PRIVARIA Secure Networking Suite News

The PRIVARIA Secure Networking Suite has just passed the 30,000 download mark, some 9 months after its initial release in May 2000. The popularity of this free software is no doubt due, at least in part, to concerns about the erosion of our Constitutional protections against government intrustion in the wake of Carnivore, Echelon, and the new "Patriot" surveillance act.

With PRIVARIA on your computers, you and one or more trusted (non-terrorist & patriotic) colleagues can share desktop access, exchange files, and collaboratively sketch drawings and type text. The only way to decrypt your communications is with a 128-bit session key that only the two of you share, and that is destroyed when you log off.... read more

After 26,000+ downloads, this GnuPG-based secure peer-to-peer connection app is really maturing nicely, and this release is mostly a collection of bugfixes, component software upgrades, and a "run as a Win NT/2K/XP Service" option. Video conferencing (which never really worked) is no longer supported in the base package.

Home Page: http://www.privaria.org

Version 0.9.9d, a significant new release of the Privaria Secure Networking Suite, is now available. See http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=40844
for files and release notes

Version 0.9.9 of PRIVARIA (http://www.privaria.org) is a mature, stable release that is get very close to what you will be seeing in the production 1.0 release. If you are one of the 17,000 people who have downloaded an earlier version of PRIVARIA, you'll definitely want to upgrade to 0.9.9. Check out the release notes and changelogs for details.

Version 0.9.8 of the PRIVARIA Secure Networking
Suite is now available at
http://http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=40844

This is a very significant release, well worth your
time to upgrade even from 0.9.7. (See release
notes for some important upgrading info.) Here are
some highlights:
* Can use your existing GnuPG/WinPT installation
and keys
* Install to the directory of your choice
* Reliability fixes to the FTP command core,
including a fix to the problem of spurious changes
in the number of active users (that's worth the
upgrade hassle alone!)
* Use a "safe" interpreter for the Remote Command
Shell by default, with option to open it up for all
functions (e.g., for telecommuter access)
* Many more bug fixes
* Some cosmetic improvements... read more

The PRIVARIA Secure Networking suite was downloaded from SourceForge.net more than 2500 times last week, the first week of its release. It's already in the top 94% of SourceForge projects.

The http://www.privaria.org/ site asks three questions of its visitors. Based on this huge response, the answers to these questions are apparently "yes":

1. Are you concerned about reports of the FBI, NSA, and CIA spying on U.S. Citizens, the U.K.s R.I.P. law (turn over your encryption keys on demand) and the ever-eroding privacy of your communications over the Internet?... read more