Party Vibe

OK it will work and I have much respect for LadyAda and Adafruit as a company (they make a lot of good stuff for anyone learning electronics/embedded systems and are one of the few tech companies with a female CEO) – likely she is doing this out of solidarity with the lass who is being stalked by FBI for being one of the devs of TOR (in spite of effectively being a contractor for the feds as well) but like many fossbytes articles “a little knowledge can be dangerous”.

In reality you can now only get away with using TOR in countries that already have a larger amount of freedom.

This does likely include (as well as the EU) India, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh and other nations that previously would have been less accepting of its use; but not only will it lag up the connection (which they do at least warn of in the article) and the RPI only has 100MB/s networking anyway and it not the fastest device for network hardware.

Added to which more and more of “normal” sites especially those dependent on ads or carrying out commercial business restrict TOR users or block them altogether as they are associated with fraud or it means they cannot geolocate the users for marketing (even if they begrudingly tolerate adblock use) – or the website owners just blacklist the entire subnets or the countries where the exit nodes are (in Europe/USA they are always in middle class areas and part of ISPs associated with big Science universities)

I have had had to disable TOR on a “secure” laptop someone working at the BT research had built for a young couple at the housing co-op as it had become unusable for anything they wanted to do online including ordering organic vegan food for the house or even going on their actvist sites as rightwing hackers increasingly took advantage using TOR it for DDOS attacks and hack attempts.

Worse, this “friend” had landed a high paying job in London and just disappeared without even letting them know the root password and they didn’t have any backup media for their personal stuff so I could only warn them the whole thing might not even be that secure and to get a hard drive to transfer their personal documents so I could one day reformat tht thing to work properly.

added to which the Great Firewall is more open than many realise

just tried a few sites on various test portals

Accessible in China
partyvibe.org is a forum about life and raving.
rtn VFRmedia – welcome to the secret goose shed (and all my other personal sites)
news.bbc.co.uk
EWTN Global Catholic Television Network: Catholic TV, Catholic Radio, and Catholic News
Vatican
Agentschap Telecom
http://www.ofcom.org.uk
http://www.ganzenparadijs.nl
http://www.radiomaria.nl
http://www.indcatholicnews.com

Blocked in China
http://www.flickr.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk

hadn’t expected BBC or all the Catholic sites (and one European Buddhist sites) to get through so easily especially as ICN is increasingly like a better version of the Guardian (its environment news is particularly good) minus the creepy trackers – amusingly Jez Corbyn turns up there as often as Jesus :laugh_at:

Microsoft office 365 corporate shows as blocked but I think the test site is resolving to the IE/NL European servers and it is not an illegal product in China as its advertised for sale there

As for the arrests, were those in DE or AT?

I read about the Austrian bloke getting nicked but the feds found he had himself been intercepting and hoarding some of the lower level kinderporno pics (teenagers but <18) and he was bust with enough cannabis for an intent to supply charge

The EFF ended up looking like twats as he was hardly blameless especially as he had also broken AT domestic data protection law by intercepting and stealing the exit node data to start with. the charges only resulted in relatively minor penalties under AT domestic law – he had the servers returned though most likely with all sorts of intercept code and a gagging order.

Out of curiosity I read a while back the guidance for setting up an exit node in DE and which ISPs tolerated it; they matched up with cheaper ISPs with less levels of reliability and customer service run by younger, less trustworthy staff often more desparate for business. There’s other info I’ve unearthed about VPNs which I will add to the posts about theses.