Free Republic

Have been using the Firefox browser since it was introduced; with all the controversies (political), it has been suggested that I change to Chrome (Google), Safari (Apple), or Opera browser. Any suggestions as to whether a change is recommended and, if so, to what?

The average computer user with an Internet connection has access to an amazing wealth of information. But there's also an entire world that's invisible to your standard Web browser. These parts of the Internet are known as the Deep Web. The tools to get to there are just a few clicks away, and more and more people who want to browse the Web anonymously are signing on. Fans of the series House of Cards might recall the Deep Web being worked into the plot of latest season. The character Lucas, a newspaper editor who was trying find a hacker, gets...

Hard-sells fully operational combat model at Defexpo Mumbai, February 12: Even as the Indian Army has entered the global market to buy short-range surface-to-air missile defence systems, Russia is keen to offer its anti-missile system Tor-M2KM to India, with the latter slated to undergo a series of tests. Exhibited outside of Russia for the first time, a fully operational combat model of the Tor-M2KM anti missile system was displayed at the Defexpo-2014 exhibition held in Delhi recently. Defence purchases have risen from just over $200 million in 2001 to over $14 billion currently. As part of the recently announced tender...

NEW DELHI, February 6 (RIA Novosti) – A naval version of the Tor short-range air defense system will be installed on all Russian warships, the manufacturer, Almaz-Antey Concern, said Thursday. The new system, dubbed M-Tor, is a variant of the modernized Tor-M2KM system featuring modular assembly, high reliability and improved precision, according to Yuri Baykov, spokesman for Almaz-Antey. M-Tor will gradually replace the outdated Kinzhal (SA-N-Gauntlet) systems, which have been in service since 1989, Baykov said at the DEFEXPO INDIA-2014 exhibition in New Delhi. He also said Russia will offer Tor-M2KMs to India as part of the recently announced tender...

The Internet’s main engineers have asked the architects of Tor—networking software designed to make Web browsing private—to consider turning the technology into an Internet standard. If widely adopted, such a standard would make it easy to include the technology in consumer and business products ranging from routers to apps. This would, in turn, allow far more people to browse the Web without being identified by anyone who might be spying on Internet traffic. If the discussions bear fruit, it could lead to the second major initiative of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in response to the mass surveillance by...

The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA's application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of the systems intelligence directorate, or SID. The majority of NSA employees work in SID, which is tasked with collecting data from communications systems around the world. According to a top-secret NSA presentation provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, one successful technique the NSA has developed involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. The...

Authorities have arrested a man in San Francisco, California accused of operating an underground website that allowed users to purchase guns and drugs from around the world using encrypted, digital currency. Ross William Ulbricht, also known as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday for his alleged involvement in the Silk Road online marketplace, according to court papers published this week. A sealed complaint dated September 27 was unearthed by security researcher Brian Krebs in which Ulbricht is accused of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy money laundering conspiracy and more. According to prosecutors,...

As highlighted by Wired, this doesn’t really surprise anyone. Researchers almost immediately noted that the Tor malware, which leveraged a vulnerability in Firefox, had to be operated by a law enforcement agency. That’s because the threat didn’t cause too much damage, despite the fact that it had the potential. Instead, it simply collected MAC addresses and Windows hostnames, sending the data back to a server in Northern Virginia. Back in August, Irish authorities arrested 28-year-old Eric Eoin Marques, the man believed to have operated Freedom Hosting, one of the largest Tor hidden services hosting providers. Marques is accused of facilitating...

An entrepreneur as professionally careful as the Dread Pirate Roberts doesn’t trust instant messaging services. Forget phones or Skype. At one point during our eight-month preinterview courtship, I offer to meet him at an undisclosed location outside the United States. “Meeting in person is out of the question,” he says. “I don’t meet in person even with my closest advisors.” When I ask for his name and nationality, he’s so spooked that he refuses to answer any other questions and we lose contact for a month. All my communications with Roberts are routed exclusively through the messaging system and forums...

Tor users visiting secret sites hosted by Freedom Hosting early Sunday morning weren’t able to reach their desired destinations. Instead they were met with a “Down for Maintenance” notice and, if they had javascript enabled, malware that could effectively identify Tor users. The Internet is wild with speculation that malware was planted by the FBI. And that isn’t as paranoid as you might think. Eric Eoin Marques, the man believed to be behind Freedom Hosting, was arrested in Ireland Thursday and is currently awaiting extradition to the U.S. on child pornography charges. While Freedom Hosting was the largest hosting service...

The violent video showing three Dirty Blondes' bouncers savaging two patrons that has sparked sweeping and nationwide outrage may soon spill over into the courts. According to a statement released this morning by two lawyers "overseeing the lawsuit against" Dirty Blondes, the recent violence inflicted upon Alex Coelho and David Parker -- who were subsequently arrested by police -- was beyond reprehensible. "Businesses such as Dirty Blondes Sports Bar have legal duties and responsibilities in the operation and management of their affairs, namely, to use reasonable care in the hiring, training, and supervising of their employees for the safety and...

Jihadists are seeking out more secure methods of online communications, including an avenue created by the U.S. government and financed by American taxpayers, in the wake of revelations about the U.S. monitoring of online messages. The Tor network has become a go-to means for jihadists and criminals to communicate, raise money, and buy and sell illicit goods and services without fear of being identified or traced by intelligence or law enforcement officials. The network uses technology called “onion routing” (Tor is an acronym for The Onion Router), which refers to layers of encryption that prevent governments or other users from...

You’re not running a domestic terrorism group (well, there are those new DHS criteria…). You’re not even sending around emails about what a dismal failure President Obama’s administration is (THIS hour, anyway). You just want to be able to chat with friends, conduct your financial business, and argue with your spouse without Big Daddy Gummint all up in your biz. Believe it or not, that’s your right. Harry “Who Cares” Reid may blow it off and say the government’s been “doing that stuff for years,”but we’ve got a news flash for Harry: just because you’ve been doing it a while...

http://internet-haganah.com/harchives/007413.html "Whither the jihadi forums?" SNIPPET: "There are currently only three jihadi forums that are sufficiently active and well-connected to be of any interest whatsoever. Why we claim to be on the verge of defeating al-Qaida while simultaneously watching passively as they use these forums to regroup and regenerate is beyond me. These are the forums three: • al-Fidaa, a forum created by al-Qaida core. That it is directly linked to al-Qaida by definition moves it to the top of the list. Current membership: 2,462, all of whom can be considered "active" if only because they just joined the forum....

On Thursday, the US House of Representatives approved an internet snooping bill that requires internet service providers (ISPs) to keep records of customer activity for a year so police can review them as needed. Here's what this bill means for you and what you can do about it. What Is This Internet Snooping Bill, Exactly, and Why Is It Bad? The lovingly titled Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (PCFIPA of 2011) requires ISPs to retain customer names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and dynamic IP addresses. It's a record of your personal information...

Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 19-10 for H.R. 1981, a data-retention bill that will require your ISP to spy on everything you do online and save records of it for 12 months. California Rep Zoe Lofgren, one of the Democrats who opposed the bill, called it a “data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.”

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today. The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET. A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses,...

An interesting discussion started on tor-talk about Iran cracking down on "web dissident technology" before Cryptome posted, "TOR Made for USG Open Source Spying Says Maker." There is an interesting post on Cryptome, TOR Made for USG Open Source Spying Says Maker, in which one of Tor's creators, Michael Reed, says to look at why the government created Tor from a common sense point-of-view instead of as conspiracy theory. The Tor Project is free software that lets people be anonymous online but it's not an invisibility cloak that's meant to protect privacy. People use Tor to be anonymous for all...

New media innovations, like Facebook and Twitter, influenced the course of last month’s unrest in Iran, panelists at the National Endowment for Democracy said Tuesday. Hundreds of thousands of Iranian opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s supporters took to Iran’s streets in June to protest the results of a disputed presidential election between Mousavi and incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Officially, Ahmadinejad won the election, but Mousavi’s supporters claim that it was rigged.

Quote: 15 August 2010 AQ {{HEARTS}} TOR click to view archive of post Posted on 15 August 2010 @ 17:54