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I've actually never tried it before, but I've read about a tool called triangle boy that utilizes third-party freedom-of-speech advocate servers that allow you to redirect url requests. I recall a company called safeweb develops this tool. I heard about this about three years ago though, so I'm not sure whether it still works.

My anecdote on India and IT was some of my friends having to use SafeWeb (remember that??) to prevent the government snooping their web pages.

They received constant death threats from police and unnamed callers. My friend who worked there was female and was threatened with rape over the telephone as well. She said that a local indian employee was raped and murdered during her term there.

She was an Australian lawyer working for an Amnesty International type NGO, investigating human rights' abuse and corruption in India.

Now, some software firms, primarily under the banner of "fighting piracy" are looking again to the pay-to-play model and trying to implement this sort of system, most notably in the .NET framework. While the initial outlay for users may be much smaller (since software packages don't need to be purchased in bulk up-front), the long-term strategy is to bring in more money to the software creator.

However, personal computers are too powerful and there are too many people interested in having software which works locally -- obtained by paying a one-time fee or nothing at all -- that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to force people and companies back into the old model.

The Internet is another matter. Computer systems used to run exclusively locally. Thanks to the work by you and your peers, where it used to be near-impossible to hook up a couple VAXes together, it became possible to link more and more computers together into the Net we have today.

Political and corporate forces are attempting to divide and control this behemoth. While the first round of attempts in the form of the dot-bomb craze failed spectacularly in commercialising and segmenting the Net, a new wave is having much more success. The Great Firewall of China and damnable legislation is cutting access. Further attempts to force hardware manufacturers to make controls available continue.

Unlike software, which has been commoditised, carrier and connection are services which cross state and national borders. Furthermore, where there are few barriers to entry in the software field, a common carrier requires incredible up-front infrastructure. Hence, there are few major carriers, all of which are regulated by both domestic and foreign governments.

It is therefore rather unlikely, even with some clever hacks such as Triangle Boy, that a return to closed loops and segments is unavoidable if the proponents are prepared to work at it, which they seemingly are.

What do you think about these developments? If your feeling is that they are anathema to the purpose of the Net (which was initially a defensive weapon and never meant to be what it has become), do you see any solutions beyond lobbying of Congressmen, which won't happen for the simple reason that the users are too dispersed as compared to those organised and deep-pocketed who would strongly control the Net?

woof.

Look here.

IIRC, the data is sent to your machine via forged UDP packets. The client on your machine (which is also the proxy for your machine) then reassembles the packets and forwards them to your browser.

Checkout the TriangleBoy Whitepaper

Both Peekabooty and Triangle Boy promised a distributed solution to this kind of Net censorship, but Peekabooty doesn't look like it's ready for prime time and Safeweb appear to have shut down the project (dead link to "project with Voice of America"). Is there a viable project that I can install that will do the same anti-censorship job?

Triangle Boy was originally part of the old Safeweb secure-http proxy service.

That incarnation of Safeweb appears to be dead, replaced by a spook-box maker.

When Safeweb was starting to have problems--overload and outages--I offered them a dollar for their business model. I guess I should have known their real business model was intelligence collection.

--Blair

Sorry. Copy and paste bugs me so I'll save you all the trouble (even though the link didn't load for me).

Link to triangle boy.

G

The researcher that is cited as developing the anonymizer Triangle Boy in this article is working for the company SafeWeb which is supposed to be:
1. A CIA front
2. A company that produces software that they won't bug fix and yet is supposed to ensure anonymity.
Tchah! The only thing governments and their spook-agencies are good at doing is fscking things up.

Learning to use the traditional remailer network takes some time and effort. And this time and effort pays off handsomely by providing the user with a highly secure method to communicate privately and anonymously. But many privacy-minded folks (and their ranks are increasing daily!) are looking for an easier and less time-intensive approach. Some are even willing to pay for it. To satisfy this niche there have arrived many new products and services that provide various combinations of anonymous email, newsgroup posting and Web-surfing with varying degrees of anonymity.

I have provided URLs for some of these services below. I have categorized them into two groups: free of charge and fee-based. Noteworthy amongst these is the fee-based Freedom Software by the Montreal-based Zero Knowledge Systems (ZKS). Launched in December 1999, Freedom is a 'privacy system' not unlike the traditional remailer network . It allows users to send email, post to newsgroups, chat and surf the Web in total privacy without having to trust third parties with their personal information. Freedom users create multiple digital identities - "nyms" - with which their online activities are associated. All data packets Freedom users send are encrypted and routed through a global privacy infrastructure called the Freedom Network, which is hosted by participating ISPs and other independent server operators. A 30-day free trial is available.

The package has been criticized <http://cryptome.org/zks-v-tcm.htm> for not being open-source. But that is changing. The source code of the kernel module of the Linux version of Freedom <http://opensource.zeroknowledge.com/> has been released; and the release of the Windows version source code is "coming soon."

Free of Charge
GILC Web-Based Remailer <http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer. html>
Hushmail <http://www.hushmail.com>
Safeweb <http://www.safeweb.com>
Zixmail <http://www.zixmail.com>
Anonymouse <http://anonymouse.is4u.de/>
COTSE <http://www.cotse.com/home.html>
Somebody.net <http://somebody.net/>
ANON.XG.NU's Web-Based Remailer <http://anon.xg.nu/remailer.html>
Chicago <http://xenophon.r0x.net/cgi-bin/mixnews-user.c gi>

Fee-Based
ZKS Freedom <http://www.freedom.net>
SkuzNET's The Internet Mail Network <http://www.theinternet.cc/ http://www.mailanon. com/>
IDcide <http://www.idcide.com>

Semi-OT: I've oft wondered if one could use a Nimda infected machine as a relay for browsing or I-Phone to cover one's tracks. You could accumulate a list of these machines just by watching your logs, then when you felt the need you bounce off two or three, perhaps using SSL to hide the contents of the traffic until you got to the last machine....

1. Face it: college is IMPORTANT

Yes and No, if you want to be a doctor, yes, college is important, you will learn the skills you need. If you want to be work with computers, college is NOT important, real life experience is.

6. Whether you like it or not, most companies will NEVER consider you and most professionals won't respect you if you don't have a degree. You will keep losing arguments even though you're right

WRONG, i just turned 22 (a week ago), i've been working since i was 17 (WORKING, not hobby thingies, real prof. work), i started as a linux admin, helped raise a company when i was 19 (life), worked in San Francisco during the .com (safeweb). I left SF in september during the bad economy, came back to belgium, still dont have ANY degree, and i immediately got employed by Hewlett-Packard. I get the amount of respect i deserve, granted the first month you have to prove yourself, but that goes with ANY new job.

7. You'll never know how much you lack unless you go to college.

For computer science, you lack sh#t, i went to some classes with a friend of mine, both at USF and SFSU, and it sucked. Maybe a UC Berkeley or MIT education is worthwhile but those are exceptions.

why bother, the holes already exist. Check out triangle boy some software to get around the chinese blocking software, but I suppose it will work just as well with the Saudi version. Basically it's a distributed proxy server.

Isn't it funny that one of Safeweb's main investors is a company controlled by the CIA called In-Q-Tel. Here is Safeweb's investors page.

Isn't it funny that one of Safeweb's main investors is a company controlled by the CIA called In-Q-Tel. Here is Safeweb's investors page.

If you can't find any entries (unlikely, for bigger companies), it indicates that either:

• Company's doing fine, everyone's happy, or
• Employees are clueless dolts that have never read FC. :-)

... and if you want to browse the pages from work, perhaps consider using SafeWeb ...

Safeweb works fine if you're jonesing for MSN's 1337 content and you don't want to screw with your user agent (or, in the case of Opera, patch your executable, since even with "Identify as MSIE 5.0" selected, "Opera" is still contained in the user agent string and blocked).

IIRC, Safeweb does attempt to clean up JS and other dangerous stuff from pages it displays to you, but it's still a risk.

They do a pretty good job of sanitizing JS, but not perfect. In about an hour, I found a couple ways for a malicious server to compromise anonymity through SafeWeb, using JS. I'll grant that it's a tough job to sanitize all JS, but SafeWeb should provide a way for users to browse without JS. In my opinion, this is the single biggest problem with using SafeWeb.

I sent email to the Safeweb folks about the fundamental "You're using Javascript" problem, and got a really prompt reply from their technical management, which was good, but they fundamentally didn't get it, which bothered me.

Their FAQ indicates they don't get it-- they dismiss the notion that JS is a privacy concern, and discredit those who say it is. However, I think they realize it internally. I know someone who used to work there. He says they get emails complaining about JS every day, but they don't want to do away with their current UI.

As I mentioned, Triangle Boy is really cool - it's a sort of distributed set of volunteer-run anonymizing servers, which keep moving around to prevent blocking services from blocking them...

The concept is old... some people (*cough*) have been doing this since at least 1996. All it takes is an anonymizing proxy script that is released for distribution. I wrote one called CGIProxy, and there are others out there. Triangle Boy has pros and cons compared to these-- it puts the bandwidth load on SafeWeb's machines rather than the volunteer Triangle Boy servers, but then it won't work at all if the SafeWeb server ever has a problem (the other scripts run independently).

Feel free to ask more questions; this particular topic is a specialty of mine.

SafeWeb offers annonymous browsing too...

http://www.safeweb.com/ is still there.

If the proxy is on your side of the router, the logs will show the proxy accessing web sites instead of you accessing them directly. If there are several people using that proxy, you may be able to somewhat "mask" your traffic since you can only tell where the proxy is going, not necessarily who told it to go there. If you have to authenticate to the proxy, then it becomes very easy to just check the proxy logs for your specific traffic.

If the proxy is on the other side of the router, the logs will only show you accessing that proxy. The router itself cannot tell where you're telling that proxy to go, you would need a packet sniffer for that.

For any of this to work you obviously need access to a proxy server, you don't just set an option in IE to make it work. You can also check out something like Safeweb.

Bah this is the place you want to be.

So did Nortel, BTW. All internal and external port 80 traffic was filtered out. Thankfully, there was safeweb, and slashdot.

I was thinking there is a site safeweb that offers anonymous, encrypted web browsing that can turn off cookies, malicious javascript, and pop-up windows. It works good on internet explorer, but is really buggy on my mozilla release.

Use safeweb, or a similar secure proxy. Let them snoop all they like, but it will be a cold day in hell before they figure out where you've been surfing ;-)

Ads of the form of:

IF YOU DON'T WANT POP-UPS, GO TO WWW.SAFEWEB.COM, CLICK ON "Configure", CHECK "Block Pop-Up Windows", AND CLICK ON "Set Permanent Options".

Added bonus: every connection is SSL between you and Safeweb (not so between Safeweb and the server you're trying to reach, but your netadmin can't sniff that).

I also recommend "Disable Java Applets", "Disable Plugins", and "Filter Profiling Cookies".

Then you get an extra banner ad with Safeweb's customers in it, but the ESC key still stops animated GIFs, and that's all they accept (so far).

Only gotcha: it's a little slower than connecting directly, and every hour or so the proxy server slashdots itself, but it always comes back. Oh, and sometimes they rejigger your authentication to further shroud your identity, so you lose your login to slashdot; annoying as hell when you're posting a message it took you ten minutes to write, but a necessary evil.

--Blair

safeweb.com is a free proxy service that will work with any Java-compatible browser. It lets you disable popups, cookies, malicious scripts, and whatever else you want to. It also hides your IP address.

It gets even stranger when, before the fix, I *could* access all three by using Safeweb, the program I use to bypass our proxy at work. I figured it was something with my ISP. But then Slashdot says it's a hardware problem on their end.

Oh well, at least I got to get outside for a bit. Course, being that it is Florida that meant 95 degree temps with feels like around 106, 100% humidity, followed by an approximate 3 degree drop before the sky opens up at the 'acts of nature and God' start flying.

Got my fix now, though, so guess I'll sleep.

IMHO, read some HOWTO's, this service is completely redundant. Below is a little addendum to the previous post: - Protect your PC from malicious hackers: Recompile the kernel with all security options, deactivate all unneccessary services like telnetd or ftpd.
ipchains will do nicely
- Prevent Websites from tracking your activities: Use mozilla or conqueror with cookies disabled, or set a per-site cookie policy. Use a proxy to disguise your IP if you have broadband with static IP.
for broadband and dialup: safeweb
- Secure your passwords and personal information: One word: Encription. Encript the data in your file system.
An encrypted filesystem is very secure but not for mortals.
- Block unwanted ads and speed up browsing: Use mozilla with a per-syte image policy. reject everithing that comes from doubleclick.net.
just edit your hosts file and add some entries from hostsforlinux

You can get there via SafeWeb.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us!!!

I'm guessing you can't log in to slashdot as your school's proxy blocks all JavaScript. Try surfing to www.safeweb.com and then surf to slashdot.org from there. If the proxy at your school allows SSL-connections (which it probably does), then you should be able to view whatever site you want (without even the content being logged at the proxy).

Good luck

What follows is mostly a re-post of a caffeine and sleep deprevation induced manifesto I posted in the article on Cult of the Dead Cow's recent product announcement.

Distributed proxies and access to the web

There is a huge benefit in an easy way to access the web from controlled and possibly opressive environments, such as from behind company or school firewalls where administrators check on traffic, or from UN Human Rights Commission type countries.

If Chinese grandmothers and high school students could easily read anything on the web, then China would be less likely to end up in a war with us or Taiwan. The Chinese are not going to like America or agree with us because they can read the propaganda and claptrap our press spews out every day, but they will have a different sense of perspective (perhaps more cynical) and they will be less likely to get into a froth about the spy-boys being a little rough with the planes. Suffice that I think that the more the people of the world can see and hear of each other, the safer the world will be. The Truth Shall Set You Free.

Of course, if you give people in communist countries a safe, unblockable way to access a set of http proxies which can then get the web pages, then the same system can be used for someone in Europe to use paypal.com in spite of the best intentions of their paternal government. It can also be used to post to slashdot in spite of the fact that you've been modded down 5 times in the last 24 hours. If Saudis can access porn, then The WIPO Troll can post fecaljapan.

The dailynews.yahoo.com link is a good example: it is unlikely that you can easily visit it from China. Look at these stories:

• Punching Holes in Internet Walls, a New York Times article on attempts to circumvent access restrictions from countries that "protect" their people from information. (Here are the obligatory partners and channel links.)
• Beijing Declares Victory But Chat Rooms Are Skeptical, a New York Times article on censored web discussion boards in China. If Chinese could safely access web sites outside the country, they might use uncensored web boards. (Again, channel and partners links.)
• www.realmapping.com, attempting to keep a database of IP addresses and geographic position. See some technical information here.

This doesn't even touch on the persistent and heroic efforts of employees everywhere to read 2600.com, fuckedcompany.com, and other blocked sites while on the clock. And numerous attempts by *_sporks everywhere to . . . nevermind, no one sympathizes with *_sporks.

Something like realmapping system might be used by gateway machines in China to track where offending users are inside China. A Triangle Boy running both inside and outside the wall is needed to let everyone see the all the internet they want (violating EU directives by sharing personal information if that's their desire).

For a gnutella/freenet to fix the internet access problem, it has to be undetectable by the European/Communist firewalls (because the Communists will block all encrypted traffic, or find the student himself) and someone in the free part of the world must run a script to dump www.nytimes.com into the gnutella/freenet system. It would be much better to set up Triangle Boy without the single point to block, the central safeweb service, and doing something to hide and disguise the web page requests and content.

This hard to do. A system that doesn't hide and disguise the traffic risks the Communists blocking all encrypted traffic or harassing users, but maybe it can work if enough people use it. Maybe proxy and client combinations can hide their real traffic in the meta tags and comments of innocent looking web pages, or use other steganographic tactics, but you would have to be constantly upgrading those modules.

Without the central safeweb proxy, cooperation from publishers on the free side of the firewall is useless. This would have the effect of making it impossible for Yahoo to not display Nazi stuff to France, because they couldn't tell who was from France. Yahoo and the French, the Communists and their people, Rob Malda and the sporks will all have to realize that anything they put on the Internet is on the Internet for anyone who wants it.

We can force the world to choose the whole Internet or none at all.

The dailynews.yahoo.com link above is a good example, as it is likely that you couldn't easily visit it from a computer in China. To see what I am talking about, look at these:

• Punching Holes in Internet Walls, a New York Times article on various attempts to circumvent access restrictions. (Here are the obligatory partners and channel links.)
• Beijing Declares Victory But Chat Rooms Are Skeptical, a New York Times article providing background information on web discussion boards used and censored by people in China. (Again, channel and partners links.)
• www.realmapping.com, (changing their name to Quova), a company attempting to keep a database of IP addresses versus geographic position. You can look at some technical information here.

A system or service like that described in the realmapping links might be used by gateway machines in China to broadly filter all sites outside the country, except for perhaps a select few. This is a real threat to the safety of the world. If Chinese grandmothers and high school students could easily and regularly read anything on the web, then China is much less likely to end up in a war with us or with Taiwan. The Chinese are not going to like America more or agree with our positions because they can read the propaganda and claptrap that our press spews out every day, but they will have a different sense of perspective (perhaps more cynical) and they will be less likely to get into a froth about some spy-boys getting a little rough with airplanes. I'm not going to get into the philosophy of it all, but suffice to say that I think that the more the people of the world can see and hear of each other, the safer the world will be. The Truth Shall Set You Free.

A system like Triangle boy, which is a network of proxies run by volunteers to enable you to connect to safeweb, is what we really need to solve this Internet filtering in foreign countries. An easier to use freenet/ gnutella from l0pft will be very exciting of course, but I think it may not be the right solution for the Communist censorship problem.

For a gnutella/freenet to have effect on the Chinese student who wants to read a New York Times article, it has to be undetectable by the Communist Firewall (because the Communists might decide to block all encrypted traffic, or find the student himself) and it depends upon someone in the free part of the world running a script to dump www.nytimes.com over into the gnutella/freenet system every day. I believe it would be much better to set up something like Triangle Boy but without the single point of failure of the central safeweb service, and doing something to hide and disguise the web page requests and content.

That's really hard to do. If you settle for a distributed system that doesn't hide and disguise the traffic, then you run the risk that the Communists will simply block all encrypted traffic or start trying to track down and harass individuals inside their country. Maybe you can depend on the difficulty of running that type of firewall on a whole country, and the fact so many people will use it even the Communists won't be able to throw them all in jail. Maybe you can also set up clever proxy and client combinations that hide their real traffic in the meta tags and comments of innocent looking web pages, or use other steganographic techniques, but you would have to be constantly upgrading them against Communist detection.

By getting rid of the central safeweb point, you also avoid any censorship due to cooperation from publishers on the free side of the firewall. This would have the effect of making it impossible for Yahoo to not display Nazi stuff to France, because they couldn't tell who was from France. This would make the IP ban that occurs after you modded down 5 times in 24 hours also useless. Yahoo and the French, the Communists, and Rob Malda will all have to come to the realization that anything they put on the Internet is on the Internet for everyone, no discrimination.

That day cannot come too soon. We need to get to work.

The dailynews.yahoo.com link above is a good example, as it is likely that you couldn't easily visit it from a computer in China. To see what I am talking about, look at these:

• Punching Holes in Internet Walls, a New York Times article on various attempts to circumvent access restrictions. (Here are the obligatory partners and channel links.)
• Beijing Declares Victory But Chat Rooms Are Skeptical, a New York Times article providing background information on web discussion boards used and censored by people in China. (Again, channel and partners links.)
• www.realmapping.com, (changing their name to Quova), a company attempting to keep a database of IP addresses versus geographic position. You can look at some technical information here.

A system or service like that described in the realmapping links might be used by gateway machines in China to broadly filter all sites outside the country, except for perhaps a select few. This is a real threat to the safety of the world. If Chinese grandmothers and high school students could easily and regularly read anything on the web, then China is much less likely to end up in a war with us or with Taiwan. The Chinese are not going to like America more or agree with our positions because they can read the propaganda and claptrap that our press spews out every day, but they will have a different sense of perspective (perhaps more cynical) and they will be less likely to get into a froth about some spy-boys getting a little rough with airplanes. I'm not going to get into the philosophy of it all, but suffice to say that I think that the more the people of the world can see and hear of each other, the safer the world will be. The Truth Shall Set You Free.

A system like Triangle boy, which is a network of proxies run by volunteers to enable you to connect to safeweb, is what we really need to solve this Internet filtering in foreign countries. An easier to use freenet/ gnutella from l0pft will be very exciting of course, but I think it may not be the right solution for the Communist censorship problem.

For a gnutella/freenet to have effect on the Chinese student who wants to read a New York Times article, it has to be undetectable by the Communist Firewall (because the Communists might decide to block all encrypted traffic, or find the student himself) and it depends upon someone in the free part of the world running a script to dump www.nytimes.com over into the gnutella/freenet system every day. I believe it would be much better to set up something like Triangle Boy but without the single point of failure of the central safeweb service, and doing something to hide and disguise the web page requests and content.

That's really hard to do. If you settle for a distributed system that doesn't hide and disguise the traffic, then you run the risk that the Communists will simply block all encrypted traffic or start trying to track down and harass individuals inside their country. Maybe you can depend on the difficulty of running that type of firewall on a whole country, and the fact so many people will use it even the Communists won't be able to throw them all in jail. Maybe you can also set up clever proxy and client combinations that hide their real traffic in the meta tags and comments of innocent looking web pages, or use other steganographic techniques, but you would have to be constantly upgrading them against Communist detection.

By getting rid of the central safeweb point, you also avoid any censorship due to cooperation from publishers on the free side of the firewall. This would have the effect of making it impossible for Yahoo to not display Nazi stuff to France, because they couldn't tell who was from France. This would make the IP ban that occurs after you modded down 5 times in 24 hours also useless. Yahoo and the French, the Communists, and Rob Malda will all have to come to the realization that anything they put on the Internet is on the Internet for everyone, no discrimination.

That day cannot come too soon. We need to get to work.

Triangle Boy is a free peer-to-peer application that bypasses firewalls and other mechanisms that attempt to block access to SafeWeb. Users who are currently blocked from directly accessing SafeWeb (or any other site) will be able to access it indirectly through any other computer running Triangle Boy.

https://triangleboy.com/

SafeWeb allows you to connect your computer to the Web through a secure, private pipe. SafeWeb encrypts all data sent and received, making it impossible for anyone to pry into your online activity. In addition, since your computer does not connect directly to any servers other than ours, no Web site you visit can obtain information about you that you do not specifically allow to pass through our SafeWeb server.

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like marketing stuff, but it's all I could find to cut-and-paste. :) Try it! You'll like it!

SafeWeb

Of course this does not solve all of the problems since the government could order SafeWeb to release their logs and do a little sluthing... but it creates a little more trouble for them.

https://fugu.safeweb.com/webpage/press_room/in_q_t el.html

It looks to me like the CIA liscensed the product that SafeWeb produces. If you consider a paying customer to be "funding" and "owning" a buisness.. then I guess you could say the CIA owns SafeWeb.
espo
--

Perhaps you are forgetting all about the elaborate system known as Echelon? The CIA piggybacks on the UK to legally spy on US citizens.

I looked high and low on the site and could find no disclosure that the CIA was funding SafeWeb. If a disclosure even exists, would you mind posting the URL? And believe me, it's quite possible for both SafeWeb and the CIA to track users; to quote (and [comment]):

"In order to guarantee that your SafeWeb surfing experience is as secure as possible, we maintain logs of select information including [but not limited to] the time of requests and certain http protocol headers."

https://www.safeweb.com

If you don't want to be tracked, make it hard to be tracked

Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.

Maybe you're a civil libertarian, and maybe you're not. Maybe you worry about how the United States exercises its vast investigative and prosecutorial powers, and maybe you don't.

But if you counsel U.S. corporations on computer-related issues, you should be concerned about a new proposed treaty known as the "Convention on Cybercrime." The Council of Europe, a 43-nation public body created to promote democracy and the rule of law, is nominally drafting the treaty. Curiously, however, the primary architect is the United States Department of Justice.

The Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation are using a foreign forum to create an international law-enforcement regime that favors the interests of the feds over those of ordinary citizens and businesses. Their goal is to make it easier to get evidence from abroad and to extradite and prosecute foreign nationals for certain kinds of crimes.

Maybe you trust the law-enforcement chiefs in D.C. to do the right thing. But here's the catch. The same new powers given to the United States will also handed over to Bulgaria, Romania, Azerbaijan, and other Council of Europe nations that-although officially democratic now-don't have a strong traditions of checks and balances on police power.

Do you want investigators rummaging around your clients' computer systems on warrants issued by former Soviet bloc nations?

(read full article here)

I wonder how many people visit the site using proxies, and if IP addresses are going to be used, I hope Indy Media know how circumstantial thay shit is. I wonder if it can be fought with in court with a demonstration of Packet Replays and Packet Injections, to show how just how shitty using IP addresses as identification can be.

And people think I'm paranoid about using daisy chaining proxies along with Safeweb

Well for those here who need it (I doubt there's many) here are my privacy links.

I think that the technical difficulties involved with censoring are difficult enough (safeweb is not the only way to beat censors), there is also the dilemma of letting some large corporation decide what kids can and cannot see. Unfortunately, I think that it will be nearly impossible to prevent the installation of filtering software. Any protests at this time will likely be unsucessful, but removal at a later time might be possible, when the idea that computers are evil dies down.

makaera

Try using SafeWeb, or any other anonymous browsing site. Most will probably be blocked, but you can probably find one that'll work.
My school blocks http://www.safeweb.com, but not https://www.safeweb.com, so I can still use the site with a secure connection.

I'm not sure if your censor program lets you go to those sites, but if it does, you can use them circumvent evil censorship programs. (safeweb works much better.)

I have found them to be buggy and not up all the time. The best place I have found for going around blocking proxies is www.safeweb.com. They've been advertising on Slashdot for a few weeks. It seems to work pretty well, it encrypts everything using SSL and even works with Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, etc. (which the Anti-Censorware proxies won't).
--

I stumbled upon something very neat the other day... if you're on a machine where you can't install any of the above (such as at work) or don't want to mess with the browser settings, just go to SafeWeb.

The nice thing is that it also encrypts everything you view with 128-bit SSL, so you can defeat those who sit around and read weblogs all day at your place of employ.

It has it's annoyances, but it works well for me. At work, I don't have to fear of accidentaly clicking on a link that takes me to pr0n. (Yes, completely unintentional, I assure you. :P)

The only thing is that it's a .com... I'm sure they have a plan for making money but I haven't quite figured out what it is yet. The only thing I can imagine is perhaps banner ads in the frame they put at the top. But hey, and extra frame I can deal with as long as my surfing is anonymous.

ISP anonymity was a given, anyway.
Using my IP address, timestamp, and a warrant,
the Man can usually 'convince' my ISP to backtrace the IP to a name.

However, there are tools that can provide a decent level of anonymity:

Freedom - Privacy for everyone. Easy to use, relatively fast, and the Linux client is open source.
Based in Canada so Carnivore shouldn't be a problem.

SafeWeb - SSL surfing proxy, so your lan-mates/ISP can't snoop on your traffic.

Anonymous Remailers - MixMaster remailers can provide a very good level of email anonymity.
I don't have a link, but info is pretty easy to find.

There are tons more, these are just a few well-known tools.

--K

• Few sites run SSL. Try this link - does it work? No - because Slashdot doesn't have SSL capabilities (at least, yet).
• As someone else pointed out, just the fact you are trying to connect to www.hotnastyporn.com can set off the filter and stop you.
• Someone else suggested SafeWeb - the question then becomes "do they block SafeWeb IPs?" Given US laws like the DCMA, if enough people decide that getting around "access controls" is wrong, it's not entirely implausible for the gov't to block.

Basically, the only really plausible way to get around the filters isn't SSL from the sites, it's using services like SafeWeb. And then you block those services...

So big deal. Just get someone to setup a proxy in the Free World that lets you connect to it via SSL. Everything goes over the SSL connection, the proxy goes and gets the real pages, and the Reichstag is none the wiser.

Safeweb, AskJesus, Babelfish, etc.

These are all examples of a fairly simple web application that pretty much destroy all hopes of this filtering methodology every flying. Are all these applications to be blacklisted as "obcene", "occult", or "too useful"?

Just like the porn, they'll never get em all.

The resolution: Just have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.

Try using safeweb. It is a secure and encrypted proxy like system. It even runs the images through safeweb site.