Press: Alternative Resources: Browsers - Search Engines - E-Mail Servers - News: Print, Radio and TV Services - by RM

There are other alternatives if you are you concerned about getting one-sided or doctored news from corporate owned or state controlled censored publications, radio and TV stations  ---- or that you are using search engines and e-mail services where you  really don't know what happens to your private and personal information.

Following below is a listing of alternative on-line services which provide you with more freedom of choice and where your personal data and privacy rights are presently not compromised.   

E-Mail Services
NEOMAILBOX
ECLIPSO

Search Engines 
Ixquick 

Browsers
Open source Tor Project

Alternative (unadulterated) News - Print, Radio, and TV

Aljazeera  (also in languages other than English)
BBC         (also in languages  other than English)
Deutsche Welle
EuroNews (also in languages other than English)
France24   (also in languages other than English)
LinkTV

Most of the above mentioned resources can also be downloaded as an APP for your smart-phone or computer.

In some countries where there is censorship some of these services won't work. In that case it is recommended to try using the Tor Browser to connect with them.

EU-Digest

Dutch Search Engine Company benefits from European outrage over secret US Surveillance Program

StartPage and Ixquick, two small search engines from the same Dutch company, announced recently that they surpassed three million daily searches for the first time. More specifically, they hit 3.4 million direct searches on Wednesday (June 12).

Ixquick.com is the company’s meta search engine that doesn’t include Google search results; the company launched StartPage.com in 2009 to provide Google search results with the increased privacy that Ixquick offers.

Surfboard Holding B.V. was the first company to be successfully certified in 2008 with the European Privacy Seal Certificate for their meta-search engines Ixquick and  Startpage

 CEO Robert Beens credits this week’s surge in traffic to consumers looking for a more private search experience in light of the PRISM-related revelations of the past week.

“People are outraged over secret US surveillance programs and they’re looking for safe, effective search alternatives,” Beens says in the company’s announcement. “We’re excited at this growth and we welcome our newest users with open arms.”

StartPage and Ixquick call themselves "the world's most private search engines" due to powerful features that protect user privacy. StartPage lets users access Google results in total privacy, and Ixquick provides private search results that do not include Google results.

The company has never taken part in any government data collection program, including PRISM, and has never turned over user data to any government entity anywhere on earth. With its headquarters in the Netherlands, the company is not directly subject to US jurisdiction, nor does it participate in US government surveillance or data collection programs.

To further protect their users, StartPage and Ixquick offer the following privacy features:

• No IP address recorded

No record made of user searches

No tracking cookies used

Encrypted connections (HTTPS) to prevent eavesdropping

14-year company track record

Third-party certified

Free, easy-to-use proxy available with every search

To complement its search products, the company will be introducing StartMail, a private, subscription-based email platform with strong encryption, later this year. Anyone interested in beta testing the program upon its release can sign up at www.Startmail.com.

EU-Digest

Internet -The Power of Google: Psychologist Finds Google Could Sway an Election with Search Manipulation

Research psychologist Richard Epstein has made a provocative and stunning discovery through a series of experiments manipulating search results: Google could sway an election without much notice.

According to stories in The Washington Post and PBS, Epstein’s hypothetical Kadoodle search engine found candidates fared far better when favorable links were promoted and unfavorable ones were demoted. Epstein’s core finding was that a dominant search engine, which is Google, could sway a close election. He told the Post:

“They have a tool far more powerful than an endorsement or a donation to affect the outcome,” Epstein said. “You have a tool for shaping government. . . . It’s a huge effect that’s basically undetectable.”

To PBS he added, “We’ve discovered that search engine rankings can be manipulated in ways that dramatically change voter preferences.”

For some time, FairSearch has been pointing out the very real perils of Google’s search manipulation practices, which harm Internet entrepreneurs every day. In January, the Federal Trade Commission took a pass on Google’s anti-competitive search bias practice though then FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz pointed out that “some evidence suggested that Google was trying to eliminate competition” in its search practices.

The European Commission has identified this practice, among others, as a potential abuse of Google’s dominance in Internet search and search advertising, and is talking with Google about its willingness to end this practice. Europe’s top antitrust regulator, Joaquín Almunia, has set his sights on fixing Google’s anti-competitive search bias. “My conviction is [Google] are diverting traffic,” he told the Financial Times in January 2013.

The most recent example of Google’s search bias is the sudden demotion or disappearance in Google search results of direct links to apps on Apple’s iOS platform.

So while Google could hypothetically steer a close election, in reality the search giant has no issue diverting search queries such as “Kindle iPad” to its own services. In other words, the threat to our political process is very real, yet theoretical, while manipulation of Google search results for anti-competitive reasons is reality that Internet companies and services live with every day.

Read more: FairSearch.org | Psychologist Finds Google Could Sway an Election with Search Manipulation

Internet: Online search terms can be economic indicators - by Dave Simms

Why would an economist care that internet searches using the term 'titanium dioxide' have been steadily rising in Canada?

As more and more economic activity moves online — Google estimates 93 per cent of Canadian consumers research online before purchasing something — interest is growing among economists in the insights to be gained from our choice of internet search terms.

If they can learn to interpret what our buying intentions are, what prices we're paying or whether we're trying to figure out how to apply for employment insurance, it could greatly improve their read on where the economy is headed.

Read more: Online search terms can be economic indicators - Business - CBC News

Google Confirms It Aims to Own Your Online ID - by Mathew Ingram

Ever since Google (GOOG) launched its new Google+ social network, we and others have pointed out that the search giant clearly has more in mind than just providing a nice place for people to share photos of their pets. For one thing, Google needs to tap into the “social signals” that people provide through networks such as Facebook so it can improve its search results. There’s a larger motive, too: As Chairman and former Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt admitted during an interview in Edinburgh over the weekend, Google is taking a hard line on the real-name issue because it sees Google+ as an “identity service” or platform on which it can build other products.

Schmidt’s comments came during an interview with Andy Carvin, the National Public Radio digital editor who has become a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions. Carvin asked the Google chairman about the company’s reasoning for pushing its real-name policies on Google+—a policy that many have criticized (including us) because it excludes potentially valuable viewpoints that might be expressed by political dissidents and others who prefer to remain anonymous. In effect, Schmidt said Google isn’t interested in changing its policies to accommodate those kinds of users: If people want to remain anonymous, he said, then they shouldn’t use Google+.

Whatever its specific interests, Google clearly sees Facebook as a competitive threat, not just because it has developed a gigantic social network with hundreds of millions of devoted users, but because it has also become a kind of identity gatekeeper—with tens of millions of those devoted users happily logging into other websites and services with their Facebook credentials, thus sending Facebook valuable data about what they are doing and where they are doing it. The ubiquitous “like” button provides even further data, something Google is also trying to mimic with its +1 buttons.Whatever its specific interests, Google clearly sees

Facebook as a competitive threat, not just because it has developed a gigantic social network with hundreds of millions of devoted users, but because it has also become a kind of identity gatekeeper—with tens of millions of those devoted users happily logging into other websites and services with their Facebook credentials, thus sending Facebook valuable data about what they are doing and where they are doing it. The ubiquitous “like” button provides even further data, something Google is also trying to mimic with its +1 buttons.
For more: Google Confirms It Aims to Own Your Online ID - BusinessWeek

EC website hosts more than 14m European cultural items

Europe’s digital library, Europeana – a website that enables anyone to access millions of digitised books, maps, photographs and more from all cultural institutions across Europe - has increased in size to 14 million objects.

Initially targeted at providing around 10 million items, Europeana was set up to explore “new ways to bring Europe’s cultural heritage online”.

Set up in 2008, the service provides paintings, film and film fragments, music clips, books, maps, photographs, newspapers and audiovisual documents. More than 14 million are provided in total – an amount to which Ireland contributed 6.47pc (905,799 items).

For more: EC website hosts more than 14m European cultural items - Digital Life - Digital Life | siliconrepublic.com - Ireland's Technology News Service

Valentine's day: Discover Love Through Art on Europeana

Lovers embracing. Romantic poems. Couples walking hand in hand. These are a few of the symbols associated with Valentine's Day, a festival of love celebrated for hundreds of years, and they can all be explored through the paintings, images, sounds and texts of Europe’s cultural heritage, available on Europeana.

For more: campaigns : Campaign Archive

TechCrunch: EUROPEANA - EU Presents Ambitious Open-Source Library Digitization Project -Site Promptly gets 10 million hits per hour and crashes

For the complete report from TechCrunch click on this link

EUROPEANA - EU Presents Ambitious Open-Source Library Digitization Project - Site Promptly gets 10 million hits per hour and crashes

A cadre of European politicians gathered Thursday at the Museum of the 18th century in Brussels to launch Europeana, a digital museum that allows visitors to explore classic paintings, photos, recordings and texts in the same manner in which it is possible to search, say, Amazon.com. Trying to access Europeana on the day of its launch, though, was akin to navigating the Vatican Museums in the tourist-thick month of August. It was impossible to see anything, as the project’s three servers were totally overwhelmed. The Commission said Saturday in a press release that the site received about 10 million hits per hour throughout Thursday - double server capacity.

The site was taken down Friday evening and is expected to be back up in mid-December.

Technical challenges included harvesting and normalizing metadata from more than 1,000 different museums and libraries from around Europe. Half of participating cultural heritage institutions so far are French. The Louvre in Paris, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (which contributed footage shot on French battlefields in 1914) and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam are three of the biggest participating museums.

Europeana, which is still in beta, was programmed using only open source applications. Everything on Europeana is allowed to be downloaded. Europeana’s three servers are located in the Hague, where the project is headquartered, but programmers plan eventually to put mirror servers around the world.