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Anonym.OS a Boon for Privacy Geeks?
The Hosting Guy writes "Wired is running an article about a live CD that makes anonymous browsing easy enough for everyone. 'So easy to use you can hand it to your grandmother and send her off on her own to the local Starbucks.' Anonym.OS makes extensive use of Tor, the onion routing network that relies on an array of servers passing encrypted traffic to permit untraceable surfing."
You might think from the daemon logo that it is a FreeBSD-based thing.
It isn't -- it is OpenBSD-based. So you'd figure the encryption would be top-notch. Also the OS is already very secure. That's what they focus on, to the exclusion of other things.
OpenBSD is quite reliable. If it includes drivers for hardware, they work.
Also, they only use code that they can look at. No blogs of code (like Linux or FreeBSD) are allowed. That's because if you can't inspect them, the NSA or an attacker might have put some bad code in there. It is because of things like this that Theo De Raadt won a prize from Stallman for his contributions to free software.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
1. What are the theories behind simple anonymous sharing of data?
It depends on what you mean by the terms "simple", "anonymous", and "sharing." Seriously. There is a lot of crypto research out there that touches upon the various possibilities, but it all boils down to this: the more anonymity you have in the network the higher the cost of using that network for everyone involved (where cost == increased bandwidth & CPU consumption and increased message passing latency.) In terms of what is possible there is basically a big dial, labelled "apply various crypto protocols and message-hiding techniques", that you can turn to decide how much inconvenience you are willing to put up with in return for better privacy.
2. Is it possible to completely diversify the Internet away from IP-based hosting to a new swarm-network of anonymous users all hosting little pieces of various forms of information? 2b. Is anyone working on this swarm idea?
Possible, but difficult. The difficulty increases significantly if you want to ensure reliability & availability of the data provided by the swarm or provide the nifty "web 2.0" trappings that most people have come to expect from web sites. Various projects are working on components of this mythical system, ranging from the Tor networking system mentioned in the original post to the Invisible Internet Project and GNUNet. Nailing the whole package in a single effort is a non-starter for anyone who has even casually glanced at the relevant research necessary to begin such a project, so each effort focuses on one specific aspect and eventually it might be possible to combine these efforts into a single coherent sytem.
In other words, don't hold your breath waiting for this one to actually come about.
3. As information becomes more accessible, will the need for information privacy be important? 3b. Is it more important to create a totally anonymous information sharing network than it is to work on harder to break encryption schemes?
I won't bother trying to answer the first part of the question because it is a matter of personal preference. As far as the second half of the question goes, having good end-to-end security does not help you if either of the endpoints is compromised; a malicious server can reveal that you are surfing for child porn while a malicious user can reveal that your site is distributing bomb-making recipes with no need for the points in between the two ends to break the communications encryption.
Of course, (s)he also isn't posting anonymously.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I couldn't find a torrent link in the comments, so here is one:= anonymos-shmoo.iso.torrent
http://linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=1249&name
175seeds to 700peers as of 6:53PM MST