Technology
Entries related to technology.
TOR, Ubuntu and Slicehost/Rackspace
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/22/2009 - 19:36Yesterday, I wrote a blog post describing how I had set up TOR to run on a hosting account that I have. Today, I arrived home to find two DMCA takedown notices. It wasn’t unexpected. In TOR’s Abuse FAQ they warned about this.
Somebody uses Tor to download a Vin Diesel movie, and your ISP gets a DMCA takedown notice. See EFF's Tor DMCA Response Template, which explains why your ISP can probably ignore the notice without any liability. [Arbitrary ports]
Fortunately, they have a Response template for Tor relay maintainer to ISP written by the Electronic Freedom Foundation. In the preface, they not that their “template letter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice”. With that caveat in mind, I took the template, added the appropriate information and a postscript pointing to my blog post about using TOR on Ubuntu in response to the crackdown of Internet access in Iran. I also asked if they had any comments on DMCA takedown notices and TOR.
So far, I’ve received an automated email, as well as an email from a person on the support desk saying that they have passed my reply on to the appropriate person. It is my hope and expectation that they will respond wisely. I will keep everyone informed.
#iranelection and #TOR on #ubuntu
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/21/2009 - 11:26A common theme in many of the #iranelection tweets has been requests for proxies or TOR bridges. Initially, I set up an SSH connection that people could use. However, SSH connections are fairly geeky and there were reports that Iran was blocking SSH. I also tried setting up an Apache proxy, but I couldn’t get that to work. I didn’t get around to trying Squid.
However, I’ve long been interested in TOR. TOR, or The Onion Router, is a popular system for anonymizing web traffic and getting past firewalls. I’ve had friends who have worked for the TOR project, so I felt it was time to set up a TOR Bridge.
The first place I looked was The TOR project’s Relay Documentation. The Linux instructions were based on pulling down a tarball and compiling it. Much messier than doing a nice install on a Ubuntu machine. So, the second place I looked was the TOR community on Ubuntu. Their installation procedure is simple and secure and went very easily.
However, getting it to work smoothly presented a few additional challenges. The default configuration appeared to support only the use of TOR from the local machine. I wanted to make it into a bridge that others could use. The first configuration option I needed to change was the listen-address in the /etc/privoxy/config file. The default is to only listen to the local host. Depending on the interfaces you have, you can listen just to an internal network, just to an external network, or to the whole world. If you want to make your privoxy available to everyone, you probably need to change the listen-address to 0.0.0.0:8118. You also need to set the forward-forks4a to 127.0.0.1:9050
Over on the TOR side, there are a few configuration changes that you may want to make. First, in the tor-tsocks.conf file, you need to specify who can use the socks interface. The problem you have to be careful about is making sure that the tor-tsocks.conf is listening where the privoxy forward-forsk4a is directing traffic. If you change interfaces or ports in one, you need to make sure you change it in the other.
The next part is to get the bridge set up. The TOR documentation talks about using Vidalia. This is all well and good, if you have fullscreen access to your bridge. However, if you are working on a hosting service machine that you are only accessing via SSH, then you may want to go in and edit the torrc file directly. You need to make sure that the SocksPort is set up pointing the desired port and the SocksListenAddress to the interface you want, again, using 0.0.0.0 as the address if you want everyone to have access.
Further down the file there is a line called ContactInfo where you should put some way for people to contact you. Then, to enable bridging, you need to open up the ORPort and the DirPort. Initially, I didn’t do this and I wondered why I never got any external connections. On the other hand, do not turn on the ORListenAddress and the DirListenAddress unless you have some sort of port forwarding. I missed that and initially enabled that option and also wondered why I wasn’t getting any traffic.
You may also want to set up an ExitPolicy if you are particularly worried about how people might use your TOR bridge. For me, the other important thing to set up was the bandwidth throttling. My hosting agreement provides 200 GB a month. Currently, using less than half of that, so I figured I would make the other half available to the TOR bridge. I could simply put up an monthly AccountingMax of 100 GB. However, that might provide access for the next 20 days, and then I would be offline for 10 days. Instead, I figured it was better to make 3 GB available on a daily basis.
With this set up, I’ve now run for a day. At my reset time, I received a message that it was starting hibernation for about four hours. During this time, I cannot use privoxy on my server and no one can get out via the TOR bridge.
So far, it has been working well. I do get warning messages about Socks version xx not recognized. (Tor is not an http proxy.) I’m not sure what is miss configured yet, and that remains my one outstanding issue.
Setting up TOR on a Ubuntu server was fairly easy and if you have an Ubuntu server and this wasn’t too geeky for you, I would encourage you to set up a similar server. It will be interesting to see if the conflict in Iran will result in many more Ubuntu servers. Are you providing a proxy or a TOR Bridge? What have your experiences been?
#iranelection Updates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 13:21#iranelection continues to be the top trending topic on twitter for another day as events continue to unfold in Iran. There is a lot of information there, but there is a lot of false information as well. With that, let me highlight and comment on some of the best material I’ve seen.
One of the most tweeted articles recently has been the Boston Globe’s photo montage of Iran’s Disputed Election. As I write this, it has received 1399 comments.
Several YouTube videos often get tweeted, including a video from the June 15 protest against election fraud in Iran (BBC Persia), a video of shootings in Iran, a video of doctors and nurses protesting at a major hospital in Tehran and a video from French television about developments in Iran
Two written stories provide more details: Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 writes A day in Iran I will never forget and an anonymous note on Facebook from a person in Tehran powerfully tells of their experience.
For a very different perspective, read Mohammad Sagha post about his trip to Tehran.
A big issue on Twitter is the question of how you know which sources to trust and what people can do to help. One post went up entitled Iran Election Cyberwar Guide for Beginners. As I write this, the link forwards to a site saying the account has been suspended. I suspect it is because the site got so many hits that it went above its bandwidth allocation. Fortunately, the content has showed up in a post on Boing Boing and other sites.
Another tweet pointed to On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict from the Albert Einstein Institute. It is nearly 200 pages, but is full of valuable information. There is great concern about the safety of people tweeting in Iran, about infiltrators and efforts of the Iranian Government to shut down access to all media.
This is illustrated nicely in two competing blog posts. Charting Stocks has a ‘proof of Israeli efforts to destabilize Iran via Twitter’. TEDChris does a very good job of challenging the ‘evidence’.
It isn’t just the new media that is getting hit. Even Al Jazeera has been asked to close their bureau in Iran. There are numerous reports of other news agencies being forbidden to report about what is going on in Iran. One tweet summed it up quite nicely, Foreign press ban? Not in the age of Twitter. That's soooo 20th century
It seems like everyone has their slant on larger discussion about media. Could Iran shut down Twitter?, Did Twitter Just Overthrow Mainstream Media?, How Iran’s hackers killed Big Brother, The Revolution Will Be Twittered, Iran Protest Tech Tools at Work>, Iran’s Twitter Revolution and Social Networks Spread Defiance Online.
Beyond that, there is plenty of humor. One that I liked was a cartoon of students protesting the stolen election in Iran and responding to a comparison to Florida in 2000 saying “We reject the American way of life.” Andrew Sullivan has The Mouse That Roared, and First Door on the Left has a cartoon about the Iranian elections featuring K. Harris.
Meanwhile, back in Iran, there are reports of Iran blocking Google Mail, Yahoo, SSH/SSL and cellphones. There are reports of power outages, Hizbollah militants fighting on the side of the Iranian Government against the Iranian people and more attacks against universities.
As I write this, more and more tweets pile up, but it is time to put up this post and then do a little other work.
Twitter Wordles
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/12/2009 - 19:43Recently, Tamela left a comment on my blog post twitterwordle blog post asking if I was selling the program that I used to create my twitterwordle image.
It is a simple PHP program and instead of selling it, I figured I'd just post it here. In addition, I've set it up on my server so you can access run it (providing I don't run out of bandwidth or access).
To run it, go to http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3605?user=example
Put in the Twitter name instead of 'example' to get the statuses of the friends for whomever's name you enter.
<?php
$u = $_REQUEST["user"];
$page = 1;
while(1) {
$ch=curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,'http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/'.$u.'.xml?page='.$page);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$xmlstr = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
try {
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);
} catch (Exception $e) {
exit;
}
$i = 0;
$uname = $xml->user[$i]->name;
if ($uname == '') exit;
while($uname != '') {
$status = $xml->user[$i]->status->text;
print $uname . " : " . $status . "<br>\n";
$i = $i + 1;
$uname = $xml->user[$i]->name;
}
$page = $page + 1;
}
?>
The Death of Twitter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/12/2009 - 17:46Today, I saw two reports presenting very different views on the imminent death of Twitter. The first is from people noting that sites like Compete.com are reporting Twitter’s growth was essentially flat. The second is that soon, Twitter will pass two to the thirty-first tweets, which is the largest signed integer. Anyone who is storing information about tweets using signed integers is likely to crash sometime on Saturday.
It was just seven months ago that Twitter passed its billionth tweet. So, is Twitter really slowing down, or is there something else going on? Looking at sites that track the number of visits to the Twitter Website, it does appear to be slowing down. However, as people start following more and more people, keeping track of tweets on Twitter becomes more and more difficult, and people start using tools like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr. Looking at traffic on these sites can also be misleading as people download applications to view their tweets.
So, what can the impending Twitpocalypse tell us? Looking at the number of Tweets per day, the trend is still up, sharply, even during the ‘flat’ month of May.
This illustrates one of the problems with metrics in a Web 2.0 world. Page impressions, and all the metrics around page impressions mean less and less. With Web 2.0, information from one site is displayed on other sites, and what you need to look at is the underlying API traffic, sort of like the number of Tweets per day.
From the bigger picture, I believe that we are seeing just another example of what goes on with technology adoption. Back in 2007, I wrote about a reporter at ad:tech who “was surprised to hear that twitter was still around and active”. In my blog post about the Technology Adoption Curves and the Twitter Lifecycle I commented, “As the innovators go out and try to convince people of a really cool new technology, and the early adopters start piling on, the laggards hear about this and try to convince everyone else that there isn’t really any value to the cool new technology.”
A group psychologist, who isn’t on Twitter yet, as far as I know, was commenting about Twitter on a mailing list and suggested as a tweet from him, “Adapting and resisting – two sides of the same coin”. Perhaps that sums up some of the discussion about the death of Twitter in less than 140 characters.
Over the coming months, I am sure that we’ll see many more blog posts about Twitter’s demise. They are likely to be partly right. What we see as Twitter today and the realtime microblogging of the future may look considerably different.
Likewise, I suspect that people that said that horseless carriages were a passing trend were right. The model T looks considerably different from today’s hybrids.
(Originally published at DigidayDaily.)
