Open-minded people?!

There's already some time that I've been thinking about this article. I'd like to write something more detailed and complete but, really, nobody will read a giant post. In the end it's not an article or anything like that, just a general overview of what's going.

Privacy is, definitely, a very delicate issue. Specially when it evolves both the extremes, both "sides of the force".
Last year I've been to a talk with an Egyptian reporter (something like a 'leader' of the Egyptian blogging community) and a Egyptian Hacker. The talk took place in a very posh space in the SouthBank Centre. They were there to talk about the Internet government censorship in their country (Really severe, including blogger's getting arrested for their posts!!).

The talk was "ok", everything on the rails, all the "open-minded people" really supporting "privacy" and completely against censorship. Ok... that seems nice... They started to discuss the tools that were being used to protect blogger's privacy, that's when all the shit came over!! "What!? Terrorists are using the same tools as you?!" "So they can't be traced in the Internet and their communications are encrypted?!" "Fuck!! What?! No! No! We've to stop them using it!!" Exactly. Those wore the words from all the "open-minded people" there.

You see?! Think about it. I don't need to say anything else.

Nowadays you can find many tools to help you protecting your privacy. In the end, security and privacy is a process. Many tools, procedures and methodologies must be adopted if you want to be "99%" anonymous in the Internet.

Let's have a look at two of them: Freenet and Tor.


Freenet [ http://www.freenetproject.org/ or wikipedia ]
A quite old, but important in it's concept, P2P (peer to peer - a network with no central server) network. The idea was to build a network of computers like a "parallel" encrypted Internet. Each computer stored some sites (encrypted in a way that even you don't know what's stored in your comp) and, once logged in the network, you could retrieve files that were hosted there! Great! Fantastic! A free territory to save, say and share whatever you want and what's even better "anonymous"!
Freenet is quite obsolete now. But many networks were created based on it's ideas.
The most recent ones are Share and Perfect Dark


Tor [ http://www.torproject.org/ or at wikipedia ]
Anonymous routing, that's the idea behind Tor. Instead of supplying a parallel Internet, Tor create a network (P2P again, with no central servers) that simply encrypt the requests! So, basically, when you ask for a Internet site , using the "Tor application", it forwards you request to other Tor computers, anonymously, one of them access the website and give you it back!
It's great for anonymous navigation and widely supported by the hacker community.


I really encourage you to try to use one of them. Actually Tor is much more simple and, probably, will be more useful to you all, whom, generally, wants to access Internet public content. Isn't it?!

ps.: The Egyptian hacker, wisely, supported the terrorists right to privacy.