Re: Tools for anonymous blogging

[Steve Schear]

At 02:14 AM 3/12/2003 +0000, Dylan Knobold wrote:
Greetings cryptographers,

   I would like to ask your assistance in setting up a weblog that
cannot easily be traced to my real identity. I have surveyed the
existing tools and do not find one that fits my needs well. For my
proposed blog, I would graciously accept volunteer hosting, but I
think it's also worth thinking improving tools so anonymous blogging
can be accessible to many.
   Finally, while remailers contend against the deeply entrenched
email infrastructure, blog publishing tools are still in their
infancy, and most people do not find it particularly convenient to
publish a blog. In addition, good hosting costs money; the free
hosting services are ad-ridden, in many cases badly.
Retain the services of virtual hosting firm which accepts e-gold for 
payment.  Prevailing costs about US$10.00/month.

E-gold accounts can be opened without providing accurate meatspace identity 
info.  If you create the account using a viable web proxy then no trail 
back to your originating IP should be generated.  If you are especially 
paranoid, you can fund one e-gold account (at http://www.e-gold.com) using 
a relatively anonymous payment method (e.g., a money order), open an 
anonymous ALTA/DMT account (also using a web proxy) at 
http://dmt.orlingrabbe.com, transfer e-gold funds into the ALTA/DMT account 
and then back out to another e-gold account (also opened via a web proxy) 
which you use to open and pay for the virtual hosting account. Sort of 
Chaumian money mix. :)


   Given these goals, what tools are available today? The most obvious
is to use an anonymizing Web proxy such as anonymizer.com in
conjunction with a public blog hosting service such as LiveJournal.
However, this approach doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.  In
particular, anonymizer.com is a single point of vulnerability, a
one-stop shop if you will for spy agencies, conveniently pre-filtered
to include only those who feel that leaking identity information is
worth thirty bucks a year to protect (the free version is little more
than a teaser for the pay service).
I suggest using JAP (Java Anonymizing Proxy), a open source P2P proxy 
cloud, operated out of the University of Technology Dresden 
http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html  Its free, relatively reliable 
and moderately good performance (I routinely get >6KB/sec bandwidth).

For relatively secure IRC communication I suggest you check out IIP, the 
Invisible Internet Proxy. Its easy to use with most IRC clients.  See my 
separate posting to the list announcing the availability of IIP 1.1.0.

steve

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general
knowledge among the people... Be not intimidated,
therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the
utmost freedom...nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled
out of your liberty by any pretenses of politeness,
delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used,
are but three different names for hypocrisy,
chicanery, and cowardice." -- John Adams
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