Recently I stumbled upon Pihole, which is a tool that blocks advertisements and web trackers. The nifty idea of Pihole is that it is no web proxy as Privoxy but it acts as a DNS server in your network. So, after installing Pihole, you setup your devices in a way that they use Pihole as a DNS server. Then, the device's DNS requests for “good” domains are answered and DNS requests for known, blacklisted ad/tracker domains are not answered (= blocked). Read more

I found a nice application which might replace email in some time: Bitmessage. Basically, Bitmessage creates a Peer-to-Peer network, i.e., a network of equal participants. The quite interesting feature of this app is that it broadcasts messages to (all) participants in this P2P network. As the message is encrypted with the public key of the intended receiver, only this person is able to decrypt the message. The cool feature now is that nobody knows who was able to decrypt the message. Read more