Tag Archives: Privacy

Secrets, lies and Snowden’s email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit | Comment is free | theguardian.com

The owner of Lavabit, the encrypted email service used by Edward Snowden finally tells his story. And it makes uncomfortable reading.

Secrets, lies and Snowden’s email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

Sintel Restored on YouTube Editorial | BlenderNation

It looks like the message came through – as of 9am this morning (CET), Sintel is available on YouTube again. In case you missed it, there was an outcry on the internet this weekend as it was pulled by Sony after alleged copyright infringement.

To put things into perspective, these YouTube takedowns are massively automated. Software scans all the uploaded media and flags any material where they detect copyrighted material. Large corporations such as Sony have enough traction with YouTube that they can then also automatically take down these media (smaller companies have to manually submit a DMCA takedown notice).

So is there still a problem? You bet there is – we’re lucky to have a huge and vocal community behind us, that spread this story over the web in a couple of hours. The story was featured on Cartoon Brew, Boing Boing, Slashdot and Reddit (which nuked the BlenderNation server for a few hours). This helped revert the takedown. If you’re a small publisher however, you will find it nearly impossible to talk to anyone and get your video back up. These automated takedowns can destroy your project and leave you powerless.

Boing Boing hits the nail on the head with their comment:

While it’s probably a mistake, because this is so brain-meltingly obviously wrong, it’s also a very stark example of how sloppy, over-broad, and consequence-free enforcement of copyright can damage culture.

I don’t think there was any intent behind this particular takedown – just an unfair, unaccountable system. I’m glad we got Sintel back.

Sintel Restored on YouTube Editorial | BlenderNation.

Kent Police fined £100,000 after interview tapes abandoned at former station | ICO news release

The ICO’s investigation found that Kent Police had no guidance or procedures in place to makes sure personal information was securely removed from former premises. The problem was made worse due to an apparent breakdown in communications between the various departments involved in the move.<

ICO Head of Enforcement, Stephen Eckersley, said:
“If this information had fallen into the wrong hands the impact on people’s lives would have been enormous and damaging. These tapes and files included extremely sensitive and confidential information relating to individuals, many of whom had been involved in serious and violent crimes. How a police force could leave such information unattended in a basement for several years is difficult to understand.

“Ultimately, this breach was a result of a clear lack of oversight, information governance and guidance from Kent Police which led to sensitive information being abandoned. It is only good fortune that the mistake was uncovered when it was and the information hasn’t fallen into the wrong hands.”

Kent Police fined £100,000 after interview tapes abandoned at former station | ICO news release.

Blocking IP ranges using IBLOCK lists and iptables

I’ve started looking at the iptables function within the Linux kernel, and found out, that with a bit of tinkering, you can use the IBLOCK lists to do a machine-wide block based on IP. You use pipes (gotta love ’em) to route them into ipset which allows you to create a set of IP addresses/ranges which then reference in the iptables. You can use wget or curl. If you use wget, you might need to use the quiet switch. You can use xargs to multi-download lists and concatenate. I’m tinkering with my download script at the moment.

First, create the set. Here, I have used a high maxelem number because I use a lot of IBLOCK’s lists. The “maxelem 1048576” can be omitted or the number reduced if you are only using one or a small number of IBLOCK lists.

ipset create IBLOCK hash:net maxelem 1048576

Second, download and add to the set if it doesn’t already exist. You can chain multiple lists into the wget or use xargs. For this example, I’m only using one.

wget -q "http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_level1&fileformat=p2p&archiveformat=gz" -O- |
    gunzip |
    cut -d: -f2 |
    grep -E "^[-0-9.]+$" |
    gawk '{print "add IBLOCK "$1}' |
    ipset restore -exist

Finally, add rules into the iptables to drop package to and from IP addresses that exist in the set. This means that packets coming in from external IPs that match IP addresses in the set will not be answered.

iptables -I INPUT -m set --match-set IBLOCK src -j DROP
iptables -I OUTPUT -m set --match-set IBLOCK dst -j DROP

When I tried this with my IBLOCK download script, it seemed to kill TOR functionality as well, which I suspect means that IBLOCK have included the TOR IP range in one or more of their lists, so I’ll need to determine which one(s) they are and exclude them, as I do use TOR actively.

As with most things, there’s more than one way to do this, and this is one of many ways you could implement blocking behaviour.

Source: Dustin C. Hatch, Using PeerBlock lists on Linux

Microsoft and Google lead coalition demanding limits on government surveillance

In October, the tech industry’s biggest companies petitioned congress to reform the US Government’s surveillance policies. Now, the firms are taking their pleas global. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo and AOL (Engadget’s parent company) have banded together to ask the world’s governments to reassess its intelligence practices. This time, however, the firms are presenting more than a strongly worded letter – they’ve laid out five core reform principals, detailed both on an official website and in full-page ads in national publications.
Continue reading →

Playing with Tor

I’ve been using Tor for a while now, and have been tinkering with settings to try to get it work right. One of the many frustrating things is DNS leaking whereby an application resolves DNS using the host DNS and not via Tor. Consequently, since the DNS server of your PoP (Point of Presence) is usually your ISP’s DNS server, or a DNS server maintained by your ISP, they can easily eavesdrop on your surfing behaviour, by simply connecting a DNS query with a traffic stream to that same IP soon afterwards.

Using DNS via Tor is a bit of a pain, but there are various ways I’ve found that seem to work. Some better than others.

Continue reading →

Tails – Privacy for anyone anywhere

In case you haven’t seen this, Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is a live incognito DVD/USB which you can use to boot off any machine that supports USB boot (and for those which don’t boot of USB, you can use PLOP).

All connections go through Tor and since its a live disk, nothing is left on the hard disk (unless you choose to save something off the Internet, I guess).

I’ve been tinkering with Tor and managed to get my DNS routed through Tor, with my normal DNS as a backup, although routing traffic is a bit tricker, since not applications like to play with the Tor network properly. Some applications such as Vuze provide SOCKS capability, which allows routing of traffic through the Tor network via proxy. Others, like Chrome/Chromium don’t offer this as well, and you have to fudge it.