New MicroSister-Beta (Windows) available

Brenno de Winter — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:22:01 +0000

It’s a good day for the MicroSister-project with the introduction of a new, nearly done Beta. It has a nicer overview of messages and plenty of bugs solved. Many of them have been brought to our attention by testers. Thank you for that! As usual you can find the software in the download-section.

A Windows-client available (beta-1)!

admin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:16:47 +0000

After hard work a Windows-version of Small Sister is available. The client is called MicroSister and uses the .NET-platform. It has been conceived by Sven Hagemann. With this version you don’t have to have your own server, but we have a server setup for you. However if you want to run your own server the source is available (designed for the Linux-platform). All software is available in the download-section of our website.

We have done quite a bit of testing and trialling, however there is no test-forum like a public beta. Have fun you people! We are looking for feedback, documentation and still a Mac-version.

SmallSister bij Tros Radio Online (similar to Dutch NPR)

admin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:29:17 +0000

Op 31 januari 2009 was ik te gast bij Tros Radio Online om te praten over Small Sister. Hier is het audio-interview.

SmallSister in Internet Vandaag (Dutch)

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:12:43 +0000

ICT Journalist Herbert Blankestein heeft op 29 december 2008 in zijn dagelijkse column Internet Vandaag op BNR Nieuwsradio aandacht besteed aan het Small Sister Project. De column is in deze podcast terug te luisteren.

VCard for testing purposes

Brenno de Winter — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 10:49:11 +0000

It can be hard to get started with Small Sister, because you don’t have any contacts to test the tool with. Let us help you on that by giving you a VCard to send some testmail to. Here is my (Brenno de Winter’s) VCard for one of my accounts:

—–Begin SmallMail vCard—–
User: 26519024633BDC87
Server: cemwana5zuid4oq5.onion
—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
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=jF1t
—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
—–End SmallMail vCard—–

No more sneaker-mail, VCards are here

Brenno de Winter — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:37:36 +0000

For those of you that have been testing SmallMail it must have been hard to exchange your creditials with your communication-partners. Exporting a gnupg-key adding details of your account is quite cumbersome and basically had to be done by sneaker-mail (handing the information in person). But that is no longer the case: We have a new version of the Small Sister Client available (version 0.2.1) that adds one new feature: vcards. This means that you can export your information and send it to whom you want to be in touch with or place it on a website (handy for journalist that need to be reachable for sources). Users can import the cards and send e-mail right away.

This is a relatively small feature with big impact, because now you can be in touch with people in a secure manner and the application is becoming less and less cumbersome. So go out test and help us make this application ready for a huge crowd.

Merry Chistmas! Small Sister is here!

admin — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 11:02:51 +0000

Today marks the birth of our Small Sister application SmallMail, a mail system that delivers a lot of privacy to users. The software is now officially in beta. After some hard work Santa is dropping a system that hides the servers in the Tor-network, makes a mailbox anonymous and more over delivers encryption every step of the way the message floats.

We have played with the software for some time and now it’s your turn. Have fun with it and download it. Discover bugs, bring in new ideas, help us to port it to Mac OS X or Windows, build package for Linux, add code, bring documentation. Have fun with it. Join our mailinglist. Heck there is even some documentation.

This release does still require some technical knowledge to get the show on the road, but our aim is to deliver a tool that is very user-friendly and ready for use by a very wide audience.

You can setup your own server and work with friends or use our server for free (just configure cemwana5zuid4oq5.onion as the server in your application). We give you this option, but do not guarantee anything. But it might be helpful to get started.

Merry christmas to ya’all!

Episode #1: Crypting a full Windows computer with TrueCrypt

admin — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:18:18 +0000

Time and time again we hear stories of laptops with sensitive data being stolen or people going to other people’s computers without permission. Fortunately there is a simpel solution to prevent data from leaking out like this. TrueCrypt, an open source package, offers the option of encrypting an entire Windows-computer. It does take sometime to set it up, but it isn’t all that hard. In this episode I show you how to do this with just a few clicks of the mouse and a couple of reboots. It’s so simpel that you should ask yourself, why you haven’t done this yet. Well: Go for it!

Introduction to the project

admin — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:59:37 +0000

On April 14th 2008 a mailinglist was started with an announcement for the Small Sister Project. The first e-mail explains why the project is needed, the relevance and what we try to achieve. And our goals. We are not about the activism, we are about protecting our own data. A group for citizens that needs the protection for business or personal reasons and try to be law abiding. From that perspective we try to build valuable tools and create sensible documentation. Also people in the law enforcement community help out, because they need good solutions too and they are not immune to the same threats citizens face. We take a logic approach to secure communication and data. You can read the exlaination furhter in the rest of this article.

Anecdote

Today I flew back home from the US through London. On the flight from Heathrow to Amsterdam something remarkable happened: A little girl (I guess 4 years of age) went to the toilet and when she came out the pilot was standing there. The door to the cockpit was open. When she came out the pilot invited her in to have a look. Ten years ago this would not get any reaction from anybody, but when I saw this I felt so happy: Common sense is back! A captain that realizes that people should be able to trust a small kid to a certain extend. I did make sure I told the crew and they felt the very same about it. For me this underlines the fundamental point that we are dealing with: we live in a society that has become distrusting of anything and anybody with ourselves as the main victim.

Reasons for the project

In today’s world we don’t trust anybody and we go to extreme’s to violate the privacy of everybody to get …. a sense of security? Currently there are some urgent matters that need our attention:

Europe is implementing a new directive that enforces EU-nations to create law that stores traffic information on communication we 500+ million Europeans have. So for a period of minimal 6 months we store who’s calling who (or who’s attemting too), who’s e-mailing who, who was online and where, who has what IP-address of phonenumber. This is what we call data retention. This is a big deal since whistle blowers and journalist have to go to great length in order to do their work without the government watching them all the time;
In a similar move the Dutch government (through transportation companies) is introducing a transportation card that fascilitates all public transportation. For fiscal reasons this data is stored for seven years. Unfortunately this has a side effect, since we are building a database with each movement of humans in our country. We know what bus they took, where they entered and where they went off. Current laws can make this information available to police and soon also to secret services. A similar system is being build for cars so that we can tax them by the mile.

The project

For the data retention there is a lot one can do to circumvent and thus obsolete the regulations. Of course without breaking the law. There are a lot of tools that enable us to obtain more privacy. The project aims to bundle those solutions and make them as broadly accessible as possible to people as we possibly can.

We aim at two things:
1. Make tools available and as simple as possible;
2. Do knowledge transfer: a lot of people are in the dark on what happens with data retention and travelling. So we need to tell the story to the world. I have arranged a lot of action already behind the scenes so that we will hit news when that is a good moment. I have good hopes to arrange that very effectively, but we still need to tell a story. So let’s build that. Second anecdote: When I took the train home I ended up with this guy. We started talking about the chipcard for transportation. When I explained what was happening on the administrative side he was visibly shocked and he told me he didn’t know. I guess that goes for many people. Information is key.

I would like to make a couple of suggestions on how we build the project:
1. We use the wisdom of the crowd. Everybody has knowledge let’s bundle that;
2. We play legal. We’re not doing anything sneaky or wrong, but we fight for our civil rights that we need;
3. We act as the KLM-pilot: Use our senses and stop accepting fear as our key driver. We’re not helping terrorist (they have their toolsets already), we’re helping the people that want secure, reliable communications and privacy;
4. We’re an open group that works together on the same vision. Everybody can help, everybody can benefit. So bring on everybody that shares our worries.