Site Changes

February 25, 2011

Some work is underway to revitalize and revamp this site. We’ll be updating the appearance of the site soon. We’re also pushing the link dumps away from here and on to twitter, where we’re posting as @anarchotech.

Items of Interest

October 12, 2010

I have a new Android smartphone, and I was recently looking into options for anonymous browsing on  it. The Tor Project offers an app called Orbot that enables using the Tor network, but at the moment it only works on Android 1.x because the 2.x OS doesn’t have a way yet for you to set the proxy. While digging around into some phone hacks, however, I discovered that you can use the Voice Dialer app to run certain commands. By saying “proxy,” for example, you get a proxy configuration screen. Interesting enough, this enables you to set a proxy and run Orbot to use Tor on your phone.

Here’s how to do it:

  • Install the Orbot app
  • Pull up the Voice Dialer app, and speak the word “proxy”
  • In the proxy configuration screen, put 127.0.0.1 and port 8118
  • Fire up the Orbot app
  • Your browsing session will now be anonymized via Tor (test it here)
  • When you’re done, pull up the Voice Dialer again and reset the proxy to return to regular browsing

This works for unrooted phones. This only seems to work via the cell’s 3G connection, not over wifi.  It also only anonymizes your browser traffic. For more info, read up on Tor.

Items of Interest

April 29, 2010

Various items of interest that have crossed our paths in the last few weeks:

Items of Interest

March 3, 2010

Here are some collected links that have caught my eye recently:

A Bad Week For Govt Snoops

November 13, 2009

* How to Deny Service to a Federal Wiretap

It turns out that the standard sets aside very little bandwidth — 64K bits per second — for keeping track of information about phone calls being made on the tapped line. When a wire tap is on, the switch is supposed to set up a 64Kbps Call Data Channel to send this information between the telco and the law enforcement agency doing the wiretap. Normally this channel has more than enough bandwidth for the whole system to work, but if someone tries to flood it with information by making dozens of SMS messages or VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) phone calls simultaneously, the channel could be overwhelmed and simply drop network traffic.

That means that law enforcement could lose records of who was called and when, and possibly miss entire call recordings as well, Sherr said.

Of course, criminals have plenty of easier ways to dodge police surveillance. They can use cash to buy prepaid mobile phones anonymously, or reach out to their accomplices with encrypted Skype calls, said Robert Graham, CEO with Errata Security. Luckily for the cops, criminals usually don’t take their communications security that seriously. “Most criminals are stupid,” he said. “They just use their same cell phone.”

* Microsoft Police Forensics Tool Leaked

The police-only forensics tool made by Microsoft to capture forensics data from a live system has been leaked online. The tool, Coffee, has been the subject of much speculation by the tech media who now finally has a chance to see it. According to reports, it grabs process information, network data, user passwords, and all sorts of information. Could the methods needed to gather that data be exploited by others? Given Microsoft’s security history the answer is most likely.

Coffee is hosted on Cryptome. User guide here.

Anarchist Sci-Fi Goodness

October 28, 2009

This new book from AK Press, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers On Fiction combines two of our favorite topics. I’ll definitely have to check that one out. I may even check out Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction while I’m at it.

Speaking of @ and sci-fi, Bruce Sterling’s recent post on sci-fi and anarchism brought these two resources to our attention:

Collected Links 10-27-09

October 27, 2009

So we’ve been too busy elsewhere to post here lately, so until we get back in the game, here are some interesting links that we’ve been perusing over the past couple of weeks/months:

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