Triangle Boy Lives

mlinksva writes: "Safeweb cancelled their free service late last year, but their P2P anonymizing proxy, Triangle Boy, has been spotted in the wild (south of Fort Worth, Texas). 'Because of its stealth nature, the P2P software does not show up in reports from many filtering products and the administrator doesn't even know the problem exists and has no way to check it.'(via UniteTheCows)."

Comments

So?

[neksys]

I can understand the concern that people have over Triangle Boy, but one must consider something important (in terms of the school in the article, anyway): Filters in schools are put in place primarily to prevent students from accidentally accessing some content that the parents may sue over. That, and to prevent kids from wasting their schooltime sending emails. However, to make use of the Triangle Boy, one must a) know how to use it, and b) have a specific reason for accessing blocked material. I don't see the liability issue there - its a piece of "stealth" software that the student, of his own free will, has used - despite acceptable measures to prevent he or she from doing so.
*shrug* Just a thought.

Anyone know anything more about this?

[joto]

How does it work? What does "stealth" mean in this context? Why wouldn't it be blocked by people having firewalls explicitly for the purpose of locking someone in?

According to this article it works by spoofing the the source address. I know at least my firewall would block that.

And furthermore, it needs to contact a server somewhere (that is, another PC running triangle boy). Now, unless they rely on word-of-mouth to tell people where those servers are, they would have to have one or more (easily blockable) servers to hand out IP-addresses and port numbers to connect to.

I don't know what's the most frightening part. That administrators think they must block users instead of simply having strict but reasonable rules that people will understand and follow? That windows let users install programs like triangle-boy without administrator privileges (or that administrators regularly give users administrator privileges). That most commercial firewalls don't block spoofed addresses? That administrators who for some reason want to lock users in don't know about Triangle boy?