Tor Now Comes In a Box 150
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."
Roll your own (Score:5, Interesting)
Wireless Tor AP built with a Raspberry Pi: http://learn.adafruit.com/onion-pi/overview [adafruit.com]
Overkill? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Wow Black helecopter syndrom (Score:5, Interesting)
What am I doing that's so important to keep secret? I'm minding my own business, that's what. You should do it too.
The reason we should all be afraid of the authorities spying on us is because more often than not, they are the POS humans that are the greatest threat. Remember COINTELPRO? Remember the FBI infiltrating mosques? Remember the IRS harassing political groups? Remember people like Thomas Drake being prosecuted for blowing the whistle on massive amounts of public corruption and fraud?
In an authoritarian regime, anything you do that stands out will get you unwanted attention. If you don't believe we're authortarian today, there's no guarantee we won't be in the future. If we can't protect our privacy today, how will we protect it then? If you want to live a free life, you need privacy.
Re: Make it easy? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean how would you know if this doesn't just send all traffic to a pseudo TOR network setup by the NSA which captures everything you do?
AKA half of Tor, I'd imagine. The point of Tor has never been to evade detection by the NSA. It's to anonymize your internet traffic to prevent the destination service operator from knowing who/where you are. It's essentially a chain of "legitimate," marginally highly-available TCP proxies that anyone can use without having to create or rent a botnet. Hidden services are a nice side effect, or at least were until Silk Road's compromise spooked everyone.
That said, your point stands: there's not enough information about how this magic box works.