eor

One of the things I've done to re-arrange my relationship with the Internet is to download the Tor browser. No I'm not publishing subversive literature or hunting down the illuminati. I just use it to access mundane sites like bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, and search without feeding the ad factories. I had noticed that Mozilla was getting really balky and it seemed to be entirely ad related. I also noticed that on BBC I kept getting "articles" about cars that only sell in the US. The bubbling irritated me because since I was very young I turned to foreign new sources to get counterspin on the US news sources. Living in Florida I was even able to pick up Radio Moscow out of Cuba, which was both entertaining and enlightening.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Tor browser, it runs Mozilla but in a bit of a cage. It bounces traffic off different servers, encrypting on the way, to make it difficult for those that might want to see who is talking to whom on the Internet. It also makes difficult for websites to tell who is talking to them (until you do something like log in). It has been used by people to do illegal things. It has also been used by people in countries where new is censored to get information from the outside world. The more people who use Tor, the better it becomes as a method of obscuring traffic and the more interested countries become in breaking it. Different departments of the US government 1) use it for their own people and 2) are trying to break it.

What I've found using Tor is that by default I get a notably different version of the news sites when bouncing through the Tor network. On BBC, I get pages that have many more international stories. The stock exchange listings are whatever ones are open, not just the US exchange. Pages load faster than with vanilla Mozilla. Now I could probably get Mozilla to give me the international editions and shape some of the content by constantly dumping cookies. But the idea of random routing and encryption has an innate appeal to this geek.

With Tor I can't watch videos that use flash (because I have it disabled), but I also don't get all those irritating flash ads. If I really need to see the video of the cute cat, I can always fire up vanilla Mozilla and look at that particular thing.

https://www.torproject.org/

I have begun changing how the various virtual presences of eor and derien are hosted. Our email and websites may be sporadic for a couple of days, a week at most. If you don't get a response where you expect one, be persistent, send again a bit later, or follow up via a different method.