citizen428.blog()

Since I was pretty busy with personal stuff during the last few days, I hadn’t noticed that two days ago German authorities started confiscating Tor middleman servers. That changed when earlier today I received an email from the owner of a confiscated system, who wants to get in touch with other Tor admins, in order to start a kind of “Knowledge Base” for people who were affected by the recent confiscations or who (still) want to set up their own Tor server. Since I’m also running such a baby (which never was an exit node though) on a virtual server in Germany, I’m of course interested in this recent development, so I want to share the informative links provided in his mail with you.

Articles/postings about the confiscations:
Anonymisierungsserver bei Razzia beschlagnahmt (German)
Staatsanwaltschaft beschlagnahmt Anonymisierungs-Server (German)
Erfolgreicher Schlag gegen die Privatsphäre (German)
Wie man die Anonymisierung kriminalisiert (German)
Re: confiscating middleman-tor-nodes [1], [2] & [3] (English)
Staatsanwaltschaft geht gegen Tor-Server vor (German)

General info on Tor/anonymity:
TOR web site (English, German and more)
Wikipedia article on Tor (English, German)
Sicher und anonym im Internet mit Proxys (German)
Onion Routing und Tor (German)
TheOnionRouter/OperationalSecurity (English)

Tor network overview:
Tor Network Status
Current Tor routers

Don’t get me wrong, child pornography is one of the worst crimes I can think of, and I wish the German authorities all the best in finding the people they are after. I do however feel that the route taken here wasn’t ideal, as it may well lead to a negative perception of Tor in the general public.

That’s why I’ve tripled the total amount of traffic Tor is allowed to serve on my system and donated some money to the project. I would advise you to do the same! Besides that I also encourage you to use Tor and promote it to other people, because anonymity is something that can’t be gained, only lost.

Pungenday, Bureaucracy 34, 3172 YOLD

Once again I try to avoid doing the things I’m actually supposed to do, so here’s another issue of “citizen428’s random tidbits”.

• Principia Discordia: “How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her. Wherein is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything“. I’m maybe the last person to find this decent online edition of the Principia, but stuff like this happens when you get abducted by time-travelling dolphins before being right in the middle of a government conspiracy. Or was it just the anual meeting of the Rodeo Clown Society? Fnord!
• 1000 Blank White Cards: “1000 Blank White Cards is a card game, the purpose of which is to create the cards you’re playing with.“. Personally I find this really cool: you start out with white cards, and everybody has to draw his or her own cards. I want to try out this game as soon as possible, and I’ll make sure to tell you about it afterwards…
• Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: This guide on writing decent SciFi and Fantasy stories is for free, but the author requested that if you like it, you should tell another aspiring writer about it, and buy two of his books. As I currently don’t have the money for the latter, I thought I can at least use my blog to reach some more aspiring writers. (via BoingBoing)
• MouseHole: “MouseHole is a personal web proxy written in Ruby designed to be simple to script. Scripts can rewrite the web as you view it, altering content and behavior as you browse. Basically, it’s an alternative to Greasemonkey, which does similar things from inside the Firefox web browser“. I’ve been playing around with this for around a week now, and I have to say that I really like it. Don’t be afraid, why is involved, so there’s chunky bacon for all!
• The Kawasaki Method and The Takahashi Method: Uncle Lecture needs you! And he surely doesn’t want your average PowerPoint food soldier, but instead he’s looking for highly trained and deadly presentation ninjas. (via I-can’t-remember-but-if-in-doubt-blame-BoingBoing)

• Random geeky stuff: moo.fx – “ a superlightweight, ultratiny, megasmall javascript effects library, written with prototype.js“; meebo – Web 2.0 Instant Messaging. Buzzwordy, but looking nice; Selenium – a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browsers, just as real users do
• Update on cool stuff™: The third episode of NCY2123 has been released and part two of When Sysadmins Ruled the World is up on Cory’s web site. Both rock as usual.

Well, that’s it for today, don’t kill any puppets while I’m away.