With 150,000 or so old print maps to his name, David Rumsey has earned his reputed place among the world's "finest private collectors." He continues to expand his personal trove as well as the digitized sub-collection he makes open to the public online — some 38,000 strong, and growing.
He's created a series of interactive maps that layer old prints onto the Google Earth and Google Maps platforms, and this summer he plans to launch a geo-referencing tool (similar to one recently introduced by the British Library) that lets users get involved in the digital mapping process themselves.
While preparing for this next expansion of his online map empire, Rumsey remains fascinated by "the power of putting these images up and letting them go," he says.
"Maps have a way of speaking to people very straightforward," he says. "You don't have to have a lot of knowledge of map history or history in general. To me they're perfect tools for teaching history to the public."
Via
Lauren Moss
RetroShare is a cross-platform, open-source, trusted and distributed P2P communication software and social sharing network.
Retroshare allows you to chat and share files of any size with your friends and family, using a web-of-trust to authenticate peers and OpenSSL to encrypt all communication.
RetroShare provides filesharing, chat, messages, forums and channels. Other key features include:
RetroShare has been inspired by the design of the Turtle algorithm:
"When designing Turtle, we were inspired by the way people living under oppressive regimes share information deemed "hostile" by their government (this can be books, newsletters, video and audio recordings, or even political jokes). Because of the potentially very serious consequences raising from being caught possessing/distributing such material, no single individual is willing to share it, except with close friends. Experience has repeatedly shown that, even in the most repressive environments, this "friends-to-friends" delivery network is remarkably effective in disseminating information, with relatively little risks for the participating parties; if one chooses his friends carefully, the chance of being caught doing the forbidden exchanges becomes very small."
Retroshare "... makes it difficult to intrude and hardly possible to monitor from an external point of view." This makes government monitoring and prosecution impossible beyond the will of Retroshare users
Free to use.
Find out more: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
Screenshots: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
Download (Mac, PC & Linux): http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/downloads.html
(Thanks to Sepp Hasslberger)
A Decentralized Secure P2P File-Sharing, Chat and Discussion Network: RetroShare