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The Tor Project is considering paying operators to host exit relays in efforts to increase the speed and security of its global anonymity network. Under early consideration is a suggestion by Tor founder Rodger Dingledine that operators receive $100 a month to cover bandwidth costs. The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) has already donated an undisclosed amount of funds over 12 months to provide for at least 125 fast exit relays which would provide extra capacity for Tor users.

The aim of the Askemos project is to enable reliable and justiciable data processing, with the goal of producing "Software that can last 200 years." The first implementations of an Askemos peer can be obtained from ball.askemos.org. The Askemos web site itself is served from the Askemos/BALL development network. Follow here for more details. Note that Askemos concerns the abstract specification exclusively; including data formats, protocols, service interfaces etc. - not the actual implementations. Askemos combines incorruptible privilege delegation and non-repudiable replication of communicating processes into a trustworthy network. Physical machines under control of their operators execute applications processes under permanent multilateral audit. The network's honest majority of hosts provides users with exclusive control, and thus real ownership of processes. Askemos models a kind of "virtual constitutional state" where physical hosts bear witness to the interactions of virtual agents (akin to citizens). Self verifying identifiers can confirm that original documents have not beentampered with. The real potential for using Askemos is for identity and time stamp services, informationmanagement in public administration and libraries attaching metadata and archives, with the goal of establishing robust systems that can endure for centuries. German tax law, for instance, has storage requirements, which makes Askemos interesting even for private, individual use. Also Activist groups, non-profits and people who desire privacy and reliability in a chaotic and unpredictable world have much to gain from this software.

Let's say you have two hosts, somewhere out on the Internet: Maybe dedicated servers, maybe Amazon EC2 or Rackspace instances, maybe a mix of the above. Now assume it's your job to provide secure, encrypted connectivity between two services running on those hosts. If those services do not use an encrypted protocol by themselves - such as non-SSL capable SMTP mail servers - then the standard answer has always been: "Use stunnel or OpenVPN!". While both of those are good, cross-platform solutions which can forward unsecure traffic over an encrypted tunnel, I believe that they come not only with administrative overhead, but also introduce a significant performance hit. I believe that there are now solutions that are easier to use, more flexible and most importantly, deliver much better performance. In this article, I will compare stunnel performance  characteristics with vCider's virtual private network solution (sign up for use with up to 8 nodes is free). You will see that vCider not only offers more flexibility and is easier to use, but also provides significantly better network performance and reduced CPU load. For my test, I have created two Ubuntu instances on Rackspace. Please note that both stunnel as well as vCider can work across network and cloud provider boundaries.

Last Thursday, tech website Xconomy hosted a forum on "The Future of Robotics in Silicon Valley and Beyond." We were there, of course, and so were a lot of other famous robotics people, including Aaron Edsinger of Meka Robotics, who had an announcement to make: an entirely new company called Redwood Robotics, a joint venture between Meka Robotics, Willow Garage, and SRI International.

If you pay for web hosting in order to run any kind of web-based application-from your WordPress blog to a nameplate site to a file-sharing service to a social media data archive-you need to back up your web server's data the same way you back up your computer's data. On database-driven web sites, there are two kinds of data you want to preserve and restore in case of disaster: the files that make up your site (the PHP/Perl/Python, JavaScript, CSS files, etc), and the contents of your database. Further, any good backup system should make both a local copy and a remote copy of the backed-up data.

Hey Great Lakes THATCampers! We're just under a month away from what promises to be a very exciting unconference. We've got a full day of workshops on Friday (be sure to email us at glthatcamp2012 [at] gmail [dot] com with your workshop choices if you haven't done so already!), topped off with a meet-and-greet hosted at London's own UnLab on the Friday evening. Saturday will be a day of sessions, and it is truly a day that is up to you, the CAMPERS, to make your own. In order to get you started, we've put together a list of a few of the session ideas you have suggested in your applications. Now that you are all registered as contributors, you are able to post about what you'd like to see happen on the 21st and 22nd. The more talk there is about the sessions prior to Great Lakes THATCamp, the faster we can get going on the Saturday morning, so please join in and help us out!

The Economist is hosting a debate between Bruce Schneier and former TSA honcho Kip Hawley, on the proposition "This house believes that changes made to airport security since 9/11 have done more harm than good." I'm admittedly biased for Bruce's position (he's for the proposition), but it seems to me that no matter what your bias, Schneier totally crushed Hawley in the opening volley. The first commenter on the debate called Hawley's argument "post hoc reasoning at its most egregious," which sums it all up neatly.

Reproducibility is a key part of science, even though almost nobody does the same experiment twice. A lab will generally repeat an experiment several times and look for results before they get published. But, once that paper is published, people tend to look for reproducibility in other ways, testing the consequences of a finding, extending it to new contexts or different populations. Almost nobody goes back and repeats something that's already been published, though. But maybe they should. At least that's the thinking behind a new effort called the Reproducibility Initiative, a project hosted by the Science Exchange and supported by Nature, PLoS, and the Rockefeller University Press.

"The world is anxiously awaiting Cotton Candy's release," said Borgar Ljosland, CEO and founder of FXI. "We've had interest in the any screen computer for everything from portable set top box gaming and entertainment to mobile any screen computing, in addition to a host of specialized medical, automotive and other applications. The size, raw horsepower and combined HDMI, USB and MicroUSB connectivity bring unprecedented flexibility to the portable market.

In the past few years, digital technologies have revolutionized everything from the way we work to the way we educate, inform and entertain ourselves. In fact, millions of engaged citizens are using the Web to connect and collaborate around shared concerns and opportunities in their communities and in international forums and institutions. Now, as Canada readies itself to host the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT2012) in Montreal this October, we have a unique opportunity to mobilize large numbers of connected citizens to participate in a global, online conversation designed to elicit new ideas and innovations that could help address some of the world's most urgent challenges.