Little Brother

[error]

Big Brother is watching you. Who's watching back?

Stop whatever you're doing and read this book NOW. A free download is available.

[Pat McCotter]

Just finished it. A great read.

[KJM]

There are a plethora of worse ways to spend the next few hours of your life.  I hardly ever read fiction these days, but I was hooked before I even got to the first chapter.

[TackleTheWorld]

Not a bad read, but who believes the resolution?

[K. Darien Freeheart]

Not a bad read, but who believes the resolution?

Yeah, that upset me a bit. I'm not sure if I'm simply let down or if I should be upset that this was the only resolution his mind could fathom. 

[KBCraig]

Not a bad read, but who believes the resolution?

Good read, very creative, but it diverged from the likely when the governor arrested the feds and kicked them out.

I love to hope for that resolution, but I find myself just too cynical. I mean, have you noticed who the presidential candidates are going to be?

[Barterer]

Well I had just begun reading the much thicker Cryptonomicon but will set it aside and read this first.  Mainly because the first few pages are full of giddy teenage shenanigans, I can't resist. 

[ByronB]

They are actually working on "Paranoid Linux" now...

[K. Darien Freeheart]

They are actually working on "Paranoid Linux" now

It could be a neat distro to provide tools to privacy minded people, but the "scatter" idea is kind of a waste of bandwidth. It's not too hard on the ISP side to reassemble a message, even one buried in crap. That said, installing things like the Pidgin OTR (Off the record) plugin by default, setting up encrypted volumes, using GPG by default, setting up Tor and using secure tunnels and such... Yeah, I'd download it.

[Barterer]

They are actually working on "Paranoid Linux" now...

In the meantime there's TORpark, the tor/firefox combo you can carry around on a memory stick, and Anonym.OS, a BSD-based live CD.

[TackleTheWorld]

You know what I found really compelling and respectful about the book?  It explained technical stuff. 
So come on, master hackers, show some respect.  The rest of us just wrapped our heads around the private/public key encryption thing.

[K. Darien Freeheart]

So come on, master hackers, show some respect.  The rest of us just wrapped our heads around the private/public key encryption thing.

Sorry. I've been "in the scene" so long sometimes I am not even aware of what I take for granted.

That said, installing things like the Pidgin OTR (Off the record) plugin by default

Pidgin is a neat program for instant messages, like MSN or AIM or ICQ. It lets you connect to any or all of those services from the same program and has some great features (like tabbed chats so you don't juggle windows). The off the record plugin encrypts the messages between you and the people you're chatting with so that someone "in the middle" can't figure out what's in the text you're sending.

setting up encrypted volumes

Volume means "disk drive" in the most common sense. Encryption masks things as it's going across a network, encrypted volumes make it very difficult to figure out what it is when it's on either side of that network. Encrypting your chats, for instance, isn't that useful if you've got regular, readable copies of them on your disk drive.

using GPG by default

The private/public encryption key thing mentioned in "Little Brother". He even called it 'pretty good privacy' in the book. PGP was a commercial version of this kind of thing but there was concern that the source code (Human readable instructions for a computer - with source code you can see what a program is actually "doing" when you use it) was kept secret by the company that made it. So a bunch of geeks got together and wrote a new version and made the source code freely obtainable so that anyone could find flaws or add improvements. This version is called GPG (GNU Privacy Guard).

setting up Tor

Tor is kinda nifty. Normally, when you connect to the internet, there's a series of "hops" from your computer to the server you're "talking" to. When you hit submit after postng here, the data is sent from your computer to the router you got from the cable/phone company. From there it goes to your ISP, from them to "the backbone" to Russell and Kat's web host's ISP to the server that actually saves the forum.

Users of Tor, however, share their internet connection in chunks to anonymize traffic. Using Tor, clicking submit would send from your computer to the router to another Tor user's ISP to the Tor user's computer, to another Tor user's ISP to another Tor user and so on until at SOME point that Tor user's computer sends it's data to Russell and Kat's server, appearing to the server as if it originated from the last Tor user (who might be in India or Spain or anywhere). Data on the internet is broken into chunks and each chunk takes a different route so unless you managed to be watching all the possible end-points, no "man in the middle" could piece together every chunk and find out what you sent.

and using secure tunnels and such

A tunnel is when you disguise one form of data as another. "Secure" tends to mean "encrypted". It's not a great way to hide something but it's more useful to utilize holes in a dragnet. The most common form of tunnel on the internet is disguising BitTorrent (person to person file sharing) traffic as regular browser traffic to get past ISP blocks of BitTorrent traffic. In China, where there is a government system that censors and blocks big chunks of the internet (called The Great Firewall of China) this kind of tunneling is useful.

[Barterer]

You know what I found really compelling and respectful about the book?  It explained technical stuff. 

I'm by no means a hacker, but the accuracy of some of the hacks in the book (at least what I've gotten to) add to the humor and charm of it.  Who knew about that $SYS$ method of hiding windows processes until Sony pulled that stunt with their music CDs, and it was all over slashdot.

It's kind of like that scene in The Matrix where one of the hacker-heroes used an actual UNIX/Linux command (+1 to whoever remembers it) and all the nerds went ohh-ahh-teeheehee-- just like my computer, I wish.

[error]

It's kind of like that scene in The Matrix where one of the hacker-heroes used an actual UNIX/Linux command (+1 to whoever remembers it) and all the nerds went ohh-ahh-teeheehee-- just like my computer, I wish.

ssh. I use it all the time to h4x0r into b0x3n.

[K. Darien Freeheart]

I never saw SSH in the Matrix. Perhaps I need to hide my spoons (I'm not up for an arguement!) and rewatch.

Back to running cmatrix....