The controversial anonabox anonymity hardware router project returned today amidst a scathing reaction from the wider security and anonymity communities.
Previously, the project was suspended from Kickstarter after claims that the project used entirely custom hardware were debunked by industry experts and laymen alike. The project has resurfaced on crowdfunding site Indiegogo, where so far it has raised over $11,000.
Last week’s takedown of Silk Road 2.0 wasn’t the only law enforcement strike on "darknet" illicit websites being concealed by the Tor Project’s network of anonymizing routers. A total of 410 .onion pages on at least 27 different sites, some of which sell everything from drugs to murder-for-hire assassins, were shut down as part of Operation Onymous—a joint operation between16 member nations of Europol, the FBI, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The news over the past few years has been spattered with cases of Internet anonymity being stripped away, despite (or because) of the use of privacy tools. Tor, the anonymizing “darknet” service, has especially been in the crosshairs—and even some of its most paranoid users have made a significant operational security (OPSEC) faux pas or two. Hector “Sabu” Monsegur, for example, forgot to turn Tor on just once before using IRC, and that was all it took to de-anonymize him. (It also didn’t help that he used a stolen credit card to buy car parts sent to his home address.)
From performance issues at hosting provider Liquid Web to outages at eBay and LastPass, large networks and websites suffered a series of disruptions and outages on Tuesday. Some Internet engineers are blaming the disruptions on a novel technical issue that impacts older Internet routers.
If you found your Internet speed has been pathetic today and some sites wouldn't load at all, you're not alone.
Many tier-one Internet service providers (ISPs), and in turn, the last mile ISPs they support, experienced technical problems that resulted in bad service throughout the US and some parts of Canada.
I hadn't been aware that, if you ask NASA nicely, you'll be allowed to take the controls of a satellite floating in outer space.
Clearly, I need to get out more, as this is what a group of very interested civilians are doing from their headquarters in a McDonald's.
Let's be fair, it's an old McDonald's. It doesn't serve burgers anymore. Indeed, as Betabeat reports, it's now referred to as McMoon's. From here, Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee who hasn't lost his enthusiasm for space, huddles with his team to re-create the joy of satellites gone by.
Specialized servers used by many ISPs to manage routers and other gateway devices provisioned to their customers are accessible from the Internet and can easily be taken over by attackers, researchers warn.
By gaining access to such servers, hackers or intelligence agencies could potentially compromise millions of routers and implicitly the home networks they serve, said Shahar Tal, a security researcher at Check Point Software Technologies. Tal gave a presentation Saturday at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas.
During his keynote and a press conference that followed here at the Black Hat information security conference, In-Q-Tel Chief Information Security Officer Dan Geer expressed concern about the growing threat of botnets powered by home and small office routers.
Might a research heavyweight open a new door to gigabit speed with the use of copper? Alcatel-Lucent on Wednesday said it set a new world record broadband speed of 10Gbps for transmission of data using traditional copper telephone lines. The prime mover of this breakthrough was Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent. What is more, the Labs' use of a prototype technology, according to the announcement, shows how existing copper access networks can be used to deliver 1Gbps symmetrical ultra-broadband access services.
The idea of a closed internet is hardly new; turn your eyes to East Asia, and the Great Firewall of China looms large.
The Chinese government is well known for the control it likes to exert over the levels of access its citizens have to the internet, and there have been numerous well-publicized cases of censorship and access being restricted to pages that refer to certain events in the county's history.
