Archive for February, 2008

Encrypted data not secure

Monday, February 25th, 2008


Do you believe that your data is secure only because you have encrypted you harddrive?

Please visit http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/ to see your data is not really secure and that everybody has access to your files if he/she has direct access to your notebook or computer.

While your computer is running the key is stored in the memory and the attacker can backup the data from the memory to a external usb harddrive (ram2usb). The status running is even if your user is logged out of the windows but you entered the encryption key before.

Create middleman for the torproject

Sunday, February 24th, 2008


Now a days you can read more and more articles about security and privacy. However the most people on the internet have a firewall and a nice virus checker and they really believe that they are secure from any kind of attacks. I hope that YOU know that this is not the reality.

First of all you have an IP address that identifies you like your own name, so you are not anonym in the internet. The whole path through the internet can be traced and a profil of your personality can be created, this means you have no privacy and you give away details of your own without your permissions. This scares me and I think it’s better to stay a little bit more anonym on the world wide web.

To get your privacy back and stay anonym you can use TOR. This is a free network that you can join by downloading the program and install it. Basically it is based on the idea to send the traffic encrypted over more middleman to one exit node and then to the “normal” internet. This means that the server on the “normal” internet is not able to see your own IP address. Another important thing is that you change the route in a definde interval through the middleman and the exit node. From this it follows that you get every interval a new IP adress and this helps to keep you privacy and anonymity.

If you want to support this network you can do this on many ways. First you can run a simple client to get your privacy and anonymity, this is the most simple case for you. Second you can create a server for this network, either a middleman or a exit node. If you want to know more types of supporting this project please visit their homepage.

In the following part of this article I will describe the configuration of a middleman server.

Middleman server:

I premise that you have successfully installed the tor program (Same way as you install the client, the different is only in the configuration).

The only thing that you have to do to get a server is to open the right ports on you firewall if you have one and to edit the configuration.

  • torrc
    SocksPort 0 #For Server
    SocksListenAddress 127.0.0.1
    Log notice syslog
    Nickname $YOUR_NICKNAME$
    Address $YOUR_IP$
    ORPort 9001 #Required for the server
    ExitPolicy reject *:* #Middleman, without this it would be an exit node.

Of course there are a lot of more options to specify the configuration but these are the most important ones ( complete list of options). After you finished this you can start tor. In the logfile you should find something like “Self-testing indicates your ORPort is reachable from the outside. Excellent. Publishing server descriptor.” this, but it takes a while to check your server. If you want to check the list with the servers you can go to http://moria.seul.org:9032/tor/status/authority and search for your nickname or your ip.

IPod touch as phone

Saturday, February 9th, 2008


Now you can make a call with your ipod touch, you don’t need to buy a iphone. With this solution you make your calls over voice-over-ip and the only thing what you need is to buy the mic and a open wlan station. The most VoIP services are really cheap or sometimes total free.

When you have the ipod touch and the mic (with software) then you can make your calls from anywhere and you are reachable. You don’t have to pay expensive mobile phone fees, just search an open and free wlan station. The voip software is in the packet included if you buy the mic.

What you need:

If you just want to read more about this topic you can visit the following pages:

Update (mic arrived):

Yesterday my ordered mic arrived and I tried it immediately. The installation and the handling of the mic and the voip-software is very simple. First of all plug-in the mic and download the software. If you have the installer on your ipod touch you can add a resource (http://touchmods.net/rep.xml) and install the software. Following that you have to create an account on freecall.com or another voip provider. Finally start the application and change the settings to your own (you can find the needed information on the homepage of you voip provider).
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