Tor Now Comes In a Box

Daniel_Stuckey writes "Tor has been in the spotlight lately as a way to keep prying eyes away from your online activities. However, to your average internet user, the covert network of relays and whatchamacallits can come off as too complex and intimidating to bother with — even as people are increasingly concerned with their online privacy in light of the NSA scandal. So goes the thinking behind Safeplug, a new hardware adapter that basically puts Tor in a box. It takes 60 seconds and 50 bucks to plug the privacy box into your router, and you're good to go, the company claims. Like anonymous browsing for dummies. The adapter comes from hardware company Pogoplug, which announced its new product yesterday and hopes it will bring Tor to the mass market by offering more consumer-friendly access. 'We want to just take what is currently available today to a more technical crowd and democratize it, making it easier to use for an average user,' CEO Dan Putterman told GigaOM."

Re: Make it easy?

[supersat]

One of the problems with that is that sometimes your real IP can leak out. For example, if you visit a page that installs the FBI's CIPAV malware, it will bypass Tor and report the real IP. If all traffic is routed through Tor by another device, this won't work.

Re:Roll your own

[necro81]

That was my thought exactly: "Say, didn't Adafruit just have an article in Make Magazine about using a Raspberry Pi to make a wireless Tor proxy?" Why yes, they did [make-digital.com].

Re:Democratize it

[Anonymous Coward]

From Merriam Webster [merriam-webster.com]:

to make (something) available to all people : to make it possible for all people to understand (something)

Democratization is a common term that existed long before USA appropriated "democracy" as part of their call to arms, you brainwashed yank.

Re:Make it easy?

[Splab]

The TOR busts the FBI did earlier this year was malware infecting windows users using outdated versions of TOR (for windows).

A TOR AP makes very good sense, since you can easily change MAC adr. local IP etc. to something other than the normal network, making leaks very hard to use.

Re:Roll your own

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

YES! or you can buy Adafruit's version already built with US and US intelligence friendly exit nodes excluded here for only a few bucks more PAPARouter [paparouter.com]

Re: Make it easy?

[bobthecow]

Because the information provided isn't sufficient to understand what the box actually does. Does it act as a DHCP provider? How would my devices know to use it? Since it sits inside the network, how would devices which want to use it know its there? Do I have to update proxy settings on browsers?