Science and Technology : Web-based Email is NOT private!

[anAfrican]

This is why I have always rejected web-based email, such as is offered by gmail, hotmail, yahoomail, etc. Although, truthfully, email through a "regular" email provider (comcast, qwest, speakeasy, verizon) still sits on their servers until one downloads it, and can be "gotten at" while it is sitting there.

About the only way to ensure end-to-end "privacy" of one's email is to run a mail server on one's own puter and send email directly to the mail server running on one's intended recipient's computer. The first drawback to this is that most ISPs have a policy of disallowing one to run any types of servers on one's home computer. That's why I go ahead and pay almost $70 for my DSL connection. (Not that I have any servers set up yet; my puters are too slow and my upstream bandwidth would have WaynHome visitors surfing at modem speeds!)

From the article: The government needs a search warrant if it wants to read the U.S. mail that arrives at your home. But federal prosecutors say they don't need a search warrant to read your e-mail messages if those messages happen to be stored in someone else's computer.

That would include all of the Big Four e-mail providers -- Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Google -- that together hold e-mail accounts for 135 million Americans.

 

[Metaverse]

Thank you Brotha for this topic!!!

To expound more on this topic Brotha, I would say the entire Internet is not private. Based on the same information you already described, we are all just browsing networking systems that are not our own. To clarify that, there are indeed private intranets that one might be a part of, like something a company can setup for their employees. Setting up private servers are not as hard as I thought. But I’ve been playing “Enemy of the State” Brotha for sometime now, and I will say the internet as we know it may not be here for long. If not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

For now, too many White millionaires are being made overnite, so there is no sense in shutting it down. But the truth is allot of information is being distributed at a rate no one can keep up with. The US Gov’t and local state and police has a special budget and task force just for monitoring the internet. I’m not sure if I can say who is safe. I know they usually make the arrests they can benefit from.

So they will arrest the pedophile chatting with a 12 year old on myspace, or the 35 year old sending bomb making secrets to his pals- or even the occasional mp3 downloader. I try never to transmit anything online I wouldn’t recite again in a court of my peers.

But I liked the idea I heard from Brotha Wisdom2see at TalkBlackLiveRadio.com, he talks about this very topic all the time. First, we need our own internet anyway. Its possible, it sounds and looks hard at first- but its really not. And these Servers should all be solar powered.