My Links

• My first essay of Fall 2015 can be found here.
• My second essay of Fall 2015 can be found here.

Some Good Reads Available Online

• Virginia Woolf, The death of the moth, and other essays
• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, 1977.
• George Orwell, On Politics and the English Language, 1946.
• John Campbell, Who Goes There? 1938. This delightful short story is the basis of John Carpenter's excellent 1982 film The Thing, among other adaptations.

Privacy and Anonymity: Some Useful Tools

A personal project revolves around shoring up my electronic privacy and anonymity. Several tools are available to use and integrate with scant technical expertise. All of these tools are free, as in cost (and often as in freedom as well).

• "Smart" phone:
  • Orbot: an app which routes internet traffic through the TOR network for Android devices.
  • Orwall: a firewall configurator which forces smartphone apps to route traffic through Orbot, and thus, through TOR. Works for rooted Android devices.
  • Signal and Redphone: apps produced by Open Whisper Systems which use end-to-end encryption to privatize text messages and phone calls, respectively.
  • A fork of Signal and Redphone that does not any use Google components, namely, GCM or the Google Play Store. But note, you must authorize third-party applications to utilize this software on your Android machine. Available also on FDroid repository.
  • The best solution, of course, is simply to forgo your mobile device. There is a strong likelihood that you do not need it for the majority of time during which you carry it around. See the Surveillance Self-Defense guide about mobile phones, produced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, here.
• Desktop web browsing:
  • TOR browser: anonymizes web browsing by encrypting and bouncing your traffic to network relays maintained by volunteers worldwide. This is called onion routing.
  • Various add-ons made available for the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser. Useful add-ons include: Adblock Plus, Noscript, and Privacy Badger will disable many website mechanisms designed to harm you.
• Web Searching:
  • Ixquick is a search engine that does not store your information.
  • Disconnect Search acts as a proxy allowing you to use popular search engines without allowing them to store your information. A browser searchbar integrated version is available.
• Virtual Privacy Networks
  • Tunnelblick is an open source VPN client available for Mac OS X. OpenVPN is a VPN client available for Windows systems. There are many VPN clients available—these are merely two popular open source examples.
  • You will also need a VPN relay server, which is what your VPN client will connect to. The best option is to host your own. You can even do this with a FreedomBox. If you are a student, there is a chance that your university provides server access to which you may connect with a VPN.
• TAILS (The Amnesiac Incognito Live System) is a free software operating system—descended from Debian, the universal free software OS—is an environment you boot into when you to use the net anonymously. TAILS uses TOR to operate, and can be loaded onto a USB drive and booted instead of your machine's operating system. Detailed instructions for obtaining and using TAILS can be found here.

My Personal Data

Note: The email shown here, as well as your Columbia UNI will only be visible to yourself and administrators. If you wish to change this email, please use: ChangePassword

My Personal Preferences

Un-comment preferences variables to activate them (remove the #-sign). Help and details on preferences variables are available in TWikiPreferences.

• Show tool-tip topic info on mouse-over of WikiWord links, on or off:
  • #Set LINKTOOLTIPINFO = off

Related Topics

• ChangePassword for changing your password
• ChangeEmailAddress for changing your email address
• TWikiUsers has a list of other TWiki users
• UserDocumentationCategory is a list of TWiki user documentation
• UserToolsCategory lists all TWiki user tools