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Peek-a-Boo (ty)
Anemophilous Coward writes "Tom's Hardware has a story detailing cDc's new anonymity app, just demonstrated Sunday. Peek-A-Booty is designed to let surfers access sites blocked by government restrictions, and is essentially, a distributed proxy network. It uses a peer-to-peer model, masking the identity of each node. This means the user can route around censorship that blocks citizens' access to specific IP addresses, because the censor doesn't know they're going there. There is also a website dedicated to the project."
I can see both the good and bad of this application.
On the good side: China. Folks over there who have to deal with the gigantic "Firewall O' Death" (also known as the "Damn it, Communism works so stop reading about how it doesn't" Firewall) can possibly use this tool to get to the outside information they need to keep spreadin' the news that "Information good."
On the other side, as a Security Manager in a bank who's sometimes asked to go find out if person XYZ has been accessing nakedhairyeyebrowedcheerleaders.com, I can see how this utility might make it impossible for me to do my job.
So I've got mixed feelings on this utility.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
THe problem is restrictive governments have people on staff to look for stuff like this. This app (while I haven't tested it) pulls from multiple sources. I like the idea a lot. Sorta moving towards a P2P web network where you can browse content like you do now but peer to peer rather than client / server.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Hmmm... gangs act in funny ways. They often think if they conduct illegal activites en masse they are somehow shielded from the law.
I certainly would not want to use an anonymous network where some sicko could be using your computer to conduct their crimes. Do you think the cops would really understand or care how those files got onto your computer? No. Off to jail you go.
The Great Rogerborgio will make a spooky prediction. When Peek-a-Booty 1.0 reaches 100,000 downloads, a story will break that the client contains a hostile trojan that lets "evil hackers" take control of your machine, impersonate you, steal your credit card details, and screw your shrieking girlfriend in the ass while you watch helplessly, tears of frustration streaming down your shocked, betrayed face.
The story will be submitted by a "credible group of anonymous white hat hackers" and run - unquestioned - by BBC Online and - slightly questioned, at best - by Reuturs, and every other online news source will pick it up from there and spread it as gospel truth.
It will not be true. It will be Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, pure and simple. Many interested parties will want Peek-a-Booty to fail. In fact, there are so many - governmental and industrial - that even the Great Rogerborgio cannot peer through the mists of time sharply enough to determine the culprit.
But it will happen. And remember, you read it here first.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
While the aims and goals of this project are commendable, I can't help but think that this program will be utilized moreso by old men wanting to look at kiddie porn safely, than those in oppressed countries.
One can simply see this trend with the GNUtella network, and monitoring the search strings people send out. They're full of stuff such as "hairless pre-teen sex" and "dogs fucking women".
I'd be much more interested in running Peek-A-Booty if it had some sort of information-type limiting, but this would go against the whole basic concept of the program. I'd be glad to assist those who are oppressed, but WILL NOT help sexual predators and the like.
Maybe people who want to help those in oppressive countries should throw up rogue squid proxy servers with bandwidth rate limiting and perhaps some client access limiting (*.cn, *.ru, and soon, *.us). This is what I do and it works quite well.
I don't even advertise it, but quite a few people find it and use it (mostly people in southeast asia, actually)
Doen't this system remind anyone of the media network in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age? Information gets passed from one place to another by different people, so that no one can tell where the person on the other end is. Looks like another one of Stephenson's ideas has become a reality.
... some cracker will set up a node that, when asked for a web page, issues spam instead.
... or worse yet the web page requested with spam interspearsed.
That will be the end of that.
The End. (uggh) Nice idea though!
-"The early bird catches the worm, but the late bird sleeps the most"
'Look! Neal Stephenson was right in !' He's not that great people, nor all that presicent. Most of the science in the Diamond Age was bad or ill-concieved, and even the media system is somewhat mangled and unworkable. It involves a really major paradigm shift that he never bothers to explain. That said, I like most of his books, except for the constant and irritating moralizing that he's doing more and more with each book. The Diamond age is stuffed to the ears with 'magic', not tech, so I wish that people would stop crowing that the man is right all the time. He's basically a conservative commentator that writes Sci-Fi. That doesn't make him bad, but it also doesn't make him a futurologist (which wouldn't make him nessecarily more correct anyway, looking at some of the lastest stories here.).
I see a lot of posts which seem to imply that employee surfing should be ignored. Why is it a big deal if an employee does some personal surfing? Why not measure an employee's productivity and leave it at that?
I used to work at a company that had a very liberal internet use policy. We were pretty early adopters as far as the corporate world goes. We wanted people to use the Internet as a tool and didn't want to micromanage or scrutinize its usage.
Over the years we had to tighten our policy as abuses started to mount. The final straw was an idiot who was collecting kiddie porn and saving it on our network server! We immediately notified the police and he has arrested and prosecuted. The guy literally had hundreds of pictures carefully organized into directories to categorize them. It was obvious (1) that he had been doing it for a while, (2) he had invested a great deal of thought and time in these activities.
The company was dragged into the employee's defense trial. We spent a lot of time and money on attorneys, depositions, etc. It was a nightmare. We were forced to implement a system to control and monitor access to the Internet to insure that this type of thing did not happen again. It is one thing to get caught in that type of situation once but it can't happen again.
So we spent a lot of time and money watching and controlling Internet access. It sucks but it only takes one idiot to mess things up for everyone and there are a lot of idiots out there.
I still think that ideally Internet usage should be the employees' responsibility but in the real world things often get much more complicated.
I believe that Peek-a-Booty will be GPL'd, or at least open-sourced.. in that case, one would simply distrust the binaries and compile (or DL from trusted site) the program locally. .. it's a neat piece of code. Assuming the widely-heralded P-a-Booty is coded to the same high standards, I would very much like to get ahold of it.
As far as it goes, however, Back Orifice is notable as one of the trickier trojays to ferret out