May 23
Tor is a system that allows you to be anonymous while online. I myself ran across it yesterday (or the day before?) when a news article about it hit slashdot.
How exactly does it allow you to remain anonymous? The site’s overview has some nice pictures that explain it well, but the basic idea is [...] [...more]
Posted: under Technology.
Tor is a system that allows you to be anonymous while online. I myself ran across it yesterday (or the day before?) when a news article about it hit slashdot.
How exactly does it allow you to remain anonymous? The site’s overview has some nice pictures that explain it well, but the basic idea is that there are a bunch of Tor servers out there. After downloading the Tor client, you can then connect to the network. Everything that goes out of your computer then gets routed through a random number of Tor servers in a random order. No site you contact can tell where you are because it’s actually a Tor server that it’s connecting to. Also, no one Tor server has any idea who you are as it just knows where the data came from and where to send it to next.
That’s a simplified version of everything. The site has all the details of what needs to be done in order to make it work and what will work with it.
Tor is open source and was originally developed at the Naval Research Laboratory.
It looks like an interesting system. I haven’t actually tried it out as I don’t care that much about anonymity at the moment, but it’s good to know it’s out there. If you’re interested in being anonymous, check it out.
May 23
A month ago I posted asking if anyone had any good idea for backup software. I was leaning towards the free side of things. Apparently, no one did. Despite that, I finally found something. Sort of.
First of all, let me state that there are a lot of backup programs out there. They range from good [...] [...more]
Posted: under Technology.
A month ago I posted asking if anyone had any good idea for backup software. I was leaning towards the free side of things. Apparently, no one did. Despite that, I finally found something. Sort of.
First of all, let me state that there are a lot of backup programs out there. They range from good to not so good to say the least. I found a great program that was almost perfect except it didn’t do “backups” exactly. It would basically synchronize two directories so they always had the same content. You could compress, encrypt, and do a billion other things to the destination directory, but it was stuck in a directory-styled setup. You couldn’t just create a “job” of all of the directories you wanted to backup. So that one was out. I found others with similar problems….they were good or at least not too bad, but they were missing something that made them somewhat unattractive. One program I found was basically a glorified front end to create zip files, while others were perfect except for the fact that they weren’t free. The funny thing is that I found one’s that weren’t free that I decided to check out anyways that were actually much worse than some of the free ones except that they had a prettier interface…
I didn’t really find anything that was perfect. What I decided on was a compromise.
For the actually backing up, I’m going to use the backup program that comes with windows. Now the funny thing here is that I thought that they had dropped the backup program from XP Home. Not so apparently. If you have the home edition and pop in your cd, you’ll find it someplace under the “valueadd” directory. You have to install it manually. It doesn’t even show up as a windows component that you can add. I really wonder why. The program is really pretty basic but it seems to get the job done. It’s missing 3 key things that I care about. The first and second are related in that you can’t set it to create volumes of size X (so it’s convenient to backup to CD or DVD for example) and that it won’t backup directly do a CD or DVD. I can get around those issues. The last downside is that it backs up into it’s own format instead of a more common format (like zip or gzip) that lots of programs can read. That’s kind of a turn off, but then again its not as if the backup program is difficult to get a copy of…. I’ll live.
Getting around the first two problems is easy. First of all, to split my backup into manageable pieces (if need be), I can use 7-zip, the open source equivalent to winzip. There’s even a command line executable, so I can write a simple batch file that can be scheduled to run after the backup so it’s entirely automated. Once it’s of a size that will properly fit onto discs, all I need to do is pop in the disc and use explorer to burn it. This is a manual process, but then again that’s unavoidable without some fancy hardware to change discs for you.
Still, if anyone knows of a simpler solution, feel free to let me know.
