Disclaimer: What I am about show you can get you fired at work. I have explicit written permission to do this where I work. I would suggest you do the same. The reason this can get you fired is because you can use it evade website blocking. If a company has gone through the trouble to implement website blocking, you can be certain that they have a policy that says if you circumvent it, you will be terminated. Don’t be stupid.

Have you ever been to a coffee shop or an airport or a technology conference where you wanted to login to webmail or a web forum that isn’t completely SSL encrypted, but you didn’t want someone to sniff your passwords or authentication cookies? You could use a VPN, but unless you already have that setup, that’s just another hoop to jump through. Why not use something you already have available to you to keep you safe. You can do this by using Secure Shell or SSH Tunneling. SSH is a protocol that was created to connect to a remote computer with a secure interactive shell. SSH can also do many other things - from copying files securely to remote systems using SCP to acting like a proxy server for your local client applications. For all the uses of the SSH protocol, look at the Secure Shell wikipedia article referenced above.

I’m going to show you how to use SSH to connect to remote SSH server and make this connection look like a SOCKS proxy to your applications. Once the connection is setup and created, you will need to configure your local programs to use the SOCKS proxy. Do this by telling them to connect to a port on your local computer that is tunneled over the encrypted connection to the SSH server. In order to do this, you will need an external SSH server to connect to you. You can run one at home or connect to a webhosting company where you have an account. I use DreamHost. If you run one at home, I’d recommend that you not run it on the default port (22) due to SSH brute force attacks. Read the rest of this entry »

Find out what the DHS knows about you.

The Department of Homeland Security already knows everything about your travel. Now, for the first time, The Identity Project makes it easy for you to request the unclassified parts of the dossier that the DHS has complied on you.

Warning: You can only request records on behalf of yourself or others with their written explicit permission. There are severe penalties for making requests for records on someone else without their knowledge.

link via BoingBoing