items tagged with privacy

Another scary news ...even If you are behind a firewall, it is possible to fingerprint (identifying) Your computer...yes we may be not alone  :-)

The technique works by "exploiting small, microscopic deviations in device hardware: clock skews." In practice, Kohno's paper says, his techniques "exploit the fact that most modern TCP stacks implement the TCP timestamps option from RFC 1323 whereby, for performance purposes, each party in a TCP flow includes information about its perception of time in each outgoing packet. A fingerprinter can use the information contained within the TCP headers to estimate a device's clock skew and thereby fingerprint a physical device. Read more at news.com

• 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)

 Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.
Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are "routed-through" other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is.
Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Unlike other peer-to-peer file sharing networks, Freenet does not let the user control what is stored in the data store. Instead, files are kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files in the data store are encrypted to reduce the likelihood of prosecution by persons wishing to censor Freenet content.

GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking. The primary application implemented within the GNUnet framework is anonymous censorship-resistant file-sharing.
The goal of the GNUnet project is to provide an infrastructure for secure peer-to-peer networking. All communication in GNUnet is authenticated and link-to-link encrypted. The economic model makes attacks on the network harder since the economics can be used to control resource usage. GNUnet peers exchange messages using a pluggable transport service abstraction. Currently, transport services based on UDP, TCP, HTTP and SMTP are available. The GNUnet core provides mechanisms to perform resource allocations for CPU, bandwidth and storage space. The core enforces resource limitations set by the user. GNUnet does not rely on any centralized services. New Peer-to-Peer protocols can be easily implemented on top of the basic GNUnet infrastructure. Current protocols include anonymous file sharing, a trivial chat protocol, message throughput benchmarking and network topology visualization.

 Mute is a file sharing network that uses virtual addresses (instead of IP addresses) and ant-inspired routing algorithms to protect the privacy of both downloaders and uploaders.

• MUTE protects your privacy by avoiding direct connections with your sharing partners in the network. Most other file sharing programs use direct connections to download or upload, making your identity available to spies from the RIAA and other unscrupulous organizations.
• Ants display collectively intelligent behavior when foraging for food or fighting off predators. Each ant in the colony acts in a rather simple way, but together they end up doing something clever, like discovering the shortest path between their ant hill and a food source. MUTE's routing mechanism is inspired by ant behavior.

Here is a lit of available NODES, a collaborative Wiki is also available Mute Wiki