About houseforge:In this series I recommend tools that meet certain criteria: they have to be free of charge, useful or fun, and they have to work at least on both linux and windows.
Suggestions are welcome
Oh well we are halfway into the month of December already and I couldn't decide on something specific yet. So let's weaken our criteria a little an decide to recommend not a specific tool but a specific
kind of tool: tools that can help to protect your privacy. However, this will not be a full-fledged privacy protection thing, I will suggest a few things to get started, and to make you think about protecting your privacy.
Here goes...
The houseforge recommendation for December 2007! ShortDo everything you can to protect your privacy, starting with your electronic communications! Encrypt your email, encrypt your instant messages and IRC chats. It is possible with the help of:
LongerLet's look at two popular means of modern electronic communication:
email and
chat.
email
Because email uses a let's say clear text protocol, anyone between you and the recipient of your email can read it without any problems. With a so called packet sniffer one can see the complete email, header, subject, and body, as it "goes over the wire". If you send confidential or sensitive information, or even if you don't want everybody to read your email, you need to encrypt them. There are various encryption algorithm of various strength.
For encrypting email,
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and it's open source equivalent
GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) have become popular; partially because their encryption is very strong and because they are compatible: PGP encrypted email can be decrypted with GnuPG and vice versa. This scheme is
called public-key cryptography and is explained at Wikipedia.
There are plugins for various email programs, for example
enigmail (which uses gnupg) for
mozilla thunderbird. What a coincidence, these are both available for many platforms
I can't go into detail about setting these up now, because I want to finish this article
IRC
OK, after you know you should encrypt you email communication and how to do it, we go to instant messages and the likes. The matter is equally complicated because of the many clients for each protocol and because there are several (sometimes incompatible) encryption schemes. Let's pick a few and bear the wrath of the users whose clients we neglect now. For
IRC xchat and
mirc seem popular.
instant messaging
Of course here
I recommend pidgin! There is an OTR-plugin available, which works very well. Another choice is
Miranda IM, which is particularly attractive because its
security and privacy addons include OTR and GnuPG.
For these clients we have
mouser's mircryption and
http://fish.sekure.us/FiSH. IIRC, they are even compatible and use a quite strong encryption scheme. Messages are encrypted before sending, and are decrypted before displaying them to the user. So, again, the evil MIM (man in the middle) cannot peep in to find out what you are talking about. From my point of view, installation and use is pretty easy: load the plugin, set a masterkey, exchange a key with your peer, and start cyb3rsex0ring.
Wrapping it upfitting the criteria
This has been a rather vague recommendation, but I think it fits our houseforge criteria: The tools are (mostly) free and (mostly) cross-platform.
GnuPG works on several platforms, so does
http://mozilla thunderbird, and therefore
http://enigmail.
http://XChat is cross-platform too, as are
http://mircryption and
http://fish (both work with
http://mirc AND
http://xchat!).
obstacles
There obviously is no point in
encrypting when your peers
can't decrypt. This is one obstacle you have to overcome: get them to use encryption too!
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Go ahead please and ask questions or voice your concerns! 
, housework & home improvement, or playing hackysack.