I wanted to watch Zero Dark Thirty last week. It was only available on DVD through Netflix, so I put it in my Queue and 2 days later I was watching it. Then I thought about what I had done.

• I went to Netflix and selected the title
• A person in a faraway warehouse pulled a disc with mpeg-encoded video from a shelf and put it on a conveyor belt
• The disc went in a truck and was driven to a mail sorting hub
• The disc was through more conveyor belts and was placed on another, larger truck
• The disc was driven some much longer distance to my city’s mail hub

Since we now know that we can’t reasonably expect the emails we exchange with friends and colleagues to not be warehoused and read without our knowledge (and without a subpoena, warrant, or similar from the reading party), I want to shine a spotlight on one of the still-effective techniques available for restoring some privacy (with caveats) to personal email. This strategy is not new. In fact, it’s quite old. I’m talking about GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), a FOSS implementation of the OpenPGP encryption standard, and GPGMail, an awesome plugin for the native Mac Mail client.

DigitalOcean is a relatively young VPS provider with servers in New York, the Netherlands and San Francisco. My first introduction to them was working on a web app called RapPad which helps people write and share rap lyrics and which I started contributing to a few months ago after it caught my eye on Hacker News.

RapPad’s owner, Amir, had it up on a VPS with DigitalOcean, which I was only vaguely aware of. I was pretty blown away with the slickness of our deploys (typical Rails deployment bottlenecks like asset compilation were carried out with literally 4x the speed of on my EC2 instance) and the speed with which I could traverse the file system, install packages and do various administrative tasks.