Knight Pulse, Jillian, and Tor

by phobos | November 25, 2008

We're excited to be doing a set of posts over at KnightPulse about anonymity and how it can help foster citizen journalism. In order to provide more professional content and topics, we're working with Jillian C. York as our lead author for the series.

The first video interview and full post are available. Expect a series of these over the next few months. Feel free to suggest relevant topics or people willing to be interviewed, anonymously or not, about their experiences with Tor and citizen journalism. Bonus points if you want to do a video interview.

This is also our first experience doing a video interview over Skype. Skype repeatedly cut out and lost all connections to its servers a few times. The video is edited to piece it back together. Not sure if it's just Skype for Linux that has these issues.

All in all, a great experience and looking forward to working with Knight Pulse and Jillian.

Comments

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November 25, 2008

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A TOR developer(?) using Skype scares me to the deepest corners of my imagination. :(

phobos

November 25, 2008

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Why does a tor developer using Skype scare you?

Skype is one scary system! It's completely closed and proprietary, they claim they use encryption, but they offer no proof to that point, and they've provided governments with the contents of conversations (they did this with the Chinese a few months back. They're pretty much everything Tor is fighting against! Seriously, it's terrifying to me that Tor developers use Skype - either you didn't know, which is scary, or you did know and didn't care - which is downright horrific.

The Internet, public switched telephone network, public roads are all scary systems. The toll collectors use proprietary technologies, do you fear them? The people doing the interview used skype video, so chances are phobos did it for that reason.

it is a public interview, where's the secrecy concern?

take off the tin hat and google for "security analysis of skype", read the papers in the results. lots is known about skype and security issues.

November 25, 2008

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This a public conversation recorded for the public, thus no expectation of privacy on that call. I would not assume that using Skype for an interview is equal to using Skype for personal and private conversation.

November 25, 2008

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Reverse engineering Skype isn't so hard. If you assume someone is recording/watching you, you are ok.

Does the First Poster use AOL IM? MSN IM? ICQ? GTalk? Same thing, except the clients are open and OTR exists for all.

Phobos gets points for fully removing his anonymity to the world. Now I know who to look for at conferences.

I am an usual guy who don't know many about backtracking, anonymity services or hidden IP. But, I have a problem, and I hope, you, or somebody else, can help me.
My site has a login access with user/password and for every session everybody take a very long URL.
But, from my site the user can surf directly on other sites. If, on this sites, somebody has an traffic analyzer, it can seen on the log the entire URL. If he copy/past the URL in a regular browser he can go directly in the user account without any user/pass control.
Can you give me some advices to resolve this security problem?

June 13, 2011

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hi, I would need a favour from you sir..I am using the Tor Browser 1.3.24_en_US.
I run the tor application as a cient only and i use the proxy address: 172.24.97.1 :3128
Type: HTTP/HTTPS and it ruuns perfectly well. But recently when i try to start tor,
it says that tor is establishing an encryption directory..And when i check into the message
log, its says that the http proxy sent an unexpected status code..I'd beg of you to please
give me a fresh setting to start Tor..
I start the tor application with vodafone..APN: MMS
Please help me get a fresh settings..I am a student and it really costs me a high fortune
buying credits..
KOJO