Don't Hurt Your Head!

Archive for the ‘Anonymity’ Category

Why would you need a SSH Tunnel? You may want to get around a firewall or just encrypt your communications so prying eyes can not see what you are doing online.  On Linux/Unix system you can tunnel all of the traffic from your local box to a remote box that you have a shell account on. You can do the same with Android, and here is how:

First you will need to download some software from the Android Market. The following are FREE apps.

SSH Tunnel This will build the tunnel for your browser to use.

Firefox, a good browser with an easy tunneling add on.

Proxy Mobile Add On

Install all three.

Then you will need a SSH account somewhere. There are a lot of free SSH services out there. Send me an email at brad@crackednoodle.com if you want to hear my favorite, or run a google search and I am sure you will find a couple. Make sure they support SSH Tunneling. Sign up and get a user name and password. You can also use your own SSH server if you have one.

Now open up your  SSH Tunnel program on your Android device. and put in your credentials. Hostname, Username, Passowrd, click on the Use SOCKS Proxy click box and make  note  of the port. It was 1984 for me. Activate the SSH Tunnel by clicking on the Tunnel Switch Check box  (tunnel has to be activated every time you use it).

Next open the Firefox browser and go to the Add Ons in options. Open the options for Proxy Mobile. Set Use Proxy, set SOCKS proxy to 127.0.0.1 and SOCKS port to 1984 (or the port you used on SSH Tunnel).

Your Tunnel should now be working! Enjoy and use wisely.

How to Video:

Anonymous browsing is simply browsing the World Wide Web with most of your identity hidden. Browsing anonymously is easy with Ubuntu or Debian. I have some easy steps to get you going.

You’ll need to set up our package repository before you can fetch Tor. First, you need to figure out the name of your distribution. If you’re using Ubuntu 9.10, it’s “karmic”, while 9.04 is “jaunty”, 8.10 is “intrepid”, and 8.04 is “hardy”. If you’re using Debian Etch, it’s “etch”, and Debian Lenny is “lenny”.

Then add a line to your sources.list file

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

deb     http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org <DISTRIBUTION> main

where you substitute the above word (etch, lenny, sid, karmic, jaunty, intrepid, hardy) in place of <DISTRIBUTION>.

Then add the gpg key used to sign the packages by running

gpg –keyserver keys.gnupg.net –recv 886DDD89
gpg –export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | sudo apt-key add -

Now refresh your sources and install Tor by running

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install tor tor-geoipdb

Install Privoxy

Simply make sure you have universal repositories and then:

sudo apt-get install privoxy

Configure Privoxy

Edit the file “/etc/privoxy/config” doing for example using nano:

sudo gedit /etc/privoxy/config

Add the following line (anywhere in the file is fine):

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .
That last . is very important don’t forget it.

Starting Services and Checking Status

sudo /etc/init.d/tor start
sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy start

Check that the service is running on port 9050

netstat -a | grep 9050

You should see the following output:

tcp 0 0 localhost:9050 *:* LISTEN

Now ad the tor button to your browser. Open Firefox, Go to Tools > Add-ons, In the search bar put in TorButton. When it finds it install the add-on. Restart Firefox and click on the Tor button in the lower right hand corner of the browser.

Test your installation:

http://check.torproject.org/

There you have it, be safe and smart.

Congratulations. You are using Tor.