Clayton's Tech Bits

Home

Contact

Resumé / C.V.

Links

Search this site:
Custom Search

Categories:

/ (224)
  Admin/ (86)
    Apache/ (7)
      HTTPS-SSL/ (4)
    Cherokee/ (1)
    LAN/ (4)
    LVM/ (3)
    Monitoring/ (2)
      munin/ (2)
    OpenVPN/ (1)
    SSH-Proxy/ (3)
    SSH-SSL/ (6)
    backups/ (16)
      SpiderOak/ (1)
      backuppc/ (5)
      dirvish/ (1)
      misc/ (6)
      rdiff-backup/ (1)
      rsync/ (1)
      unison/ (1)
    commandLine/ (11)
    crontab/ (1)
    databases/ (8)
      MSSQL/ (2)
      MySQL/ (5)
      PostgreSQL/ (1)
    dynamicDNS/ (2)
    email/ (9)
      Dovecot/ (1)
      deliverability/ (1)
      misc/ (1)
      postfix/ (6)
    iptables/ (2)
    virtualization/ (8)
      VMware/ (1)
      virtualBox/ (7)
  Coding/ (11)
    bash/ (1)
    gdb/ (1)
    git/ (2)
    php/ (4)
    python/ (3)
      Django/ (1)
  Education/ (1)
  Hosting/ (23)
    Amazon/ (14)
      EBS/ (3)
      EC2/ (11)
    Godaddy/ (2)
    NearlyFreeSpeech/ (3)
    Rackspace/ (1)
    vpslink/ (3)
  Linux/ (20)
    Awesome/ (3)
    CPUfreq/ (1)
    Chinese/ (1)
    Debian/ (5)
      WPA/ (1)
    audio/ (1)
    encryption/ (2)
    fonts/ (1)
    misc/ (4)
    router-bridge/ (2)
  SW/ (39)
    browser/ (2)
      Chrome/ (1)
      Firefox/ (1)
    business/ (25)
      Drupal/ (8)
      KnowledgeTree/ (6)
      Redmine/ (2)
      SugarCRM/ (6)
      WebERP/ (2)
      eGroupware/ (1)
    email/ (1)
    fileSharing/ (1)
      mldonkey/ (1)
    graphics/ (2)
    research/ (2)
    website/ (6)
      blog/ (6)
        blosxom/ (3)
        rss2email/ (1)
        webgen/ (1)
  Security/ (12)
    IMchat/ (1)
    circumvention/ (2)
    e-mail/ (4)
    greatFirewall/ (1)
    hacking/ (1)
    password/ (1)
    privacy/ (1)
    skype/ (1)
  Services/ (1)
    fileSharing/ (1)
  TechWriting/ (1)
  xHW/ (13)
    Lenovo/ (1)
    Motorola_A1200/ (2)
    Thinkpad_600e/ (1)
    Thinkpad_a21m/ (3)
    Thinkpad_i1300/ (1)
    Thinkpad_x24/ (1)
    USB_audio/ (1)
    scanner/ (1)
    wirelessCards/ (2)
  xLife/ (17)
    China/ (9)
      Beijing/ (5)
        OpenSource/ (3)
    Expatriation/ (1)
    Vietnam/ (7)

Archives:

  • 2012/03
  • 2012/01
  • 2011/12
  • 2011/11
  • 2011/10
  • 2011/09
  • 2011/08
  • 2011/07
  • 2011/06
  • 2011/05
  • 2011/04
  • 2011/02
  • 2010/12
  • 2010/11
  • 2010/10
  • 2010/09
  • 2010/08
  • 2010/07
  • 2010/06
  • 2010/05
  • 2010/04
  • 2010/03
  • 2010/02
  • 2010/01
  • 2009/12
  • 2009/11
  • 2009/10
  • 2009/09
  • 2009/08
  • 2009/07
  • 2009/06
  • 2009/05
  • 2009/04
  • 2009/03
  • 2009/02
  • 2009/01
  • 2008/12
  • 2008/11
  • 2008/10
  • 2008/09

    • Subscribe XML RSS Feed

    Fri, 12 Dec 2008

    /Security/circumvention: Penetrating Firewalls, Internet Censorship, and Eavesdropping

    I just bumped into another interesting site called "Circumvention Tools[1]", which has a nice summary of ways to regain access to blocked / censored websites and prevent others from eavesdropping on things you say and places you go while online.

    Of course Tor[2][3], which provides penetration and privacy, and is one of my personal favorites, gets prominent mention. (And surprise surprise, the Tor website is blocked from where I am sitting right now in P.R.China....) Tor in combination with Firefox and the Firefox torplugin, which allows the Firefox proxy through Tor to be turned on and off with a click of the mouse, is incredibly convenient.

    However, Tor can be really quite slow because not enough Tor users agree to operate exit nodes. So I was intriqued to read about how easy it is to set up a SOCKS proxy[4][7] with SSH. This does require that you have SSH access to another machine outside the network where you are being blocked / spied upon, but that is not so hard. Running a machine at home with dynamic DNS[5] is not too hard in most places (where I live its actually not so easy....) And low-end Virtual Private Servers can be had for as little as US$8 per month[6].

    And finally, in the category of "simple tricks[8]", there are services that will e-mail website content to you in response to an e-mailed request. This strikes me as having other interesting applications beyond penetration.... How about a weather e-mail every morning, with a little help from cron? Or pulling down a site in a very bad / slow network environment?

    [1] http://en.flossmanuals.net/CircumventionTools/
    [2] http://en.flossmanuals.net/CircumventionTools/TorTheOnionRouter
    [3] http://www.torproject.org/
    [4] http://en.flossmanuals.net/CircumventionTools/SSHTunnelling
    [5] http://blog.langex.net/index.cgi/Admin/dynamicDNS/
    [6] http://blog.langex.net/index.cgi/Hosting/
    [7] http://en.flossmanuals.net/CircumventionTools/ConfiguringSocksProxies
    [8] http://en.flossmanuals.net/CircumventionTools/SimpleTricks

    posted at: 14:39 | path: /Security/circumvention | permanent link to this entry