[nylug-talk] [FC-discuss] Protect Your Students and Your Privacy: A New Project (fwd)

[Joshua Zeidner]

On 6/21/07, Jay Sulzberger <jays at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>   Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:15:01 -0000
>   From: Free Culture blog <webleader+rss-bot at freeculture.org>
>   Reply-To: Discussion of Free Culture in general and this organization in
>       particular <discuss at freeculture.org>
>   To: discuss at freeculture.org
>   Subject: [FC-discuss] Protect Your Students and Your Privacy: A New
> Project
>
>   Hi Everyone-
>
>   My name is Brendan Ballou, and I'm from the Free Culture chapter at
>   Columbia. Some of you may have already heard about EFF's onion router
>   (Tor, http://tor.eff.org/). Basically Tor is a program that prevents
>   outside parties (your university, your ISP, the RIAA, etc) from tracking
>   your movements on the web (all of it  â€" including file sharing). It's
> an
>   incredibly useful tool - one in fact that Chinese dissidents use to keep
>   information from the Chinese government.
>
>   Last semester we modified Tor to run only over the Columbia University
>   intranet. Our modified program, the Columbia University Local Area Tor
>   (CU-LATOR) ran much faster than the standard version, and now we want to
>   expand to other universities that participate in Internet2 (to maintain
>   network speed). If you would be interested in having your school
>   participate in this larger, nation-wide uni-tor (we're working on a
>   name), please email me, because the more schools that participate, the
>   faster the network will run and the safer all our information will be.
>   You don't need to be a coder to be involved, we just need boots on the
>   ground to help publicize the program and get people to use it. You can
>   check if your school participates in Internet2 here:
>   http://members.internet2.edu/university/universities.cfm
>
>   However, if you are a coder we need your help too. Right now Tor only
>   runs on Mac and Linux



  This is a bit misleading... the standard EFF Tor distribution not only
runs on Windows, it runs very well.  I am assuming that they are referring
to their fork of Tor.

  Secondly, its going to be very difficult to muster support for a project
that aims to be an alternative to the official EFF version.  If there are
significant performance advantages, why not commit them to the main code
base?  Does this group's political aims significantly diverge from that of
the EFF?

  -jmz


- we need people to help build software for
>   Windows. Iif you're interested in being involved in that project, email
>   Ron Gejman at rsg2119 at columbia.edu.
>
>   This is a fun project, and an important one too. We hope we can get your
>   help in keeping students' data safe and private.
>
>   Best,
>
>   Brendan Ballou
>
>   bcb2114 at columbia.edu
>
>   URL:
> http://freeculture.org/blog/2007/06/21/protect-your-students-and-your-privacy-a-new-project/
>
>
>


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