Torpark v1.5.0.7

Ada senjata baru untuk surfing internet dengan aman tanpa meninggalkan jejak. Beritanya aku dapat dari rubrik 'Digital Internet' Koran Tempo hari ini. Software tersebut bernama Torpark. Dijelaskan bahwa Browser Torpark diciptakan oleh Steve Topletz dan release perdananya adalah tanggal 19 September lalu.

Kalau boleh dibilang sih software ini tidak bisa di sebut Browser. Kenapa? Karena yang aku lihat dia tidak berupa suatu software yang utuh tetapi ternyata disandingkan dengan Mozilla fire fox, bisa juga disebut plugin. Sewaktu aku install di komputer ternyata Firefox yang selama ini selalu menemaniku tidak bisa disandingkan dengan Firefox bawaannya Torpark. Akhirnya ketahuan juga penyakitnya. Ternyata Firefox ku adalah versi desktop sementara Firefox bawaan torpark adalah versi Portable Edition.

Tapi selain itu memang sewaktu Torpark aku jalankan ada beberapa tahapan sebelum firefoxnya muncul. Jadi sewaktu loading tidak serta merta firefox muncul seperti pada browser biasa. Ternyata pada waktu Torpark dijalankan, dia akan menciptakan sebuah koneksi yang ter-encript ke jaringan TOR. TOR sendiri adalah singkatan dari The Onion Router yaitu suatu program yang memungkinkan penggunanya untuk berkomunikasi secara anonim di internet.

Jadi sekarang kita tidak perlu khawatir jejak-jejak penjelajahan kita di dunia maya bisa terendus oleh oknum yang tidak bertanggung jawab. Disebutkan di situs resminya, apabila menggunakan Torpark sewaktu kita menjelajah internet, IP kita akan berubah-ubah setiap menit sesuai data yang dipasok oleh jaringan TOR. Untuk membuktikannya kita bisa mencoba lewat situs yang menyediakan layanan pembacaan IP seperti di www.whatismyip.com . Akan terlihat apabila setelah sekian lama direfresh alamat IP kita akan berubah dengan sendirinya. Bisa saja IP saya yang di indonesia setelah beberapa menit akan berubah menjadi IP negara nun jauh di sana semisal Afrika Selatan. Saya sertakan screenshot.Torpark ketika pertama kali dijalankan.

Ada kelemahan yang sangat kentara apabila kita menggunakan Torpark. Kinerja browser kita akan terasa melambat. Ini disebabkan karena sebelum surfing di internet kita harus melewati dulu jaringan TOR. Tetapi jangan khawatir apabila kita tidak sedang ingin menggunakan Torpark, kita bisa menonaktifkannya sementara lewat tombol yang ada di browser firefox.

Untuk lebih jelasnya bisa dilihat langsung di situs resminya di http://torpark.nfshost.com/.

IBM deal could mean smarter cars, better drivers

By Candace Lombardi
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 2:13 PM PDT

 

IBM will help design software that could lead to self-adjusting headlights on cars and sensors that help avert crashes, as part of a deal signed Wednesday.

Big Blue will design and develop software and handle intellectual property management in a five-year deal with Magna Electronics, an auto electronics division of Canada-based Magna International, that has already begun developing "smart" car parts. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"Magna Electronics' partnership (with IBM) will be growing and enhancing the capability that we already have. It puts us on a different playing field," said Tracy Fuerst, a spokeswoman for Magna International.

Neither company would comment on specific products. But, Bernie Meyerson, the chief technology officer for IBM Systems Technology, did say that the collaboration could produce things like embedded sensors and cameras that would slow down a car approaching a stop sign if a driver does not react in time. Another system placed inside a car could tell when a driver is drifting off to sleep and sound an alarm, or emit an evergreen scent, to wake him. "Intelligent headlights" could adjust depending on lighting and weather conditions, said Meyerson.

According to one analyst, this deal will create multiple business opportunities for IBM. Whether it's hardware, software, storage, operations or management services, IBM will be able to become a supplier for these kinds of channels to the automotive industry, said Jonathan Eunice, president and principal analyst for Illuminata.

Meyerson said that the collaboration will incorporate the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) technology that IBM unveiled in 2003. In this case, the UIMA technology would retrieve real-time data, including a car's speed, the speed of the car in front of it, traffic patterns and the average speed of multiple cars on a particular road. That data could then be used to regulate the car's driving patterns.

Having a car organize all that information and then respond to it accordingly is extremely complex, said Meyerson. It requires several software and hardware components in the car to work together seamlessly.

"To put it in the simplest terms, you need a computer that takes care of itself," said Meyerson. "It becomes like the human body. You don't act to make your heart beat. You don't act to make your immune system fight off bacteria. That level of autonomic function has not gotten there yet" for cars, said Meyerson.

Eunice said that politicians and technology companies like to put forth grand visions of car autonomy, safety and convenience to gain support for technology that is complicated and tedious to explain otherwise. Most likely, said Eunice, you will see such advancements in government and commercial vehicles first.

"We expect these to eventually be pervasive like seatbelts and antilock breaks. But it takes decades to happen," Eunice said. "It does require quite a long time to develop and the progress happens somewhat fitfully."

Sun seeks Solaris security badge

By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 3:33 PM PDT

 

Sun working on a new high-level security certification, Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+, for a coming security-enhanced version of Solaris 10 operating system, the server and software company said Wednesday. Sun previously maintained a separate version of the operating system, Trusted Solaris, for high-security environments. But because the demand for its features is expanding to mainstream customers, the company discontinued that product in favor of "Trusted Extensions" folded into ordinary Solaris.

The extensions will be available later this year in the Solaris 11/06 update, Sun said. The current Solaris 10 is under evaluation for two EAL4+ profiles, Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) and Role-Based Access Control Protection Profile (RBACP), and with the extensions, for a third, Labeled Security Protection Profile (LSPP). That third level is required for storing secret or top secret data on the same server as public information, Sun said. The last version of Trusted Solaris was based on Solaris 8, Sun said.

Microsoft wants more Vista testers

By Ina Fried
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 10:34 AM PDT

 

Microsoft said on Thursday that it is looking for more people to give Windows Vista a try.

The software maker said that the Release Candidate 1 version offered up earlier this month is now being opened up to consumers who were not already testing the new operating system.

Microsoft is looking for more testers, as it works to iron out the bugs in Vista. After several delays, the company hopes to release Vista to large business customers in November and start selling it broadly in January.

"RC1 represents a significant industry milestone on the road to delivering Windows Vista, and customer participation and feedback are integral parts of the development process," Microsoft said in a statement. "The feedback received thus far from testers has been extremely valuable, and Microsoft expects that by expanding the (customer preview program) with RC1, the Windows Vista team will gather even more worthwhile input."

In all, Microsoft expects to make the latest test version available to about 5 million people.

Dell: Exploding batteries are Sony's fault

By Tom Espiner
Special to CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 9:49 AM PDT

Last modified: September 14, 2006, 10:32 AM PDT

 

NEW YORK--Chairman Michael Dell has denied that the way Dell constructs its PCs played a part in a spate of battery-related fires. He instead laid the blame entirely with the manufacturer of the battery cells, Sony.

"We know exactly why there was a problem. Sony had contaminated its cells in the manufacturing process," Dell told ZDNet UK at the company's Technology Day event here on Tuesday.

Dell refuted reports by Sony that the way his company integrates the battery cells into its PC designs made its machines more susceptible to problems than devices from other computer makers.

"The batteries were contaminated and were no good no matter what you did with them," Dell said. "We know the batteries, under rare circumstances, catch fire, (which is why we recalled them)."

Dell recalled the batteries last month after several of its laptops overheated and caught fire. Other manufacturers are known to use Sony battery cells, but only Dell and Apple Computer have been affected by any problems.

Sony has agreed to help financially with the Dell recall and another by Apple resulting from faults with Sony batteries. However, a Sony representative denied that the blame for Dell's battery cell problems lay completely with the Japanese manufacturer.

"It is the configuration. We use the same batteries in our Vaios, and have our own safeguards against potential overheating. Other manufacturers which use the same cells haven't come forward with any issues. On rare occasions, a short circuit can occur, but this is affected by systems configurations found in different laptops," the representative said.

Extra problems for small manufacturers?
But Dell has maintained that other laptop manufacturers may face the same battery problems that forced it to recall 4.1 million cells. The computer giant claimed that it preempted the rest of the market in recalling the batteries.

"We were out in front on this issue, we see this stuff faster. Maybe there are products out on the (reseller) channel that could (have problems). I don't see anything to preclude that," Alex Gruzen, general manager of the Dell product group, told ZDNet UK. "Maybe we're seeing problems ahead of the smaller-volume producers."

Dell said this may be more difficult to rectify for smaller manufacturers that sell through reseller channels, as those manufacturers, because they had not sold directly to customers, would have to take extra steps to trace and recall faulty batteries.

"We can identify who has the faulty batteries in a way our competitors cannot, because they sell through the channel," added Gruzen.

Gruzen added that the recall was progressing well but admitted the company had little control over any damage to its reputation following the battery problems.

"It's really up to you (the consumer), to be honest. Customers will have to decide for themselves. We're going to worry about what's under our control. We are executing the recall extraordinarily well," Gruzen said.

Jeff Kimble, European marketing manager for Dell, said that the faulty batteries were a problem Dell wasn't proud of, but that it was "proud of its response."

Sony said the recalls had arisen because of microscopic metal particles in the recalled battery cells coming into contact with other parts of the battery cell, leading to a short circuit within the cell.

"The potential for this to occur can be affected by variations in the system configurations found in different notebook computers," Sony said.

Sony currently estimates that the overall cost of supporting the recall programs of Apple and Dell will amount to between 20 billion and 30 billion yen ($170 million and $255 million). The estimate is based on the cost of replacement battery packs and any related costs to be incurred by Sony.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from New York.  

Behind Google's German courtroom battle

By Anne Broache
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 4:00 AM PDT

 

Google's free Web e-mail offering may be available for correspondence in 40 languages, but efforts at worldwide expansion using the moniker "Gmail" continue to face complications.

Last October, the search giant grabbed headlines--and miffed some British users--when it voluntarily renamed its service "Google Mail" in the United Kingdom, following an out-of-court trademark dispute.

The woes don't end there. Across western Europe, a quiet battle rages on between Google and Daniel Giersch, a German-born venture capitalist who insists he'll never relinquish his 6-year-old trademark registration of "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" (translation: G-mail...and the mail goes right off).

"Google's behavior is very threatening, very aggressive and very unfaithful, and to me, it's very evil," he said in a recent telephone interview with CNET News.com from his part-time Los Angeles home.

A Hamburg, Germany, district court has already handed Giersch victories at both the preliminary and final stages of the litigation. Dismissing Google's arguments that the two names are not confusingly similar, it ordered the company earlier this year to remove all "Gmail" references from its German service and to cease handing out gmail.com aliases to users within the geographic area.

Buoyed by that success, Giersch said he plans new lawsuits to defend more recent registrations of the trademark in Switzerland, Norway and Monaco, where he hopes to expand his electronic postal delivery business that goes by the G-mail (short for "Giersch mail") name. He said he is also considering a suit in the United States based on alleged "investment losses" that the overseas disputes have wrought on the American arm of his venture capital firm. (Google has already encountered competition for the U.S. trademark.)

Google still maintains it has clear rights to use the Gmail name in Germany and in countries throughout the world where it has applied for such trademark rights. It lodged an appeal against the Hamburg district court's decision but claims it has nevertheless been abiding by the orders to restrict all people determined to be German residents to use only of googlemail.com, ever since a preliminary injunction was issued in April 2005.

"In no case do we offer or allow a user to use '@gmail.com' if the user's IP address is German," a company representative said in an e-mail interview.

Google has initiated its own actions against the 32-year-old Giersch in other European countries since the German litigation began, asserting it has prior rights to the Gmail name and that Giersch's registration attempts should be blocked. Giersch's lawyers said the company has filed--so far, unsuccessfully--for a cancellation of his Norwegian holding with the country's trademark office. The Google representative would confirm only that a court challenge is pending against the Swiss trademark, adding that "there are a number of cases outstanding against Giersch in Europe."

For the Mountain View, Calif.-based search market leader, the rationale is simple: "Google will take the action it deems necessary to protect our interests in Europe," the company representative said.

Google v. Giersch
Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google with a home-brewed data center in a dorm room. For Daniel Giersch's venture, it was a backpack and a bicycle.

When he was 18, Giersch founded his first company, a same-day mail delivery service designed to offer a swifter alternative to the Deutsche Post. Within a few years, by his estimation, the company was delivering 80 percent of the mail within his hometown of Itzehoe, a town of about 30,000 residents near Hamburg.

Giersch ultimately sold control of the physical delivery operations and started on a new venture he called "hybrid mail." The idea is to combine the relative security of physical mail delivery with the speediness of e-mail. A sender's document is scanned into Giersch's system at its origin, transmitted electronically to a G-mail office in the destination city, printed out at the other end and hand-delivered to its recipient. Giersch also offers users a "secure" gmail.de address, which they can obtain only by verifying their identities with a passport or other official ID card--a far different business model from Google's Gmail, he said.

In 2000, Giersch registered "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" with the German trademark office. He was still investing in and developing his hybrid mail service four years later (in Germany, one has five years after registering a trademark to commercialize its use), when he saw news reports that Google planned to launch a Web e-mail service named Gmail. Google's e-mail service debuted in April 2004.

"Knowing Google is very powerful, I liked it at the time; I Googled myself everyday. I said, 'you know what? I want to call these guys,'" Giersch said in a telephone interview. "I did my MBA, and I know what a big company is looking for, and that is international growth. I knew sooner or later they would go to Germany."

After rebuffing his initial attempts to talk over the situation, Google eventually offered to buy the German trademark rights for $250,000, Giersch said. But by then, turned off by what he deemed "arrogance" on the search giant's part, he had decided never to settle. When Google started offering the Gmail service in German in 2005, Giersch believed he had grounds under German trademark law to sue the company for infringement, so he did just that.

 

New Web sites seek profit in wikis

By Robert Levine
The New York Times

Published: September 4, 2006, 9:55 AM PDT

 

Every day, millions of people find answers on Wikipedia to questions both trivial and serious. Jack Herrick found his business model there.

In 2004, Herrick acquired the how-to guide eHow.com, which featured articles written by paid freelance writers. Although the business made a profit, he realized that the revenue brought in by selling advertising would not support the extensive site he had in mind. "If the page were about how to get a mortgage, it would work," he said. "But the idea was to be the how-to guide to everything."

So in January 2005 he started wikiHow, a how-to guide built on the same open-source software as Wikipedia, which lets anyone write and edit entries in a collaborative system. To his surprise he found that many of the entries generated by Internet users--free--were more informative than those written by freelancers.

"Wikipedia proved you could get there with another method," Herrick said. Several months ago he sold eHow to focus on the new site, which now has 10,000 entries in English, Spanish and German.

Herrick is hardly the only entrepreneur inspired by the efficiency and low cost of what has become known as the wiki model. Although Wikipedia is operated by a nonprofit foundation, ideas for advertising-based wiki sites are beginning to take their place alongside blogs and social networking sites as a staple of Silicon Valley business plans.

In addition to Wikia, a site devoted to topics judged too esoteric for the online encyclopedia, there is ShopWiki, for product reviews, and Wikitravel, for tourism advice. Several start-ups allow users to operate their own wiki sites.

"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and this is about the other 999,000 books in the library," said Ben Elowitz, chief executive of Wetpaint, a start-your-own wiki site.

Others wonder how big that library can get. All of the companies making consumer-oriented wikis are privately held and do not release revenue figures. But so far not one of them has come close to the popularity of Wikipedia, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. WikiHow had 1.1 million visitors in July, Wikia had just over 270,000, and several other wiki sites had too small an audience to be measured by the Nielsen/NetRatings methodology.

Andrew Frank, a research director at the Gartner Group, a technology consulting firm, said that all of this interest in wikis might rest on some naïve assumptions.

"The assertion that these sites are cheap to run is questionable," he said. For example, to sell a substantial amount of advertising, wiki sites might have to filter for objectionable content. And he says he believes that ads on wikis could be worth less per impression than those on sites that aim at a more specific audience.

"I think there's going to be a lot of wikis," Herrick said. "But I'm not sure how many of them will make money."

Others are more optimistic. Last month John Gotts, an entrepreneur known for buying the rights to domain names, agreed to buy the site Wiki.com for $2.86 million.

"I would never have paid this much for any other domain," Gotts said. "I can't think of one that would be worth more." He pointed out that the site Wiki.com drew traffic before he bought it, even though it had little content.

The wiki concept was invented in 1994 by Ward Cunningham, a computer scientist who created a program called WikiWikiWeb as a way to share programming techniques. He named his creation after the Hawaiian word for fast.

"The subject I had in mind was the knowledge necessary to write good computer code," Cunningham said, "but I realized it would have broader implications. It's a medium that allows people to collaborate more easily than they could in systems that are modeled after the precomputer world, like e-mail."

Over the last few years, wikis have gained traction as tools in the business world, where companies run them on internal networks to foster collaboration on complex projects. The Gartner Group has predicted that half of all companies will use them internally in some fashion by 2009. There has also been at least one failed experiment with wikis in journalism: The Los Angeles Times tried online "wikitorials" but quickly abandoned the idea.

Even Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, is looking for ways to broaden--and profit from--the wiki concept. With financing from technology luminaries like Marc Andreessen and Mitchell Kapor, he and Angela Beesley started Wikia, which includes 1,500 separate wikis, from the Star Wars-focused Wookieepedia to user-generated pages on depression. Although Wikia is a for-profit company, it was founded with some of the communitarian idealism of Wikipedia, and its business plan calls for it to donate money to that foundation.

"It's never going to be a billion-dollar-revenue business," said Gil Penchina, the company's chief executive. He said that the site currently made less than a dollar a page per month, although the site's growing number of pages could make that significant.

"It feels to me like Craigslist," he said. "It's a small business, but it's a good business and it makes a lot of people happy."

If wikis become a big business, some of that idealism may fade--and consumers may begin to resent contributing to the sites free. So far, though, the sites are growing fast, thanks to dedicated volunteers. Sondra Crane, a 75-year-old retiree who lives in Altamonte Springs, Fla., has written scores of entries for wikiHow on subjects both practical (how to make pot roast) and profound (how to get old without feeling old). "I've been writing all my life and I always wanted to have my name known," she said. "I'd like to get paid--I put a lot of hours in. But it's nice to know that people are being helped."

Wikia and wikiHow operate much like Wikipedia: they let all users contribute and stipulate that any content they generate may be used freely, much as open-source software is. Other start-ups, including Wiki.com, are departing from the traditional collaborative spirit of the wiki model, in that they will let users decide who has permission to contribute to the wikis they start.

Gotts, who has been paying for Wiki.com in $10,000 installments with a final payment of about $2.8 million due within six months, said that he intended to share revenue with those who used his site to start wikis. "The main way we're going to make money," he said, "is to lead the trend for users to make money."

He said that he would let users register Wiki.com subdomains free on topics of their own choosing--he suggested that might be anything from soccer.wiki.com to smokedsalmon.wiki.com--in the hope they would attract advertising or e-commerce.

But Ramit Sethi, co-founder of PBwiki, another make-your-own wiki site, said that it was still too early to determine what model would turn wikis into money-makers.

"Nobody has found the de facto business model for wikis," said "It's kind of the Wild West."

Entire contents, Copyright © 2006 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

Double the cores, double the heat?

 By Tom Krazit, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: August 3, 2006, 4:00 AM

 

The earth may be heating up, but Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are determined to keep PC warming trends in check.

A few years ago, fast single-core processors were causing fits in the PC industry, which tried to design systems to stay reliable as the temperature rose inside the PC chassis. Newer dual-core chips from both AMD and Intel run cooler than their single-core antecedents, much to the relief of PC designers.

But as both companies prepare products that use four processing cores, some wonder if they've seen what was just a brief respite from the processor heat wave, especially as virtualization technologies reach the average user's system.

Intel, fresh off the launch of its Core 2 Duo chips, has announced plans to accelerate the introduction of a quad-core processor called Kentsfield, now expected in the fourth quarter. Not to be outdone, AMD later this year will release a product called "4x4," which is two AMD processors connected together on a high-end motherboard.

Both chipmakers' products will run hotter than the current processors, although it's unclear how much of a gap will exist. Intel hasn't released thermal specifications for Kentsfield yet, said Intel spokesman George Alfs. However, Kentsfield is essentially two Core 2 Duo processors bolted together onto a chip, so its thermal profile will certainly be higher than a single Core 2 Duo processor.

Likewise, 4x4 systems will consume more power than a dual-core AMD processor, said AMD's vice president of advanced marketing, Pat Moorhead. AMD plans to make the 4x4 product consume less power than two separate processors would in one system, although Moorhead declined to specify how the company plans to do that.

But Intel and AMD both say they've learned their lessons on power consumption and heat. A buildup of heat inside a PC can contribute to component failures, especially with sensitive items like hard drives, said In-Stat analyst Jim McGregor, during an interview at Intel's recent Core 2 Duo launch. That heat buildup requires noisy fans to keep the system cool, especially in notebooks.

Kentsfield and 4x4 are designed for high-end users who are willing to spend lots of money on a PC with cooling systems and powerful technology, said Dean McCarron, an analyst with Mercury Research. But mainstream users are not willing to take on that expense, he said.

Taming the thermals
When quad-core processors become the norm for the millions of PCs shipped each quarter, Intel and AMD will have to be vigilant about keeping power consumption at their current, PC-friendly levels. "When you push the thermals or the electric consumption too far outside the norm, that does put you into a niche segment," McCarron said.

Intel hasn't announced specific plans for quad-core processors beyond Kentsfield, Alfs said. Sources familiar with Intel's plans have indicated that when the company is ready to move from its current 65-nanometer manufacturing technology to its 45-nanometer process next year, it will start with dual-core chips to make the transition easier. And then at some later date, it will be ready to build quad-core chips with the smaller 45-nanometer transistors on a single piece of silicon, unlike the multichip package used for Kentsfield. Chipmakers also usually see a decline in power consumption as they move to smaller transistors.

Intel's Alfs declined to comment on those plans, but did say the company plans to have a wide range of products available at various levels of power consumption. This could include low-power chips for small-size PCs or high-power chips for expensive gaming PCs. Intel will talk more about its plans for quad-core processors at the next Intel Developer Forum in September, Alfs said.

AMD's first quad-core processor, to be introduced in 2007 and made with its new 65-nanometer technology, will be released within the same thermal profile as its current dual-core chips, Moorhead said. "Performance outside of an appropriate thermal envelope doesn't really do anybody any good," he said.

The definition of an appropriate thermal envelope could change, however, when virtualization technologies reach the desktop.

Virtualization software has been used primarily in servers to let IT managers run several different types of applications on a single server. Instead of running multiple servers at low utilization rates, managers can increase the utilization rate of a single server and reduce the number of boxes they have to nurture.

PC virtualization is some years away from becoming prevalent on the desktop, although early examples have started to appear in products such as Parallels, which allows Mac users to run Windows alongside the Mac operating system on Intel-based Macs.

Virtualization being still uncommon on PCs, most users currently hit the maximum performance of their processor only for short periods of time. But if they begin running numerous applications in multiple virtual environments on multicore processors, they'll be running their system at higher levels of performance for extended periods of time. That's when the inside temperature of PCs could once again start climbing.

Still, this is primarily a server problem at the moment, McCarron said. Heat could once again become an issue for PCs, however, when coupled with the demands for power from newer, more sophisticated graphics processors.

AMD's Moorhead said that although the PC industry isn't at that level yet, chipmakers will have to continue to build low-power transistors, improve the performance of power sensitive technology, and work with the PC industry to design efficient cooling products.

A dual-core or quad-core processor is still better for PC thermals than running two or four separate processors, McCarron said. But chip and PC companies will have to keep a close eye on the utilization rates of their multicore chips to stay cool into the next decade.

 

A blogger's battle from behind bars

Josh Wolf, a 24-year-old freelance journalist, made headlines last week as the first known blogger to be thrown into federal prison for not cooperating with judiciary officials.

One of the Internet's earliest video bloggers, Wolf refused to testify before a U.S. grand jury and also refused to hand over unpublished video footage he shot during a clash between San Francisco police and anti-G8 protesters in July 2005.

Wolf might normally be protected by California's shield law. But federal prosecutors, who want to see if Wolf's footage shows a San Francisco police car being set on fire at the protest, say they have jurisdiction over the case because the car was paid for in part by federal dollars. (Click here for video. Note: Contains some profanity.)

And in an ironic twist, the very members of the corporate-controlled mainstream media that Wolf and many fellow new-media members like to criticize, have come to his defense and are contributing to his legal fund. Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail last year for refusing to testify in a federal investigation, aired her support for Wolf on Saturday in front of the facility in which he is being held in Dublin, Calif., but was denied an interview with him.

Prison officials allowed CNET News.com to do a 15-minute phone interview with their now famous Netizen inmate, who calls himself a "student of anarchist philosophies." The San Francisco man said his jailing might have something to do with his politics, or at least the politics of the people on the tape. But his greater concern is what he sees as the government's attempt to further erode the protections affording to journalists.

Q: First of all, how are you holding up in there, and what's your situation like? Are you being housed in a protected area or among the hard-core felons?
Wolf: I'm holding up quite all right. I'm very lucky to be in this facility. It seems more akin to what one might expect from a mental ward, except the people aren't crazy. I've established a rapport with most of the inmates there. The food is edible, which is a great relief seeing as I'm someone who's a little finicky about food and you can't be too finicky in jail, if you know what I mean. I'm going to refrain from discussing who's in the population other than to say that everyone has been respectful to me and quite friendly and outgoing. The guards have also been very professional and treat everyone, not only myself, but everyone in the population as human beings which is something I was a little afraid I wouldn't observe but I'm happy to say is the case in this federal facility.

Tell us about your rationale in deciding not to hand over the video tapes. How much of it was about protecting your sources, or activists caught on tape, and how much of it was about First Amendment rights?
Wolf: First and foremost, this issue should be a state issue. The federal grand jury is investigating the alleged attempted damage to a San Francisco police vehicle. That is the subject of the investigation. If an S.F. police vehicle is considered federal property, then what isn't federal property? Your school? Even City Hall itself. I'm not sure that that extension is accurate, but it's not very much of a stretch and that is very disturbing.

Beyond that, I should be protected in the state system by the California shield law. The state of California, the local jurisdiction, has made no attempts to try to get this footage. This is an attempt of the federal government circumventing the state protections for who knows what purpose. Something tells me that it's about more than damage to a San Francisco police vehicle. And it's a scary position when you have the government acting in such a coercive, secretive manner. The fact that I am a journalist and should be protected is a very big part of it. When I went in and began documenting this movement, I gave my word to numerous people that I would only publish what my discretion allowed and beyond that would not turn over additional material. So they are sources in a different sort of way than the Judith Miller case, but there still is an element of protecting sources and also protecting people's right to privacy and freedoms of association.

Do you feel the federal government is making an example of you because of your political beliefs?
Wolf: I don't feel that that is the case so much, but I do feel it's an attempt of the government to further erode the protections affording to journalists. I do feel it may be a political attempt to catalogue and chronicle who in the San Francisco Bay Area identifies as anarchist, not particularly myself, but the people on the tape. I'm sure you're aware of the 1950s HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) McCarthyism. Today's communist is the anarchist. I'm very much concerned that this is a political witch hunt, although I feel it's less about me than about people out in the community.