So two weeks ago, I applied to join the German [[Piratenpartei]] (Pirate Party).

This political party, whose inspirational origin lies in the Swedish Piratpartiet, has been around for just over three years now and has declared its goals as the safeguarding of civil rights on the internet, the transparency and technical competency of the government, the reform of patent and copyright law and the furthering of free education.

Had another laymen discussion with my dad today (laymen since he's a statistical physicist and I'm a hacker, so neither of us are experts on information theory) and became even more convinced that Twitter could only truly unfold its potential as a political censorship-buster if it worked in a decentralized fashion, as I described some weeks ago.

Here's a bit of a brainstorm, listing several points.

This is a bit of speculative brainstorming. A lot of this must have been thought of before, and when I have time I will research to see what papers have been written about it.

I've toiled on a few more features for the Proxy DB module (described in the past few posts).

Changes include:

After my last post on testing proxy servers, I spent the past 10 or so hours on what inevitably happens whenever I develop even the simplest web application: A Drupal module.

This is a simple tool to check a list of proxy servers for uptime. The scripts are available in zipped form (proxydb.tar.gz). You can also check out the SVN repository:

Quoting from the README file: