A most disturbing announcement was posted to the or-talk mailing list by Roger Dingledine, one of the core developers of Tor. Earlier this month it was discovered that moria1 and gablemoo, two of the seven directory authorities of the Tor darknet were compromised along with a server added to the project's domain to track and serve metrics. One of the boxen was imaged for later analysis but all were reconstructed. New crypto keys were cut for the directory authorities due to the compromise, necessitating a new release of the software. Scarily, moria also hosted the Subversion and git repositories for …
It's been said that the killer app that made the Net as ubiquitous as it is today is the web browser, with e-mail running a close second. Just about everyone uses a browser in some capacity or another to access news, information, and e-mail, possibly moreso than dedicated applications (such as e-mail readers, RSS readers, or database searching applications). As great as they are, web browsers have their own unique sets of problems and vulnerabilities that have to be taken into account, especially if privacy is of concern to you.
Firefox, in my considered opinion, is an excellent web browser …
If you've read my website for any length of time, you're probably aware of the fact that I am very much a privacy advocate - I think that it is none of anyone's business what you search for on the Net, what you read, or where you go. Furthermore, it is also a closely held belief of mine that so long as you aren't bothering anyone, aren't causing trouble, and aren't doing anything to anyone of legal age in your country of residence that's hurting anyone (or if it is, it's consensual and has been negotiated for in advance), it is …
Someone Out There has set up a new wiki on the Tor network for exchanging and cataloging links. It's admittedly a little thin right now on content, but the more that word gets out, the bigger it'll hopefully get. You can check it out here: http://mihfrbaf562yakt2.onion/wiki/
I still have to write about the rest of Thresholds, going to see Daywatch, and on Sunday night going to The True Colors Tour to see the Dresden Dolls and Cyndi Lauper perform. There's a lot going on right now; story of my lives for the past month or so, in fact.
But I still want to write about something, so I'm going to get out my war jacket and write about the Tor Hidden Wiki vanishing. The Tor Hidden Wiki was a site hidden somewhere on the Tor darknet. Nobody knows who ran it or where it was located …
Tor, The Onion Router is a well-known net.privacy project that has been the subject of a grassroots development project for a couple of years now. The EFF has made room for a couple of student developers through Google's Summer of Code programme and posted an official announcement to the NoReply wiki. To apply for a position in the project you have to have a code sample and be at least somewhat familiar with how Tor works and how the code works. Knowledge of crypto is a major plus, seeing as how it encrypts traffic between nodes for privacy. You …
Paul Cesarini of Bowling Green State University is an assistant professor of visual communication and has been using Tor (The Onion Router - an anonymisation system for net.traffic) to familiarise himself with it so that he could then discuss it with students in two of the courses he teaches. He was visited by campus police and a network admin and told to stop using it. It seems that someone else on campus was using Tor, and more's the point he was under investigation for fraud of some kind, and they wanted to know if the student under investigation had been …
