How to really feel like a 1337 4aXXor

Most of the time, when watching “hackers” on television, and in movies, I am usually quite harsh in mocking the appearance of their tools, and the Hollywood OS. The fact of the matter is that real programmers, and even more so real hackers, primarily work with the keyboardThey usually get this right, oddly. and character mode information…but not this!–this, however, doesn’t really translate into visually interesting information for blockbuster movie audiences, so there’s always lots of flashy UI bling, and the ViewerFriendlyInterface in movies and TV.

Thus, we always find ourselves seeing elite hackers working with insanely graphics heavy three dimensional displays, programming in natural language interfaces with 120 point fonts sizes, displaying code as 2D power spectra, communication between servers is always accompanied by maps with connections tracing lines between the physical locations of the servers, etc.

That’s not what really happens. When someone who knows how to use computers is interested in the path between servers it usually looks more like this (forgive the blurring, I’m apparently very paranoid):

The physical location of the servers is pretty irrelevant, compared to such things as the “ping time” of the server, etc.

Well, as silly as those Hollywood things usually are, it turns out that nothing makes you really feel like a wizard like actually using nifty computer tools that actually have those kinds of displays.

What am I talking about?

One of the torrent hubs I use extensively is Demonoid. Recently, due to actions by the RIAA-pretending-to-be-a-Canadian-organization, the Demonoid guys have started blocking all traffic originating in Canada. If I browse to any page at Demonoid, I see this message and nothing else:

We received a letter from a lawyer representing the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and We need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this. If you reside in Canada, that is the reason you are being redirected to this message. Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.

Well, the obvious solution to this problem is to convince Demonoid that my requests don’t originate in CanadaNothing about actually using torrent files to download stuff is blocked–just web access to the directory that lets you get the torrent files. So that’s the only problem that needs a solution. And again, the obvious way to do this is by making use of a proxy server in some other country.

When I decided to start digging into this, the first thing that popped into my mind was the Tor project. I’ve followed Tor from its academic (well, military-academic, really) beginnings, to when it was just “onion routing“, though the EFF project stages, and into its current form, but I’ve never done any “production” work with it–nothing more than downloading the software at various points in the life of the project, and reading the papers. I decided that if I was going to have to setup a proxy system anyway to access Demonoid, I might as well make us of a system that would not just proxy, but also anonymize and provide additional privacy protection.

For those of you who didn’t click through, and don’t know what Tor is, the best simple explanation is here: Understanding and Using Tor – An Introduction for the Layman

Well, it’s been a while since I last checked in on Tor and in that time it’s really gotten “ready for prime time”. I’d hate to try to explain how cryptographically secure anonymous onion routing works to, say, my Mom, but I’m pretty sure that I could show her how to set it up and use it in about ten minutes. At this point, if you’re using Firefox, setting up Tor for web browsing is really idiot proof–you run an installer that sets up Tor, also installs a privacy-enhancing proxy, adds a nice GUI control application, and drops a plugin into Firefox. The plugin puts a switch into your Firefox status bar–if it’s on, Firefox’s traffic goes through Tor. If it’s not everything is normal. (It’s almost as easy with other browsers and other OSes.)

With this setup I can browse normally all day long, and when I want to access Demonoid, I just click the switch to send traffic through Tor while I’m interacting with it. Genius.

Oh, and the best part, the part that ties in the comments at the beginning with all of this? Remember I mentioned that “nice GUI control application”? Well, it includes a network map, that shows you the traditional movie display where the relay bounces from server to server, and a map shows you the physical locations of the various servers.

Boy, does that make you feel like a real superhacker supreme.

(And now I’m getting really interested in the idea of Tor’s hidden services… I’m going to have to carve out some time to look into that at some point.)