[e-privacy] EFF Promotes Freenet-like System Tor

[Andrea Glorioso]

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/22/2031229&from=rss

EFF Promotes Freenet-like System Tor

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 22, @04:01PM
from the god-of-tunder dept.

An anonymous reader  writes "The Electronic Frontier  Foundation (EFF)
just announced  that it  has become a   financial sponsor of   Tor, an
open-source project to help  people 'engage in anonymous communication
online.' It   sounds  like  a   simpler version   of  Freenet, e.g. 'a
network-within-a-network  that protects communication from ... traffic
analysis.' Like Freenet,  the  source-code  is freely available    and
binaries exist for Windows, Linux, etc." 

The submitter continues "It also allows you to install Tor-aware apps,
such as an  HTTP proxy (for  private browsing), or maybe private  P2P? 
Unlike Freenet,  it doesn't use massive  encryption  (as far as  I can
tell) and  relies more on something called  onion routing  to randomly
bounce requests between other Tor proxies,  thus obfuscating the IP of
the  original  client. So it  allows  you to  browse  regular Internet
sites!  Maybe    it should be   considered  more  of  an 'open-source'
Anonymizer? But I  don't know if it's actually  Open Source -  you can
download the source (and compile it yourself)  but I don't know if the
developers are  letting  anyone  else  touch  their code.    They are,
however, looking   for  contributors and  other  forms  of help.  And,
finally,  they're hoping people will  start running Tor servers!" It's
open source, however contributions are handled.

+++

Ciao,

--
Andrea Glorioso             sama at miu-ft.org         +39 333 820 5723
        .:: Media Innovation Unit - Firenze Tecnologia ::.
	      Conquering the world for fun and profit