other retarded cokeheads of the likes claim that the services The Pirate Bay are offering are illegal.

What exactly is The Pirate Bay offering?

They once actually served as a BitTorrent tracker, search engine and indexing service. They got rid of the BitTorrent tracker sooner or later because they got aware of the retarded people living on this planet deeming it illegal. So what are they left with? A search engine and indexing service. Sounds familiar. Something like Google, Yahoo and Bing? Pretty much, yes, except only for the BitTorrent network. How is that illegal you ask? Well, beats me. But apparently even judges agree.

In case you are wondering how the classical BitTorrent network operates, here's a quick outline:

• BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer network for data transfers (files like music, videos, pictures, etc.)
• If you want to download a certain file, you download a *.torrent file that contains hashes of pieces of the actual file you want. A hash essentially is nothing but a calculated number from that piece of a file, to verify its integrity and to find the file. Keep in mind that you can not recreate the file from these hashes.
• The *.torrent file also contains a list of so called BitTorrent trackers, which are servers you will connect to, essentially ask them "Who has this file?" but also tell them whether you have a file to offer. They enable a communication between the peers, so the peers can find each other and initiate a transfer between themselves.

Okay, now let's assume we have a file that is shared and it contains by law content that is not allowed to be freely shared (like for example a ripped music album). Whoever puts this file up has to create the *.torrent file for it. So that person calculates hashes from the files, adds a BitTorrent tracker to the file and done.

This *.torrent file, containing nothing but legal metadata, will be put up on a site now, for example on The Pirate Bay. So The Pirate Bay offers this *.torrent file, with a description of the files it supposedly contains metadata for and people are free to download this *.torrent file. This is not illegal. Anybody who claims it is, is a retard and did not understand how this system works.

If anybody downloads this *.torrent file of said music album now and adds it to their BitTorrent client, the BitTorrent client will contact the specified BitTorrent trackers and they will reply a list of people who currently want or offer the file. Now, depending on the country you are residing in but also depending on your moral values, none, one or both of these actions can be considered illegal:

• Downloading the actual files from a peer (getting the music album)
• Uploading the actual files to a peer (sharing/giving the music album)

What did The Pirate Bay do in all this? Effectively the following:

• Telling you about the file: Music album
• Offering hashes for said file (Remember: calculated numbers, not possible to recreate the file from)
• Telling you which BitTorrent tracker to ask about peers
• If specified as a BitTorrent tracker itself: telling you which peers are getting and sharing the file (This is now obsolete as The Pirate Bay no longer operates a BitTorrent tracker themselves)

All of that is considered metadata. None of that is illegal.

Still, on April 17th, 2009 the operators of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of "assistance to copyright infringement" in Sweden and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (roughly 4.4 million USD (as of writing of this article)).

This didn't stop The Pirate Bay from operating however. It still operates as of today and the music industry is still trying really hard to get them down. Since by now they realized they can't take them down from the very source instead they try censoring access to The Pirate Bay.

So far access to The Pirate Bay has been "blocked" in: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, the People's Republic of China and the United Kingdom. Several other countries had temporary blockades or legal cases about blocking the site. More are probably to come.

The quality from these blockades usually reach from mostly simple Domain Name System (DNS) blockades to Internet Protocol (IP) blockades. Both of them are very easy to go around and people wanting to access The Pirate Bay as well as The Pirate Bay themselves offer tons of ways to go around them. In the end all these blockades cause is free advertising for The Pirate Bay and BitTorrent plus getting people aware what kind of MAFIAA is operating within our governments and courts resulting in membership boosts for the Pirate Party.

One of the worst organizations, trying the hardest to block The Pirate Bay is BREIN (Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland) in the Netherlands. They don't even stop at just blocking The Pirate Bay by forcing the country's Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to apply a blockade but instead they also want to stop every proxy that is being set up to go around said blockades.

But they even go further. After successfully getting court orders to force closure of a proxy provided by the Dutch Pirate Party as well as a proxy provided by Greenhost they even demand a gag on the Dutch Pirate Party to stop operating any kind of proxy service as well as stop explanation on how to use them or set them up.

Yes. The censorship is getting worse and worse. Stop discussing. Stop offering proxy services. The question how long before VPNs and proxy services become illegal is very valid.

BREIN, you can not win this. Stop fighting.

For every IP address that gets blocked The Pirate Bay will have a new one ready within minutes.

This is a futile game, already lost by BREIN. But since they apparently don't have a BRAIN, they don't see it. As long as there is one person on the Internet who does not agree, content can not be censored. And such people will fortunately always exist.

With that said, have a link to a list of The Pirate Bay proxies, generously provided by Pirate Reverse: http://about.piratereverse.info/proxy/list.html

And also a guide on how you can help and set up your own Pirate Bay proxy: http://about.piratereverse.info/proxy/index.html