Tor: Anonymous communication for the US Department of Defense...and you.

What do the United States Department of Defence and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have in common? They have both funded the development of Tor (tor.eff.org), a free-software onion routing network that helps people around the world use the Internet safely. The public Tor network has 150 servers on five continents, and averages over 40Mbit/s of traffic. Our users include ordinary citizens who want protection from identity theft and prying corporations, corporations who want to look at a competitor's website in private, and aid workers in the Middle East who need to contact their home servers without fear of physical harm. Roger Dingledine give an overview of the Tor architecture, and talk about why you'd want to use it, what security it provides, and how user applications interface to it. He show a working Tor network, and invite the audience to connect to it and use it. Roger Dingledine is a security and privacy researcher. While at MIT he developed Free Haven, one of the early peer-to-peer systems that emphasized resource management while retaining anonymity for its users. Currently he consults for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the U.S. Navy to design and develop systems for anonymity and traffic analysis resistance. Recent work includes anonymous publishing and communication systems, traffic analysis resistance, censorship resistance, attack resistance for decentralized networks, and reputation. NUUG talk from 2005-04-21.