Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you
The Cathedral is at least trying:
(H/T Voxday)
Since the Gmail privacy brouhaha earlier this month I've started to think a bit about my digital footprint, and with shit like this, damn it's hard not to get paranoid.
Anomaly UK had this post talking about how to do dissenting blogging if the shit gets serious and the government starts to crack down. See how in the comments Jim, who seems to know what he's talking about, makes some suggestions. I also recall how zhainan made that great post about darknets.
In these moments I wish I had done computer science. But us humanities types don't necessarily have to be hostages of the Cathedral.
Jim is right in that a good way of spoofing the digital trackers is routing traffic through non-Cathedral countries, say Russia or China.
Of course China tracks you too in ways closer than the US/EU is even trying to. But they have their priorities, and cracking down with English language blogs or Hollywood movie pirating is not one of them. To this day Russian or Chinese uploaders work as well as megaupload et al. use to work. Now if only North Korea could get some data centers working...
I don't know what we can do, but God knows I'm getting a Chinese printer next.
4 comments
reply'But us humanities types don’t necessarily have to be hostages of the Cathedral.' Don't worry. The techie types write apps like "TorButton." That takes all the complexity of Tor and puts it into a little Firefox add-on so you don't have to fiddle with the complexity. TorButton is not a magic bullet, but stuff that is comparable will end up making complex security functions accessible to humanities types.
I'm using Iron at the moment, and know about TOR but never went about setting it up. I shall spend some time this morning. I'm no programmar but I'm what you could call a 'power user', so with enough time I can set up anything. I just want to know it's worth it.
TorButton is not necessarily useful at the moment, unless you really want to test how the network looks from different IP numbers. When you say "Iron," do you mean the SRWare Chrome alternative? My point wasn't to tout the virtues of TorButton, so much as it was to reassure you that the complex stuff can be made user-friendly when there is a huge demand - and now that SOPA and ACTA are floating around, there IS a huge demand.
Yes, I'm using SRWare Iron with the Sheepish add-on. Funny the sheer amount of trackers any given site has. What's the point of Tor then? It's an IP spoofer, right? Given that and a MAC address spoofer it should be a huge improvement over normal browsing.