Sunday, May 22, 2005

Tor Anonymity Network Reaches 100 Verified Nodes.. Tor Anonymity Network Reaches 100 Verified Nodes. James A. Y. Joyce writes "Tor is an onion routing anonymous network. It routes your data transfers through a series of encrypted links between random nodes in the network; the greater the number of nodes, the greater the anonymity afforded. To commemorate the 100th verified node in the Tor network (graphs of throughput and nodes mirrored at Imageshack), the EFF are putting up a request for other organisations and personal users to start up Tor nodes of their own. (Tor has been mentioned on Slashdot twice before.)" [Slashdot] [Privacy Digest: Privacy News (Civil Rights, Encryption, Free Speech, Cryptography)] I've been testing this myself, and it works well enough. Web browsing is much slower, which is to be expected--a bit faster than dialup on my fast cable modem, with the main slowdown being in the initial page request. Note that Tor won't protect your anonymity against anyone with the ability to monitor all of the traffic of the network's nodes (in other words, the NSA), because information is passed around through the network without random delays being imposed. That's necessary given what it does (you wouldn't want to wait from 30 minutes to a day to load a web page), which is still good enough to protect against lesser threats, and to make the Feds waste time and money tracking you. 7:43:26 PM    comment () Protectionism Creates Jobs, Promotes Free-Enterprise And Can-do Spirit. 'Buy American' legislation draws fire: On Friday, the Information Technology Association of America called the measure bad security policy and bad economic policy. The legislation, an amendment to the Homeland Security Authorization Act, would force the Department of Homeland Security to buy products mostly made in America. The legislation was authored by Rep. Don Manzullo, an Illinois Republican, and passed by the House on Wednesday. It would require more than 50 percent of the components in any end product procured by the department to be mined, produced or manufactured inside the United States. "With this purchasing prohibition, I guess (the department) will have to learn to do without computers and cell phones," ITAA President Harris Miller said in a statement. "I cannot think of a single U.S. manufacturer that could meet this 50 percent threshold for these devices, and I doubt that those charged with protecting our safety here at home can either." [...] According to ITAA's Miller, the latest "Buy American" legislation would invite similar restrictions from other countries and raise the government's cost of doing business. "This legislation puts politics in front of common sense in combating terrorist threats. At the same time, it sends a signal to our trading partners that protectionism trumps global trade," Miller said in a statement. "That's a lose-lose proposition for the nation." [Mises Economics Blog] "With this purchasing prohibition, I guess (the department) will have to learn to do without computers and cell phones," ITAA President Harris Miller said in a statement. That sounds good to me. 7:32:25 PM    comment () EATING THEIR OWN, AND LOVING IT. Completely predictably, Time lunges at the opportunity to pound the stake into Newsweek's heart, not realizing that it is committing suicide at the same time (subhead: "How Newsweek botched its report on prisoner abuse‰¥äand helped set off an anti-U.S. firestorm"): Journalists strive to be influential. But there can't be many who would hope to affect events [...] [The Light Of Reason] So-called "mainstream media" in this country has been dead a long time, the corpse is completely rotten, and the stench is overwhelming. The tragic truth is that, while I'm certain Bush would prefer outright censorship for the same reasons that a dictatorship would be "a heck of a lot easier," he doesn't even need it. 7:19:12 PM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 2:05:18 PM.