Dancing on the razor line

Saturday, 11 December 2004 19:26

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You want to surf anonymously? here are some tools:

JAP (Java) is based on a set of trust node which mix all http connection and add a level of encryption (ssl) till nobody can say who watch what
Peekabooty, "Peekabooty is software run by "global-thinking, local-acting" people in countries that do not censor the Internet. A user in a country that censors the Internet connects to the ad hoc network of computers running Peekabooty. A small number of randomly selected computers in the network retrieves the Web pages and relays them back to the user.
ENTROPY stands for Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield and as such describes the main goal of the project.

ENTROPY is developed as a response to increasing censorship and surveillance in the internet. The program connects your computer to a network of machines which all run this software. The ENTROPY network is running parallel to the WWW and also other internet services like FTP, email, ICQ. etc.
For the user the ENTROPY network looks like a collection of WWW pages. The difference to the WWW however is that there are no accesses to central servers. And this is why there is no site operator who could log who downloaded what and when. Every computer taking part in the ENTROPY network (every node) is at the same time server, router for other nodes, caching proxy and client for the user: that is You.
After you gained some experience with the ENTROPY network, there are command line tools for you to insert whole directory trees into the network as a ENTROPY site. So ENTROPY does for you what a webspace provider does for you in the WWW - but without the storage and bandwidth costs and without any regulation or policy as to what kind of content you are allowed to publish. Everyone can contribute his own ENTROPY site for everybody else to browse through. The contents is stored in a distributed manner across all available and reachable nodes and no one can find out about who put up what contents into the network [1]. Even if your node is not actively running, your contents can be retrieved by others -- without knowing that it was actually you who published the files. Of course this is only true if you do not publish your name (or leave your name or other personal data in the files you publish)

As far the censoring firewall is concerned, the user is simply accessing some computer not on its "banned" list. The retrieved Web pages are encrypted using the de facto standard for secure transactions in order to prevent the firewall from examining the Web pages' contents. Since the encryption used is a secure transaction standard, it will look like an ordinary e-business transaction to the firewall."

Freenet (Java) is distributed encrypted storage node network so nobody can delete a document or know who is hosting it) are all project that try to bypass the nation-wide censorship of internet. The FAQ o freenet is very instructive and help to learn a lot about anonymity services...

I personnaly use JAP and Freenet sometimes...

I fund an interesting portal discussing of legal news concerning information technology: "geeks, laws, everything in between"
furthermore do not forget to read also: Why a "distributed cloud" of peer-to-peer systems will not be able to circumvent Internet blocking in the long run