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
- How technology is making censorship irrelevant
- A new tool (Feed Over Email) to beat internet censorship
- Google releases censorship tools
- How to record the cops
- Court allows warrantless cell location tracking
- Schneier on wiretapping the internet
- Government uses social networking sites for more than investigation
- Open science as humanity’s best hope
- The Open Source Sensing Initiative
- Another reason to use Tor
- Movements for Climate Action: Towards Utopia or Apocalypse?
- Cheap plastic solar cells — “cheaply produced solar cells have the ability to transform poorer countries and their energy demands.”
- What are reproductive rights?
- More critique of the Singularity University by Cascio
- Religious bioconservatives react to transhumanism
- The conspiracy industry and the lure of fascism
- Cognitive slaves — Facebook, Google, etc profiting off of free labor
Items of Interest 7-30-10
July 30, 2010
- July 31st Call to Action Against Racism and Fascism
- Chomsky’s advice for anarchists
- How politics rely on disgust
- Why misogynists make great informants
- Can technology bring on a worldwide social revolution?
- Free software as part of the anarchist toolkit
- Secure communication for Android
- Two new issues of Hack This Zine
- Why transhumanism is the best bet for avoiding extinction (from 2009, but good)
- Monopolists of the genetic code
- Google and CIA invest in future of web monitoring
- Obama’s Surveillance Power Grab
- Corporate profits return, but there’s zero hiring
Hack for Using Tor on Android 2.x
July 28, 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 5-22
May 22, 2010
- The Appleseed Project: an open-source distributed social networking project. An alternative to Facebook, and unlike Diaspora, is already running. Originated in anarchist circles. Development. Drumbeat. Beta. Latest Source. Facebook. Twitter.
- IT in Developing Nations Makes Women and Poor Happier.
- Infoladies of Bangladesh Revolutionize Rural Life.
- Afrocyberpunk: “But here in Africa, development has been dangerously asymmetrical. By the time any product hits our soil it’s already fully-developed and ready to be abused by the imagination. Technology designed for vastly different societies invariably trickles down to our streets, re-sprayed, re-labeled, and hacked to fit whatever market will take it. Regulation? You can forget about regulation.”
- James Hughes on Beyond the Human Race — and “Human Racism”
- Nobody Encrypts Their Phone Calls. Some interesting links and talk in the comments.
- Google Launches Encrypted Search
- Twitter’s Role in Bangkok Conflict.
- Leaking Legitimacy. “… it’s become increasingly clear that there is a coordinated information operations campaign in place to downplay the impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill … eyt another body blow to the nation-state and the global market system as legitimate organizational constructs.”
- Interview with Meredith Patterson from DIYBio
- Craig Venter Creates Synthetic Life: This is major, major scientific news. The ETC calls for a moratorium on synthetic biology (ain’t going to happen). Ken MacLeod offers commentary.
- Open Letter to Glenn Beck from AK Press. “From what sense we can make of your show, you seem happy with “altering” rather than “abolishing” a screwed-up system. For you, replacing the old boss with a new one (Sarah Palin?) is good enough. We understand that you’re confused–these are confusing times. But, deep down, you and the tea partiers know that you can’t trust any politician, or banker, or corporate hack, or union bureaucrat…or anyone who makes their living sucking power and profit from ordinary people. Which, unfortunately, probably includes multi-millionaires like you.
Items of Interest
April 29, 2010
Various items of interest that have crossed our paths in the last few weeks:
- Somalia: Failed State, Economic Success? An interesting perspective on how Somalia has in some ways done better despite a lack of central government.
- Using social ills of the future to bootstrap networked resilient communities.
- The Internet: Serving the Revolution? The internet as friend and foe.
- Fighting the fascists using direct action hacktivism.
- 1024-bit encryption cracked.
- The Brain Rejects Inequality: Physiological responses to unfairness.
- Using magnets to manipulate morality.
- Why I Won’t Be Buying an iPad, and Why It Doesn’t Matter as Much as You Think
- Standing orders for open-source warfare
Items of Interest
March 3, 2010
Here are some collected links that have caught my eye recently:
- Digital Security and Tactics By (and For) Anti-Authoritarians event this March 12th at the 8 Days of Anarchy in the Bay Area
- Latvian “Robin Hood” hacker leaks bank details
- Ultimate griefing: publishing the private info on the rich to fuel public outrage
- The complicated politics of Italian transhumanism Part 1: Stefano Vaj defends against claims that his overhumanism politics are fascist
- The complicated politics of Italian transhumanism Part 2: the critics lay out their evidence for claiming the overhumanists are fascists (see also this and this)
- The MikroKopter: small, cheap, carries a camera, and there are instructions to build your own
- Public reactions to terrorist threats: projecting leadership qualities onto political figures, with serious political consequences
- Survival of the kindest: how evolution drives compassion and collaboration
- Security implications of volume shadow copy in Windows 7/Vista: no secure deletion possible
- Microsoft 7/Vista Law Enforcement Forensics Guides
- Hackers brew code to counter police forensics: COFFEE, meet DECAF
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.
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:
- Anarchism and Science Fiction Readling List (organized by author)
- Recommendations from the “”Beyond The Dispossessed: Anarchism and Science Fiction” panel at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair last weekend.
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:
- SentDev on Cognitive Liberty and the Right to One’s Mind
- The democratization of virulence
- How Technology and the Open Source Movement Can Save Science
- On sleeplessness, the iphone, and you
- Economics of the singularity
- The economic impact of intelligent machines
- Cascio on three possible economic models: part one, part two (connects to previous talk on economic forecasting we did here)
- Cascio on the desktop manufacturing revolution
- Rebooting environmentalism for the 21st century
- Anarchist Arrested for Twittering (more)
- “Project Gaydar” and Online Privacy
- US Spies Buy Stake In Firm That Monitors Blogs and Tweets
- Oklahoma and Abortion
- Anarchybuntu — project for a new linux version made for anarchists
- Build your own DIY Bedazzler
- Hack your phone to prevent snooping
- “Evil maid” attacks on encrypted hard drives
