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."

Comments

Good for some, nightmare for others

[Dark Paladin]

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.

Re:Good for some, nightmare for others

[shut_up_man]

Dude, you're such a tease... nakedhairyeyebrowedcheerleaders.com doesn't even exist!

And here I was getting all excited...

Re:Good for some, nightmare for others

[YU Nicks NE Way]

I agree that jpegs of naked cheerleaders with hairy eyebrows are not security issues in and of themselves.

That doesn't really matter, though. The most vulnerable part of any corporate network is its users, now. A user who's violating the acceptable use policies for his or her employer's network is an automatic security risk. First, such an employee becomes a possible blackmail target. In the case of porn, a network admin must bar porn on a professional network because of the possibility of a sexual harassment suit being filed against the company. That means that the AUP must make accessing such materials through the corporate site a disciplinable offense...hey, presto, instant blackmail. Second, though, any user who is actively subverting procedures put in place to prevent such abuse must believe that he or she "knows better than you do". Although the user's right in the vast bulk of cases, the cost in those rare cases where they're wrong is disastrous. What if the site is malicious? If they can get around your barriers, then what else are they downloading? Do they necessarily even know? How tight are the barriers around their machines?

Would you be willing to bet the company on their care?

This still won't work!

[SMN]

Peacefire has been following Peek-A-Booty for a while, and we keep coming to the conclusion that a peer-to-peer anti-censorship system is impossible. There's a very basic problem that Peek-A-Booty still hasn't solved.

The problem: Say I'm a user who wants to connect to a Peek-A-Booty network. I need to get the address of a node to connect to. How do I get this? The obvious solution, and the one used for Gnutella and other peer-to-peer apps, is to publish a list of nodes (or at least one). But that won't work here -- because then the censors can use the same list to track down the nodes and block and/or disable them. This is especially problematic if you're using Peek-A-Booty as it claims it is meant to be: if you're in a country that filters access (say, China) and the government can track down the users trying to circumvent the filters, they can and will punish/torture/kill those people.

Peek-A-Booty has not solved this problem. Read what Tom's article has to say about it:

"For security, there's no attempt at initial discovery - you'll get sent details of a node by word of mouth, or from some other secure source. Baronowski and de Villa expect that citizens groups (NGOs) will become trusted servers."

That's right -- the only way to connect to a Peek-A-Booty network is word-of-mouth, which is horribly ineffective. Finding a node will be extremely difficult unless you know the right people, and then it's very easy for the censor to ruin it. Trust the wrong person, and your whole network is exposed. Government spies could give out addresses that the claim are Peek-A-Booty networks, then catch anyone who tries to connect to those. Worst of all, they could just offer some huge incentive to people for turning in their friends.

I hate to say it, but this system simply isn't ready yet. They have not come up with a technically sound solution.

Spooky prediction

[Rogerborg]

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.

Employee surfing - hard learned lessons

[nomadicGeek]

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.

Peek-A-Booty is no longer affiliated with CDC

[Anonymous Coward]

http://cultdeadcow.com/details.php3?listing_id=426

PEEKABOOTY UPDATE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LUBBOCK, TX, February 7 -- The CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc) would like to clarify a few matters in relation to Peekabooty, an anti-censorship software application currently under development.

Peekabooty was originally the brainchild of the Hacktivismo group, an international cadre of hackers founded by the cDc's Oxblood Ruffin. Hacktivismo's mandate was and is to develop technology in the service of human rights. Peekabooty was its first project; others are in various stages of planning and development.

The CULT OF THE DEAD COW has supported this work from its conception, because we view censorship of the Internet as a cancer that must be excised. However, it should be noted that the cDc membership have not been contributing code or driving the development schedule for Peekabooty. This project was entirely the concern of Hacktivismo group.

Two years ago, Bronc Buster and Mr. Pink wrote the proto-code for the current iteration of Peekabooty. Paul Baranowski (who until recently used the handle "Drunken Master") later became its chief architect and took charge of the Peekabooty programming effort. Some months ago, Paul chose to dedicate himself full-time to refactoring the codebase and finish implementing the remaining functionality.

Paul has recently decided to sever ties with the Hacktivismo group but he will continue to develop the Peekabooty app. Occasionally developers can't find the environment they need to do their best work and now is one such time.

Paul will be leaving Hacktivismo and taking on full responsibility for his work and all future development of his software. So from now on, Paul is directing all aspects of the Peekabooty project. It is no longer a Hacktivismo production. The Hacktivismo group will shift its main focus back to other projects in the pipeline.

We continue to wish Paul the best of luck. We believe that Peekabooty will prove itself to be a liberating force on the Net. Although Hacktivismo has severed formal ties with the project, some members intend to informally contribute their testing skills, etc. to the ongoing effort.

Paul will be presenting a recent snapshot at CodeCon, February 15 - 17, in San Francisco. Go check it out. But please be aware that this is not a launch; Peekabooty is still a work in progress.