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"Dropbox is holding a promotion for students in which you can gain 3GB of extra Dropbox space for two years, plus more depending on how many people in your school sign up. To sign up for Dropbox's "Great Space Race," all you need to do is head to the link below and type in a valid .EDU email address (which you probably have even if you aren't a student anymore). After you confirm it, you should see 3 extra GB of space in your account. If you get others at your school to sign up too, you'll get even more space, going all the way up to 25GB. So sign up, tell your friends, and invite them if you haven't already for bigger bonuses!"

"Security researchers warn that cybercriminals have started using Java exploits signed with digital certificates to trick users into allowing the malicious code to run inside browsers. A signed Java exploit was discovered Monday on a website belonging to the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany that was infected with a Web exploit toolkit called g01pack, security researcher Eric Romang said Tuesday in a blog post. "

A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity.  The document, part of a program called "Communities Against Terrorism", lists the use of "anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address" as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity.  The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using "software to hide encrypted data in digital photos" or other media.  In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone "overly concerned about privacy" or attempting to "shield the screen from view of others" should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities.

Under a new deal signed by the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto, the act of emailing a link will be classed as equivalent to photocopying, and each student and faculty member will cost the universities $27.50/year for this right that the law gives them for free, along with a collection of other blanket licenses of varying legitimacy. In order to enforce these licenses, all faculty email will be subject to surveillance.

"On Saturday, around 18 months after President Obama signed it into law, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act will take effect. Ostensibly, the act is designed to bring U.S. patent law in line with the rest of the world. Of course, not everybody feels it will help achieve the patent system's goal of protecting inventors while fostering innovation, and its effect could be even more pronounced on the DIY inventor."

Allison sez, "Michael Geist provides some commentary on yesterday's announcement by Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and Access Copyright. His conclusion: 'For those that sign the model license, the new AUCC - Access Copyright deal is simply more of the same: AUCC and its institutions pass along copyright costs to students, Access Copyright gets millions in revenues despite ongoing questions about its repertoire (with thousands used to lobby against education copyright reforms and most of the money going to foreign collectives and publishers, not authors), and the potential for digitally-oriented changes within Canadian higher education heading back to the back burner.'"

In a stunning move, on March 16, 2012, Barack Obama signed an Executive Order stating that the President and his specifically designated Secretaries now have the authority to commandeer all domestic U.S. resources including food and water. The EO also states that the President and his Secretaries have the authority to seize all transportation, energy, and infrastructure inside the United States as well as forcibly induct/draft American citizens into the military. The EO also contains a vague reference in regards to harnessing American citizens to fulfill "labor requirements" for the purposes of national defense.

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.