Monthly Archives: September 2006

Sick As A Dog

Well right now I feel like I’ve been mauled by Jesus, as I’m sick as a dog and it sucks hard. Went to bed last night and at about 12:30am I woke up feeling funny in the throat, I repeatedly woke every few hours feeling progressively sicker.

Wonderfully at about 6:20am I got up, tried to walk to the toilet and felt like I have just drunk an entire bottle of rum. Needless to say I then slept till 10:50am and now I feel shitty and sick.

Torpark

What is Torpark? Basically it’s a modified version of the Firefox browser that uses the TOR network.

Download Torpark and put it on a USB Flash keychain. Plug it into any internet terminal whether at home, school, or public. Run Torpark.exe and it will launch a Tor circuit connection, which creates an encrypted tunnel from your computer indirectly to a Tor exit computer, allowing you to surf the internet anonymously.

I must give you a little warning though.

German police seize ‘anonymizing’ Tor servers
Police block an undisclosed number of servers during a crackdown on Internet pornography, By John Blau, IDG News Service, September 11, 2006 – Infoworld

In a crackdown on Internet child pornography, German police detected several servers running a copy of Tor, a software designed to anonymize Internet usage.

“We seized or blocked an undisclosed number of servers during a raid, which is still underway,” Jens Gruhl, a spokesman for the public prosecutors office of Konstanz, Germany, said Monday. “A few of these computers had installed copies of Tor.”

Users of Tor software in the country, worried about an unexpected visit by the police, have decried the move in a flurry of blogs.

“This situation is disturbing, really disturbing,” wrote Alexander Janssen, from Düsseldorf, Germany, in a blog post. “I run a Tor server myself and the last thing I want to experience is the police kicking down my door [and] seizing my computer.”

Gruhl said German crime officials are not specifically searching for servers running Tor but for servers distributing child porn. “That fact that police discovered copies of Tor is coincidental, not intentional.”

In his blog, Janssen reckoned that the seized servers were configured to be so-called Tor “exit nodes,” allowing their IP (Internet Protocol) addresses to show up in the server logfiles in question.

Tor was created to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that “threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships and state security,” according to the Web site www.torproject.org.

The software bounces communications around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers, protecting users from Web sites that build profiles of their interests, local eavesdroppers that read data or learn what sites they visit, and even the onion routers themselves.

So in reality privacy comes at a cost.

MetaMachine Closes It's Doors

MetaMachine, the company behind the popular file sharing software eDonkey 2000, has agreed to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $30 million to settle claims it facilitated mass copyright infringement. To bad the open source eMule is the most dominant client in the network and appears to be totally unaffected at this point.