My Tricked Out Internet

Folks, let's face it: the internet isn't what it used to be. Back in the day, a man could get himself a deliciously wide variety of contraband goods off of the internet. Everything from a simple Cuban cigar to a mail-order bride from a failed state in Eastern Europe was yours to be had... for a price. Sadly, these freewheeling days of anarchical pleasures on the electronic frontier are fast drawing to a close. Several months ago my cousin tried to perform a very simple task: download a episode of HBO's True Blood off of BitTorrent. Well, shortly after this innocuous activity, he received a cease and desist order from HBO. As Abraham Lincoln might say, what the fuck?
Now, one may argue that HBO was only justly defending its property rights, or that Abraham Lincoln is dead so his thoughts on the matter are neither here nor there. The essential fact remains though: HBO somehow cared enough and was diligent enough to detect a tiny infringement of their property rights by one internet user among billions. And True Blood, form what I hear, isn't even one of their better shows. Imagine the shitstorm if he had tried to download The Sopranos. Now, this is a scary thought. How are god-fearing online entrepreneurs supposed to conduct their business in this climate of fear? Well, in case nobody realized, that was a rhetorical question. The answer is that they can't. In the new world of the internet, nobody is free. Every action of our online ads is scrutinized under a microscope. Even our Google searches, for some absurd reason, are recorded and saved by Google.
People, we don't have to take this treatment lying down. I realized this the other day when I was busy trickin' out my Firefox browse. In addition to random stuff like an RSS feed and Cooliris (which is definitely worth checking out) I found an ingenious app called TrackMeNot. TrackMeNot deals with the Google problem in a most effective manner. It conceals your real searches in a cloud of misinformation. In other words, the program generates massive amounts of random search queries that swamp your actual volume of searches. Thus, anyone looking at your search history should be unable to distinguish any sort of real pattern whatsoever. Fight the power.