Slightly over a year has gone by since I announced that I'd set up a Tor node in Amazon's EC2 to help add some bandwidth to the Tor network. I've been keeping an eye on things since then, keeping tabs on what goes into maintaining a node in Amazon's virtualization infrastructure and tallying up the cost, so here are my results.

Last month my year of 'free' operation of a micro instance in the EC2 was up; I now have to pay full price for my particular tier every month to maintain my node (though I always had to pay …

Slightly over six months months ago (almost to the day) I set up a Tor node using a micro-sized instance in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (or EC2), a service which lets you run virtual machines in Amazon's network for very little money per month at all. As before, my virtual Tor router is running in the free service tier, which lets me push 30 gigs of network traffic every month. I've configured Tor to push rather more traffic than that (100 gigs per month at an average speed of 300 KB per second) and automatically go into hibernation mode (dropping …

Updated: 8 March 2011.

After a discussion on the torservers mailing list about setting up lots of Tor bridges for people to use to connect with the network in areas where it is otherwise blocked, it struck me that I should probably write up how I set up a few back in February during the uprising in Egypt.

Seeing as how I have a limited amount of bandwidth where I live for various reasons (most of all Verizon halting deployment of residential fibre) I've been making use of VPS companies and pushing certain tasks off of my network and onto …

If you're anything like me, at some point you started to run out of room for your dead-tree editions and started downloading e-books. While you no longer have the tactile experience of reading e-books you have to admit that having a fixed-sized device with which you can store hundreds upon thousands of texts makes life a lot easier, plus, not everyone can read comfortably on a laptop or desktop display. Enter Amazon's Kindle, the darling of the e-book reader market which not only lets you buy e-books wirelessly (which can either tank your bank account or save your sanity while …

...you fail at surprise gift.