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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."
Since Slashdot bans most Tor proxies from making comments. Perfect for geeks, eh?
Anonymizing yourself isn't a crime or probable cause for any kind of search warrant.
... yet.
Anonymizing yourself isn't a crime or probable cause for any kind of search warrant.
In police states, someone who wants to be anonymous deviates from the norm and automatically becomes suspicious, as The Man considers that if you're not guilty, you have nothing to hide.
In US-PATRIOT USA, I'm not sure I'd want to participate in the Tor network. I'm definitely not the only one. Perhaps I'm a coward, but that should tell you something of what this country is slowly turning into...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Has the will to un-molestation finally passed out of mainstream?
There's a big difference between not wanting the government to tap your phone and not wanting web sites to put a cookie on your PC. The latter is a "privacy geek" thing, and yes, that level of privacy is fringe.
I don't respond to AC's.
Not really true is you're using TOR and a proxy. It'd be hard as hell to trace. But maybe so if you're running a TOR server (an outlet for other people's anonymity). That's why there are a hell of a lot more TOR users that don't also run servers. That's also why TOR is virtually unuseable (it's dial-up speed, when it doesn't time-out altogether).
I don't respond to AC's.
Yes. Use encryption. Encryption in your email client, encryption in your browser. Tor does this, but so does https and ssl.
The only way I see to guarantee anonymous receiving is some kind of broadcast - for example as exists with satellite downloading systems: the information is always broadcast by the satellite to a really wide area, in which any party can receive it (and discard it if it's not meant for them to have it) without the abbility to detect who and where has received it. The reason this scheme works is because satellite receiving is a "read only" system - the receivers are passive and don't send information to satellites, they only filter the received content (i.e. channels or download streams). This could be useful with a public key encryption scheme.
(btw. the way satellite downloads currently works is that the receiver must have a separate "ground" line to a regular ISP that's used to send requests to the satellite company to broadcast the desired information, so there's still a traceable line, but in one direction only)
-- Sig down
You have the right to pamphlet anonymously. You have the right to use the internet to do it. You should be able to criticize the government without worrying about anyone getting revenge on you. I totally agree that the Patriot act goes way too far. By removing our basic freedoms, George W. has given the victory to the terrorists. We should be fighting to preserve our freedoms, not giving up our freedoms to fight the terrorists.
The fact that a bunch of sickos use this technology to be perverted does not mean that the rest of us should not use it. If you care about your freedom and you don't like what is going on then you can use it to safely make your complaints heard.
yes.
Think about it this way:
HTTPS etc encrypt your data before it is sent to the wireless card
WPA/WEP encrypts the data as its recieved on the wireless card, then transmits it
not quite right but basicly, HTTPS encrypts data before it would be encrypted for WPA wireless.
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
Has the will to un-molestation finally passed out of mainstream?
Funny you should mention "molestation", because guess what behavior Big Brother is going to cite when they crack down on anonymous Internet proxying?
I value my privacy and will fight tooth and nail to preserve it. However, "privacy" and "anonymity" are not the same thing.
My home is private. My computer is private.
Anything I do outside of my home, whether I travel via foot or via wire, is public and there's a possibility that I may be seen or even recognized.
The idea that one might live one's life in private and without fear of molestation is a *very* recent phenomenon. It's not passing out of the mainstream, it never quite arrived there.
The right to privacy is a post-war interpolation from the set of Constitutional rights. It was hardly a consideration before single-family households became common beyond the elite classes consequent to industrialisation. The very idea of private life took meaning from the distinction to be drawn between the public and private duties of the landed gentry, whether he was acting as public judge or administrator of his chattel. The idea that citizens required more privacy than that demanded by Christian modesty simply did not occur. It is only in the last generation that anyone became actually interested in the details of your private life. Before the information age, such trivia had no value beyond the prurient, of interest only to busibodies and the beat cop; again, unless you were a name.
illegitimii non ingravare
So does anyone know just how much porn there is on the internet?
All of it?
I'm looking for hard statistics cause most "normal" people don't get it when I refer to my connection as a "porn pipe".
Have you tried wearing pants?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Yes, to track a tor session from server to end-user is theoretically possible. Guess what? So is time travel. The confluence of circumstance and technology needed to make either one actually happen make them practically impossible. I don't know tor all that well, but I'd be damn surprised if they did any sort of connection logging whatsoever. So, your quest ends at hop one unless you've managed to root that box. I don't know tor all that well, but I'd be damn surprised if they were bouncing each conn off < N boxes, where N is probably greater than 5. So you'd need to root say 5 boxes. I don't know tor all that well, but I'd be damn surprised if the routes were not randomized from connection to connection. So, you'd need actually need to root pretty much the entire network, or some large subset of it.
I don't know what your personal odds of pulling that off are, maybe you are more 31337 than I, but I'm estimating that the probability is, say, Planck's constant (scalarized, of course.) For the government, we'll give them about 15 orders of magnitude greater... inverse of Avogadro's number, perhaps. Or maybe the Hartree energy constant, if I'm feeling really generous.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
So true. In fact, I would suggest that you stop using envelopes when mailing letters and just use postcards instead, that way everybody along the way can read them much more easily. You don't have anything to hide, do you?
No real reason for secret ballots either, now that I think about it. After all, you're not attemting to make an illegal vote.
The police ought to be able to search your house at will, too. If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear, right?
Oh, remember that sooner or later if you stop defending your freedoms you lose them. When it becomes illegal to criticize the government and you say "but that wasn't what I meant" it's just a tad too late.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
So you don't think warrants are required for any phone taps? Actually, that is a bit of a simplification. Wire taps are used to listen in to essentially private conversations between people who are expected to be friends/collegues/etc, hence the assumption of privacy.
On the other hand, wandering the public internet is akin to strolling in the park or mall, where one would not expect privacy to be guaranteed... and the officers of the Ministry of Love happily exploit that expectation.
That's the remaining gotcha that can reliably get you ID'd.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
On the other hand, wandering the public internet is akin to strolling in the park or mall, where one would not expect privacy to be guaranteed... and the officers of the Ministry of Love happily exploit that expectation.
The problem with this statement is that not all activity on the internet is like strolling in the park or mall. Many times activity on the internet is exactly like a phone call, a communicatin between friends/colleagues/etc. For instance, email or instant messaging. If you post something on a forum such as slashdot, however, in that case it's in the public.
I think if you have a letter in an envolope, you have phone line encrypteded (or if it is a line not connected to the larger standard grid), or you are using encryption/SSL on the internet you can expect protection from warrentless searches and privacy. But I don't think you should always expect a phone conversation to be private (it is insanely easy for someone else inside the same house/building to pick up onto the same line) especially wireless or cell phones (you can listen to cell phone conversations with $30 worth of gear from radioshack). Likewise with the amount of servers your queries may run through I don't think you should expect privacy on the internet. And with a unsealed letter you shouldn't expect that no one will read it (like a post-card).
I qoute the 4th ammendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Searching and seizing needs to be limited to private places and things, otherwise police can't arrest anyone anywhere without a warrant or confiscate drugs in public parks.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
On the other hand, wandering the public internet is akin to strolling in the park...
(pretending that's not a troll...)
The Internet being "public" is your assumption. You infer it, but it's certainly not implied.
The Internet is designed as an end-to-end architecture. AKA point-to-point, which is exactly what the telephone system is. It's not inherently designed to be public or private, but the end-to-end architecture certainly enables truly private communication (assuming the continuing existence of encryption technologies not broken or illegal), and to me it strongly suggests that, given demand, it should be a feature of most Internet applications. Which it sort of is, if you don't count security (i.e., my email and IM and web surfing is private, but that privacy is usually not very secure.)
Ultimately, the Internet with private communication is ten times as useful as the one without it. Maybe a thousand times. Hell, given the cultural impact, you can't measure the difference at all. It leads to two very different worlds.
The fact that this score has an Insightful Moderation is scary...I've got Karma to burn, so let me speak my mind.
We should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our everyday lives, even if the constitution doesn't have a "de facto" privacy clause in it. Remember that crazy court Case Roe v. Wade? The court didn't say that "abortion was legal," the Court declared that laws prohibiting abortion represented a violation of a women's right to privacy. While the right to privacy does to exist as such in the Constitution it has long been interpreted to exist as an umbrella created by the first 5 amendments in the Bill of Rights.
To be quite honest with you, I know cops who have problems with the way that today's society is going. They don't want to have to worry about carrying an ID when they're walking down the street to buy a gallon of milk. (HIIBEL V. SIXTH JUDICIAL DIST. COURT OF NEV.,HUMBOLDT CTY. (03-5554) 542 U.S. 177 (2004) 118 Nev. 868, 59 P.2d 1201, affirmed.)
It really bothers me in a multitude of ways that our civil liberties are being torn down under the guise of terrorism. It really bothers me that many people are letting their guards down and just allowing these rights to just be walked on like nothing matters. Is it just me or am I the only one who sees a problem here?
I disable sigs...do you?
Information wants to be free, deal with it.
Information doesn't want shit, deal with it.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
So you don't think warrants are required for any phone taps?
In the USA with that GWB madman on the loose and in control?
No.
Haven't you been watching the news? He wouldn't know what a court order was if he were slapped one for high treason.
The so called "anarchists" get all over the news acting like total fuckwads at WTO "protests".
As an anarchist, somebody who was at the WTO protests, and someone who strongly supports online privacy and the cypherpunk perspective, I'd like to ask what the hell you're talking about?
The WTO protests was one of the biggest events of the late 20th century, it was part of a snowballing effect against corporate globalization which stretched from all points on the globe, and culminated in events such as the uprisings in Argentina and the Zapatista march on Mexico City.
In what way are the WTO protests, which were centered around deconstructing corporate control of our lives, including information and it's free flow, counter to the cypherpunk position?
What makes you think the public doesn't take privacy seriously? Try getting caught peeking in somebody's bedroom window, and you'll find out how serious most people are about their privacy. It's just that for most people don't need the level of privacy that the Tor Network provides. Someobdy goes to that much trouble to obfuscate their internet traffic definitely deserves to be called a "geek".
...there is also the possibility that, while outside of your home, you might elect to wear a mask or makeup, in a deliberate attempt to disguise your identity. You might also speak softly, or with a characteristically different voice, or in a different language. You could carry cash, instead of credit cards or checks.
Nothing wrong with any of that, even if it does look a bit out of place to those around you.
Now then, I might elect to use Tor, PGP, S/MIME, OpenVPN in a deliberate attempt to disguise my identity.
And there's nothing wrong with that, either.
The notion that I might be conducting myself "in public" does not require me to wear my secrets on my shirtsleaves.
Kid-proof tablet..
I love the IDEA of Tor. I also love the idea of FreeNet. Neither one seems to work at all well (or quickly) in their current iterations however. Until these things are solved, for most people the trade-offs are just not worth it. Especially when so much is achievable under the mere guise of the millions of people involved. Until the RIAA hires MILLIONS of lawyers to sue MILLIONS of customers per year, people won't mind thumbing their nose at them and playing the numbers game. The same is CERTAINLY true for surfing and IM.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
An important thing to note is that Tor provides IP-based anonymity, not privacy. It _only_ helps to hide your IP address. If you send the password for your anonymous e-mail account in cleartext, the last node can intercept it. Actually, when I was running a Tor node, I sniffed people's traffic to see what they were doing. That didn't help me know _who_ the person was, unless he posted his name in cleartext somewhere. This is something you should expect. Tor nodes are random people with unknown interests. That someone is running a Tor node does not mean they don't look at the data you send.
I'll say it again: the encryption in Tor does _not_ hide your payload. It only serves to hide your IP address.
If you use Tor, use encryption on the upper layer.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
While the intent of this project is very good, and I hate to pick holes ....here's one for the ultra-paranoid:
..[whoops, maybe too late], but this is a significant problem that I've come across personally when considering a "privacy" geared livecd. You place a lot of trust in the person(s) packaging the distro unless you pretty much compile the whole thing yourself.
Do you trust the precompiled binaries on the livecd ?
Sure, the OpenBSD source is available for you to comb over for backdoors & sniffers etc, but how do you know that Anonym.OS was compiled using that exact same source code ?
Maybe comparing hashes of the binaries to the offical OpenBSD versions would be a good start, but there are various reasons why this will only get you half way to validating that the build is kosher
I'm not even beginning to suggest this work is trojaned or anything - the last thing I want to do is spread FUD about something this cool and useful
One solution (which is very time consuming, and already dated), is the Trusted Build Live CD (TB) by the Hacktivismo group. It is basically a cookbook for rolling your own Gentoo livecd, with some tailoring for anonymity related applications like Tor (AFAIK, it doesn't do the nice packet filtering that Anonym.OS does, however).
Taking it to Starbucks, (at least where I live) means using Wifi. It really isn't possible they've implemented usable Wifi support in their LiveCD is it? Usually getting wireless to work on linux means finding windows drivers, utilizing NDISWrapper, etc.
That being said, what would be required for the linux community to make Wifi drivers more accessible? Is this something that is reliant entirely on the manufacturers providing drivers or is there some other solution? It would surely aid linux adoption if it was easier to get your Laptop Wifi working.
For the linux-savvy, NDISWrapper is of course very slick, and I was able to get my HP Notebook Wifi card working in about 20 minutes, but the less techy people such as the Grandmother mentioned in the posting are not going to be able to sort their way through ndiswrapper and iwconfig, much less figure out newer encryption methods.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Yeah, that's probably true.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.