I am officially the coolest dude in Brooklyn (in my head at least). I have my very own Tor t-shirt! A few weeks ago one of the developers of the software emailed me to let me know that I had been running a fast Tor server for some time now and he asked me if I wanted a free t-shirt. Naturally I said yes. Soon after, I received a package with the shirt. It’s the coolest, ever. Click the thumbnails if you want a better look at the front and back.

Tor is a free program that provides onion routing anonymity for just about any program using the TCP protocol (browsing, blogging, instant messaging, IRC and SSH to name a few of the uses). In this day and age, with privacy rights getting raped, prison-style and draconian governments throwing people in prisons for thought crimes, it’s a good and necessary thing to have and to support. I run Tor on a Linux server (Ubuntu) I rent somewhere in Florida to give back to the network I occasionally use. I don’t really use the server for much, so I don’t limit the bandwidth I give to Tor, allowing it to be one of the faster middlemen in the web of servers that make up the Tor network. I think it’s pretty cool shit.

Tor is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. The project is non-profit and is supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and people like you (if you’re cool) and me (I’m so totally neat). You should download Tor, in case you should ever need it. If you have some free bandwidth, consider running a Tor server. You can also help the project by donation. If all of this isn’t your bag of nuts, you might want to think about becoming a member of the EFF and supporting the fight to protect digital rights and privacy. It’s all good shit.

I’ve got a black feeling this morning after reading that the Supreme Court is requiring all US companies to store employee email and instant messaging. It’s fucking ridiculous, not only in burden of cost for companies to store that data, but in the loss of privacy and reality of it’s usefulness.

Anyway you look at it, it’s a punch in the balls for personal privacy. Slap a jock strap on that shit and be a man. Start using encryption. Check out GPG for encrypting email and personal files. If you use Thunderbird as an email client, there’s a real handy plugin called Enigmail that makes phasing in encryption pretty damn simple. For Instant messaging, switch to GAIM (cross-platform), Adium (OSX) or Kopete (KDE Linux). All three have some form of built-in encryption or plugin available. Adium and GAIM both can run OTR, an encryption and plausible deniability plugin. Kopete uses GPG to encrypt and as far as I know, there’s not another client that does that (there’s a plugin for GAIM, but I hear it doesn’t work well with more recent versions).

All these programs are free and open source. If you’re not using anything, I’d suggest you seriously consider it. For web browsing, think about using a proxy, like Tor or if you have the skills or patience to set it up, SSH tunnel to an outside server running squid (here’s a link to how I do it). If you don’t have access to a server like I’ve got, you can run squid on your home computer and connect to it from work. If you don’t have a static IP at home, you can use a free service like No-IP to get access. ISPs don’t like customers running servers out of their home, but if you SSH tunnel it, your chances of getting noticed are pretty nil. I tunnel squid to a remote server I keep and it works very well. I also have Tor installed on all my machines and run it as a server on my remote machine to give back to the network. It’s doubtful you need a proxy for all the web browsing you do in the course of a day at the office, but the option for security and privacy is good to have (not to mention the ability to get around restrictive firewalls).

If you don’t care about all this, so be it. Maybe that’s fine for you. But, depending on who you are and what you do in your life and for a living, you might want to take heed especially if you give a damn about your personal rights and privacy.