Category Archives: Tor Browser

In the coming months, the Seattle-based nonprofit The Tor Project will be making some changes to improve how the Tor network protects users privacy and security. The free network lets users browse the internet anonymously. For example, using Tor can reduce the risk of being identified when dissidents speak out against their governments, whistleblowers communicate with journalists and victims of domestic abuse seek help.

In its most common, and best-known, function, a person using the free Tor Browser essentially a privacy-enhanced version of Firefox uses the internet mostly normally. Behind the scenes, the browser and the network handle the web traffic by bouncing the communications through a chain of three randomly chosen computers from all over the world, called relays. As of March 2017, the Tor network counts almost 7,000 of these relays. The goal of leveraging these relays is to decouple a users identity from her activity.

Tor bounces web traffic over three randomly selected Tor relays out of a total of around 7,000 relays.

But those users are still, generally speaking, using others websites, which can be shut down or pressured into censoring online activity. My own work as a scholar and volunteer member of The Tor Project also looks at the networks way of allowing people to host websites privately and anonymously, which is where most of the upgrades to the system will come.

Called onion services, this element of the Tor network makes it possible for a person to run a website (or filesharing site, or chat service or even video calling system) from a dedicated server or even her own computer without exposing where in the world it is. That makes it much harder for authorities or opponents to take down. The upcoming changes will fix flaws in the systems original design, and employ modern-day cryptography to make the system future-proof. They will improve security and anonymity for existing Tor users and perhaps draw additional users who were concerned the prior protections were not enough when communicating and expressing themselves online.

Understanding onion services

As of March 2017, an estimated 50,000 onion services are operating on the Tor network. Onion services continuously come online and offline, though, so it is difficult to obtain exact numbers. Their name comes from the fact that, like Tor users, their identities and activities are protected by multiple layers of encryption, like those of an onion.

While criminals are frequently early adopters of anonymity technology, as more people use the system, legal and ethical uses become far more common than illegal ones. Many onion services host websites, chat sites and video calling services. We dont know all of what theyre doing because The Tor Project designs privacy into its technology, so it does not and cannot keep track. In addition, when new onion services are set up, their very existence is private by default; an operator must choose to broadcast a services existence publicly.

Many owners do announce their sites existence, however, and the Ahmia search engine provides a convenient way to find all publicly known onion services. They are as diverse as the internet itself, including a search engine, a literary journal and an archive of Marxist and related writing. Facebook even has a way for Tor users to connect directly to its social media service.

Facebooks onion service, facebookcorewwwi.onion, when accessed through the Tor Browser.

Creating an onion site

When a privacy-conscious user sets up an onion service (either manually or with a third-party tool such as onionshare), people who want to connect to it must use the Tor Browser or other Tor-enabled software; normal browsers such as Chrome and Firefox cannot connect to domains whose names end in .onion. (People who want to peek at onion sites without all of the networks anonymity protections can visit Tor2web, which acts as a bridge between the open web and the Tor network.)

Originally, a new onion service was supposed to be known only to its creator, who could choose whether and how to tell others of its existence. Of course, some, like Facebook, want to spread the word as widely as possible. But not everyone wants to open their Tor site or service to the public, the way search and social media sites do.

However, a design flaw made it possible for an adversary to learn about the creation of a new onion service. This happened because each day, onion services announce their existence to several Tor relays. As happened in 2014, an attacker could potentially control enough relays to keep track of new service registrations and slowly build up a list of onion sites both secret and public over time.

The same design flaw also made it possible for an attacker to predict what relays a particular service would contact the following day, allowing the adversary to become these very relays, and render the onion service unreachable. Not only could someone wanting to operate a private, secret onion service be unmasked under certain circumstances, but their site could effectively be taken offline.

The updates to the system fix both of these problems. First, the relays each service contacts for its daily check-in will be randomly assigned. And second, the check-in message itself will be encrypted, so a relay can follow its instructions, but the human operator wont be able to read it.

Naming domains more securely

Another form of security causes the names of onion services to be harder to remember. Onion domains are not named like regular websites are: facebook.com, theconversation.com and so on. Instead, their names are derived from randomly generated cryptographic data, and often appear like expyuzz4wqqyqhjn.onion, which is the website of The Tor Project. (It is possible to repeatedly generate onion domains until a user arrives at one thats a bit easier to recognize. Facebook did that and with a combination of luck and raw computational power managed to create facebookcorewwwi.onion.)

Older onion services had names made up of 16 random characters. The new ones will use 56 characters, making their domain names look like this: l5satjgud6gucryazcyvyvhuxhr74u6ygigiuyixe3a6ysis67ororad.onion.

While the exact effects on users ability to enter onion services addresses havent been studied, lengthening their names shouldnt affect things much. Because onion domain names have always been hard to remember, most users take advantage of the Tor Browsers bookmarks, or copy and paste domain names into address fields.

Protecting onion sites

All this new design makes it significantly harder to discover an onion service whose operator wants it to remain hidden. But what if an adversary still manages to find out about it? The Tor Project has solved that problem by allowing onion services to challenge would-be users to enter a password before using it.

In addition, The Tor Project is updating the cryptography that onion services employ. Older versions of Tor used a cryptosystem called RSA, which could be broken by calculating the two prime factors of very large numbers. While RSA is not considered insecure yet, researchers have devised several attacks, so The Tor Project is replacing it with what is called elliptic-curve cryptography, which uses keys that are shorter, more efficient and understood to be at least as secure.

The developers are also updating other basic elements of the encryption standards used in Tor. The hash function, which Tor uses to derive short and constant-length text strings from arbitrarily long data, will change from the troubled and partially broken SHA-1 to the modern SHA-3. In addition, secret keys for the Advanced Encryption Standard cryptosystem will be twice as long as before and therefore significantly harder to break. These dont address specific immediate threats, but protect against future improvements in attacking encryption.

With these improvements to the software that runs Tor, were expecting to be able to prevent future attacks and protect Tor users around the world. However, better anonymity is only one aspect in the bigger picture. More experimentation and research are necessary to make onion services easier to use.

Philipp Winter is a member of The Tor Project.

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Child Porn Case Dropped as U.S. Refuses To Show Software code

. Updated March 09, 2017.

Charges against Vancouver, Washington, teacher Jay Michaud in U.S. District Court in Seattle were dismissed Monday.

In 2015, Michaud was arrested and accused of downloading child pornography. During the child porn investigation, the FBI allowed a secret child porn website on the largely anonymous Tor network to run for two weeks while it tried to identify users by hacking into their computers.

The child porn website, called Playpen, operated on Tor, which provides users anonymity by routing their communications through numerous computers around the globe, and it had more than 150,000 members. The Tor browser is based on Firefox. While the network is used for various reasons -- including circumventing free-speech restrictions in some parts of the world -- it has also provided sanctuary for child pornography, drug trafficking and other criminality.

After arresting Playpen's operator in Florida in early 2015, the FBI let the website continue running for two weeks while trying to identify users, a move the agency said was necessary to apprehend those posting and downloading images of children being sexually abused. Defense attorneys criticized the tactic as unethical.

A magistrate in Virginia issued a search warrant allowing the agency to deploy what it calls a "network investigative technique": code that prompted the computers that signed into Playpen to communicate back to the government certain information, including IP addresses, despite the anonymity normally afforded by Tor.

The FBI then obtained further warrants to search suspects' homes. At least 137 people were charged. Defendants have challenged the FBI's hacking on numerous grounds.

A federal judge in Washington state threw out the government's evidence against Michaud last year, saying that unless the FBI detailed the vulnerability it exploited, the man couldn't mount an effective defense.

The DOJ said previously the information is not relevant. Defendants have been offered or provided all the evidence they need, including limited source code and data streams showing what the program did, the FBI has argued.

Michaud's lawyer, Colin Fieman, said in an email to The Associated Press that they are relieved and grateful his case is done but that many unanswered questions remain about the FBI's investigation, known as Operation Pacifier.

"Mr. Michaud maintained his innocence from the outset, and the dismissal is a result of the FBI's overreaching and misuse of its computer hacking capabilities, including its operation of the world's largest child pornography web site and attacks on computers in over 120 countries," Fieman said. "It remains to be seen whether the FBI will ever be held fully accountable for those aspects of its investigation that put core privacy rights at risk and violated common standards of decency when it comes to how law enforcement agencies do their job."

A school district spokeswoman says Michaud hasn't returned to work, KGV-TV reported.

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OMG! Is Facebook Messenger Day a Total Ripoff of Snapchat ... - CIO Today

Child Porn Case Dropped as U.S. Refuses To Show Software code

Charges against Vancouver, Washington, teacher Jay Michaud in U.S. District Court in Seattle were dismissed Monday.

In 2015, Michaud was arrested and accused of downloading child pornography. During the child porn investigation, the FBI allowed a secret child porn website on the largely anonymous Tor network to run for two weeks while it tried to identify users by hacking into their computers.

The child porn website, called Playpen, operated on Tor, which provides users anonymity by routing their communications through numerous computers around the globe, and it had more than 150,000 members. The Tor browser is based on Firefox. While the network is used for various reasons -- including circumventing free-speech restrictions in some parts of the world -- it has also provided sanctuary for child pornography, drug trafficking and other criminality.

After arresting Playpen's operator in Florida in early 2015, the FBI let the website continue running for two weeks while trying to identify users, a move the agency said was necessary to apprehend those posting and downloading images of children being sexually abused. Defense attorneys criticized the tactic as unethical.

A magistrate in Virginia issued a search warrant allowing the agency to deploy what it calls a "network investigative technique": code that prompted the computers that signed into Playpen to communicate back to the government certain information, including IP addresses, despite the anonymity normally afforded by Tor.

The FBI then obtained further warrants to search suspects' homes. At least 137 people were charged. Defendants have challenged the FBI's hacking on numerous grounds.

A federal judge in Washington state threw out the government's evidence against Michaud last year, saying that unless the FBI detailed the vulnerability it exploited, the man couldn't mount an effective defense.

The DOJ said previously the information is not relevant. Defendants have been offered or provided all the evidence they need, including limited source code and data streams showing what the program did, the FBI has argued.

Michaud's lawyer, Colin Fieman, said in an email to The Associated Press that they are relieved and grateful his case is done but that many unanswered questions remain about the FBI's investigation, known as Operation Pacifier.

"Mr. Michaud maintained his innocence from the outset, and the dismissal is a result of the FBI's overreaching and misuse of its computer hacking capabilities, including its operation of the world's largest child pornography web site and attacks on computers in over 120 countries," Fieman said. "It remains to be seen whether the FBI will ever be held fully accountable for those aspects of its investigation that put core privacy rights at risk and violated common standards of decency when it comes to how law enforcement agencies do their job."

A school district spokeswoman says Michaud hasn't returned to work, KGV-TV reported.

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Europe-Wide Raids Against Cybercrime Networks - NewsFactor Network

Getty Image (File Photo)

SEATTLE (AP) Federal prosecutors have dropped child pornography charges against a Washington teacher after the U.S. Justice Department refused to disclose information about a software weakness it exploited during an investigation last year.

Charges against Vancouver, Washington, teacher Jay Michaud in U.S. District Court in Seattle were dismissed Monday.

In 2015, Michaud was arrested and accused of downloading child pornography. During the child porn investigation, the FBI allowed a secret child porn website on the largely anonymous Tor network to run for two weeks while it tried to identify users by hacking into their computers.

The child porn website, called Playpen, operated on Tor, which provides users anonymity by routing their communications through numerous computers around the globe, and it had more than 150,000 members. The Tor browser is based on Firefox. While the network is used for various reasons including circumventing free-speech restrictions in some parts of the world it has also provided sanctuary for child pornography, drug trafficking and other criminality.

After arresting Playpens operator in Florida in early 2015, the FBI let the website continue running for two weeks while trying to identify users, a move the agency said was necessary to apprehend those posting and downloading images of children being sexually abused. Defense attorneys criticized the tactic as unethical.

A magistrate in Virginia issued a search warrant allowing the agency to deploy what it calls a network investigative technique: code that prompted the computers that signed into Playpen to communicate back to the government certain information, including IP addresses, despite the anonymity normally afforded by Tor.

The FBI then obtained further warrants to search suspects homes. At least 137 people were charged. Defendants have challenged the FBIs hacking on numerous grounds.

A federal judge in Washington state threw out the governments evidence against Michaud last year, saying that unless the FBI detailed the vulnerability it exploited, the man couldnt mount an effective defense.

The DOJ said previously the information is not relevant. Defendants have been offered or provided all the evidence they need, including limited source code and data streams showing what the program did, the FBI has argued.

Michauds lawyer, Colin Fieman, said in an email to The Associated Press that they are relieved and grateful his case is done but that many unanswered questions remain about the FBIs investigation, known as Operation Pacifier.

Mr. Michaud maintained his innocence from the outset, and the dismissal is a result of the FBIs overreaching and misuse of its computer hacking capabilities, including its operation of the worlds largest child pornography web site and attacks on computers in over 120 countries, Fieman said. It remains to be seen whether the FBI will ever be held fully accountable for those aspects of its investigation that put core privacy rights at risk and violated common standards of decency when it comes to how law enforcement agencies do their job.

A school district spokeswoman says Michaud hasnt returned to work, KGV-TV reported.

Read the rest here:
Vancouver child-porn case dropped as US refuses to show software code - Q13 FOX

When the revelations about government mass surveillance were disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, the issue irrevocably changed how the world saw online privacy. Suddenly the general public started to think a lot more about how safe it is to post all their activities online, and to question how safe their data is on the internet.

One way many people now stay safe online is to make use of the Tor anonymising network.

The Tor anonymity network (named after The Onion Router project) consists of software that shields and redirects internet traffic through a worldwide network of relays. It is comprised of volunteers who set up their computers as Tor exit nodes, in order to offer at least three layers of encryption, whereby the source and the final destination of the Tor path is completely anonymised.

The network is used both by people who have privacy concerns and don't want governments and internet service providers (ISP) to be able to spy on their activities online, as well as by others who have nefarious purposes in mind for example, people who want to obtain firearms, narcotics and counterfeit goods from secret underground marketplaces on the Dark Web.

How do I use Tor?

It's fairly simple to get started with Tor. Simply go to the Tor Project website and download the Tor Browser here. The Tor Browser is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and it has been translated into 15 other popular languages besides English.

Step One: Select the Tor Browser in the language and operating system of your choice and click on the link in the table on the download page, then safe the file to your desktop.

Step Two: Install the software and make sure that it is updated to the latest version.

Step Three: Every time you want to go on the internet, from now on you should only do so by launching the Tor Browser. Sometimes it takes several seconds for websites to load, but this is normal the extra time is due to the fact your internet traffic is bouncing around the Tor relays so that it becomes untraceable to you. Use Tor for all websites, including Facebook.

Step Four (optional): If you want to further encrypt your web traffic so it makes it impossible for it to be traced, then you should use Tor together with a virtual private network (VPN). VPNs are premium paid subscription tunnel services that route internet traffic through a private server to hide your traffic and geographic location. There are tons of VPN providers online, offering a range of different prices, so check out this VPN comparison guide before purchasing.

Advice: We know that illegally downloading pirated content via torrents is popular, but although it is tempting, you shouldn't do so on the Tor network, as it will slow down and jam up the network for everyone else. So please don't do this. Also, again, remember that it is illegal.

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What is Tor and how do I use it? - International Business Times UK

Need to hire an assassin, buy some contraband, view illegal porn, or just bypass government, corporate, or identity thief snooping? Tor is your answer. Tor, which stands for "The Onion Router" is not a product, but a protocol that lets you hide your Web browsing as though it were obscured by the many layers of an onion. The most common way to view the so-called Dark Web that comprises Tor sites is by using the Tor Browser, a modded version of Mozilla Firefox. Using this Web browser also hides your location, IP address, and other identifying data from regular websites. Accessing Tor has long been beyond the ability of the average user. Tor Browser manages to simplify the process of protecting your identity onlinebut at the price of performance.

What Is Tor? If you're thinking that Tor comes from a sketchy group of hackers, know that its core technology was developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab and D.A.R.P.A.. The Tor Project non-profit receives sizeable donations from various federal entities such as The National Science Foundation. The Tor Project has a page listing many examples of legitimate types of Tor users, such as political dissidents in countries with tight control over the Internet and individuals concerned about personal privacy.

Tor won't encrypt your datafor that, you'll need a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Instead, Tor routes your Internet traffic through a series of intermediary nodes. This makes it very difficult for government snoops or aggressive advertisers to track you online. Using Tor affords far more privacy than other browsers' private (or Incognito) modes, since it obscures your IP address so that you can't be tracked with it. Standard browsers' private browsing modes discard your cached pages and browsing history after your browsing session. Even Firefox's new, enhanced private browsing mode doesn't hide your identifiable IP address from the sites you visit, though it does prevent them tracking you based on cookies.

Starting Up Connecting to the Tor network entails more than just installing a browser and firing up websites. You need to install support code, but luckily, the free Tor Browser bundle streamlines the process. Installers are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Tor Project recommends installing the browser on a USB drive for more anonymity and portability; the drive needs to have 80MB free space.

We tested a standard Windows installer, with choices to create desktop icons and run the browser immediately. The browser itself is a heavily modified version of Firefox 38.5 (as of this writing), and includes several security plug-ins as well as security tweaks such as not caching any website data. For a full rundown of the PCMag Editors' Choice browser's many features, read our full review of Firefox.

Before merrily browsing along anonymously, you need to inform Tor about your Web connection. If your Internet connection is censored, you configure one way, if not, you can connect directly to the network. Since we live in a free society and work for benevolent corporate overlords, we connected directly for testing. After connecting to the Tor relay system (a dialog with a progress bar appears at this stage), the browser launches, and you see the Tor project's page.

Interface The browser's home page includes a plea for financial support to the project, a search box using the anonymized Disconnect.me search, and a Test Tor Network Settings link. Hitting the latter loads a page that indicates whether you're successfully anonymized. We recommend taking this step. The page even shows your apparent IP addressapparent because it's by no means your actual IP address. We verified this by opening Microsoft Edge and checking our actual IP address on Web search sites. The two addresses couldn't have been more different, because the Tor Browser reports the IP address of a Tor node.

The browser interface is identical with Firefox, except with some necessary add-ons installed. NoScript, a commonly used Firefox add-on, is preinstalled and can be used to block most non-HTML content on the Web. The green onion button to the left of the address bar is the Torbutton add-on. It lets you see your Tor network settings, but also the circuit you're using: Our circuit started in Germany and passed through two different addresses in the Netherlands before reaching the good old Internet. If that doesn't suit you, you can request a new circuit, either for the current session or for the current site. This was one of our favorite features.

One thing we really like about the Tor Browser is how it makes existing security and privacy tools easier to use. NoScript, for example, can be a harsh mistress, who can be difficult to configure, and can break websites. But a security panel in the Torbutton presents you with a simple security slide. At the lowest, default setting, all browser features are enabled. At the highest setting, all JavaScript and even some image types are blocked, among other settings. This makes it easy to raise or lower the level of protection you need, without having to muck around in multiple settings windows.

Everything you do in the browser is tested for anonymity: When we tried full-screening the browser window, a message told us that that could provide sites a way to track us, and recommended leaving the window at the default size. And the project's site specifically states that using Tor alone doesn't guarantee anonymity, but rather that you have to abide by safe browsing guidelines: don't use BitTorrent, don't install additional browser add-ons, don't open documents or media while online. The recommendation to only visit secure HTTPS sites is optionally enforced by a plug-in called HTTPS Everywhere.

Even if you follow these recommendations, though, someone could detect the simple fact that you're using Tor, unless you set it up to use a Tor bridge relay. Those are not listed in the Tor directory, so hackers (and governments) would have more trouble finding them.

One thing we noticed while browsing the standard Web through Tor was the need to enter a CAPTCHA to access many sites. This is because your cloaked URL looks suspicious to website security services such as CloudFlare, used by millions of sites to protect themselves. It's just one more price you pay for anonymity.

We also had trouble finding the correct version of websites we wished to visit. Directing the Tor Browser to PCMag.com, for example, took us to the Netherlands localization of our website. We could not find any way to direct us back to the main URL, which lets you access the U.S. site.

The Dark Web You can use Tor to anonymize browsing to standard websites, of course, but there's a whole hidden network of sites that don't appear on the standard Web at all, and are only visible if you're using a Tor connection. You can read all about it in our feature, Inside the Dark Web. If you use a standard search engine, even one anonymized by Disconnect.me, you just see standard websites. By the way, you may improve your privacy by switching to an anonymous search provider such as DuckDuckGo or Startpage.com. DuckDuckGo even offers a hidden search version, and Sinbad Search is only available through Tor. Ahmia is another search engine, on the open Web, for finding hidden Tor sites, with the twist of only showing sites that are on the up-and-up.

Tor hidden sites have URLs that end in .onion, preceded by 16 alphanumeric characters. You can find directories of these hidden sites with categories resembling the good old days of Yahoo. There's even a Tor Links Directory page (on the regular Web) that's a directory of these directories. There are many chat and message boards, but you even find directories of things like lossless audio files, video game hacks, and financial services such as anonymous bitcoin, and even a Tor version of Facebook. Many onion sites are very slow or completely downkeep in mind that they're not run by deep-pocketed Web companies. Very often we clicked an onion link only to be greeted with an "Unable to Connect" error. Sinbad helpfully displays a red "Offline on last crawl" bullet to let you know that a site is probably nonfunctional.

Speed and Compatibility Webpage loading time under Tor is typically far slower than browsing with a standard Internet connection. It's really not possible to state definitively by how much your browsing will be slowed down if you use Tor, because it depends on the particular relay servers your traffic is being routed through. And this can change every time for every browsing session. As a very rough rule of thumb, however, PCMag.com took 11.3 seconds to load in Firefox and 28.7 seconds in the Tor Browser, at the same time, over the same FiOS connection on the open Web. Your mileage, of course, will vary.

As for browser benchmarks, the results hew to Firefox's own performance, with near-leading performance on all the major JavaScript tests, JetStream and Octane, for example. On our test laptop, the Tor Browser scored 20,195 on Octane, compared with 22,297 for standard Firefoxnot a huge difference. The Tor network routing is a far more significant factor in browsing performance than browser JavaScript speed. That is, unless you've blocked all JavaScript.

Keep in mind, though, that the Tor Browser is based on the Firefox Extended Support Release versions, which updates less frequently so that large organizations have time to maintain their custom code. That means you don't get quite the latest in Firefox performance and features, but security updates are delivered at the same time as new main versions.

There's a similar story when it comes to standards compatibility: On the HTML5Test.com site, which quantifies the number of new Web standards supported by a browser, the Tor Browser gets a score of 412, compared with 468 for the latest Firefox version. You may run into incompatible sites, though. For example, none of the Internet speed connection test sites performed correctly in the Tor Browser.

Tor, Browser of Thunder With the near complete lack of privacy on today's Web, Tor is becoming more and more necessary. It lets you browse the Web knowing that all those tracking services aren't watching your every move. Most of us have experienced how an ad follows you from site to site, just because you clicked on, or searched for a product or service once. All that goes away.

Of course, you pay a price of extra setup and slower performance with the Tor Browser, but it's less onerous than you may think. And the included support for fine-grain privacy and security protection is excellent. If you take your online privacy seriously, you owe it to yourself to check out the Tor Browser. For standard, full-speed Web browsing, however, check out PCMag Editors' Choice Web browser, Firefox.

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Tor Browser Review & Rating | PCMag.com

Federal prosecutors have dropped child pornography charges against a Washington teacher after the U.S. Justice Department refused to disclose information about a software weakness it exploited during an investigation last year.

Charges against Vancouver, Washington, teacher Jay Michaud in U.S. District Court in Seattle were dismissed Monday.

In 2015, Michaud was arrested and accused of downloading child pornography. During the child porn investigation, the FBI allowed a secret child porn website on the largely anonymous Tor network to run for two weeks while it tried to identify users by hacking into their computers.

The child porn website, called Playpen, operated on Tor, which provides users anonymity by routing their communications through numerous computers around the globe, and it had more than 150,000 members. The Tor browser is based on Firefox. While the network is used for various reasons including circumventing free-speech restrictions in some parts of the world it has also provided sanctuary for child pornography, drug trafficking and other criminality.

After arresting Playpen's operator in Florida in early 2015, the FBI let the website continue running for two weeks while trying to identify users, a move the agency said was necessary to apprehend those posting and downloading images of children being sexually abused. Defense attorneys criticized the tactic as unethical.

A magistrate in Virginia issued a search warrant allowing the agency to deploy what it calls a "network investigative technique": code that prompted the computers that signed into Playpen to communicate back to the government certain information, including IP addresses, despite the anonymity normally afforded by Tor.

The FBI then obtained further warrants to search suspects' homes. At least 137 people were charged. Defendants have challenged the FBI's hacking on numerous grounds.

A federal judge in Washington state threw out the government's evidence against Michaud last year, saying that unless the FBI detailed the vulnerability it exploited, the man couldn't mount an effective defense.

The DOJ said previously the information is not relevant. Defendants have been offered or provided all the evidence they need, including limited source code and data streams showing what the program did, the FBI has argued.

Michaud's lawyer, Colin Fieman, said in an email to The Associated Press that they are relieved and grateful his case is done but that many unanswered questions remain about the FBI's investigation, known as Operation Pacifier.

"Mr. Michaud maintained his innocence from the outset, and the dismissal is a result of the FBI's overreaching and misuse of its computer hacking capabilities, including its operation of the world's largest child pornography web site and attacks on computers in over 120 countries," Fieman said. "It remains to be seen whether the FBI will ever be held fully accountable for those aspects of its investigation that put core privacy rights at risk and violated common standards of decency when it comes to how law enforcement agencies do their job."

A school district spokeswoman says Michaud hasn't returned to work, KGV-TV reported.

Read more here:
Child porn case dropped as US refuses to show software weakness it exploited - Chicago Tribune

Posted10 August 2016

Tor Browser keeps your online activities private. It disguises your identity and protects your web traffic from many forms of internet surveillance. Tor can also be used to bypass internet filters.

Tor Browser is an up-to-date, privacy-optimised version of Mozilla Firefox. It is free and open source software that enables online anonymity and censorship circumvention. Unlike other browsers, Tor Browser:

The Tor Browser operates on the Tor network, which runs on Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and which is designed to enable online anonymity and censorship circumvention.

The Tor network consists of thousands of servers run by volunteers all over the world. Every time the Tor Browser makes a new connection, it selects three of these Tor relays and connects to the Internet through them. It encrypts each leg of this journey in such a way that the relays themselves do not know the full path through which it sends and receives data.

When you use the Tor Browser, your internet traffic will appear to come from a different IP address, often in a different country. As a result, the Tor Browser hides your IP address from the websites you access while also hiding the websites you access from third parties who might try to monitor your traffic. It also ensures that no single Tor relay can figure out both your location on the Internet and the websites you visit (though some of them will know one or the other).

Tor also takes steps to encrypt communications into and throughout its network. However, this protection does not extend all the way to websites that are accessible through unencrypted channels (that is, websites that do not support HTTPS).

Because the Tor Browser hides the connection between you and the websites you visit, it allows you to browse the Web anonymously and avoid online tracking. It it also useful for circumventing online filters so that you can access content from (or publish content to) websites that would otherwise be restricted.

The following steps illustrate how the Tor network works when Alice's computer uses Tor Browser to communicate with Bob's server:

Step 1. Alice's Tor Browser obtains a list of Tor nodes or relays [1] from the Tor directory server (Dave).

Step 2. Alice's Tor Browser picks a random path through Tor network to the destination server (Bob). All connections inside Tor network are encrypted (green [3]). In this example, the last connection is not-encrypted (red [2]). The last connection would be encrypted if Alice were visiting an https website.

Step 3. If at the later time, Alice visits another server (Jane), Alice's Tor Browser selects a different random path.

Note: There is a trade-off between anonymity and speed. Tor provides anonymity by bouncing your traffic through volunteer servers in various parts of the world. It will almost always be slower than a direct connection to the Internet.

Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, GNU/Linux, Android and iOS compatible programs:

The Tor Browser is available for the GNU Linux, Mac OS, Microsoft Windows and Android operating systems. Tor is the most rigorously tested tool for keeping your online activities anonymous. Below are a few other tools that are suitable for circumventing online censorship and protecting the confidentiality of your local traffic. Unlike Tor, these tools require that you trust the service provider:

Note: If you are in a location where access to the Tor Project website is blocked, you can use email to request a download link that is more likely to work. Send an email to gettor@torproject.org with the version you need (windows, osx or linux) in the body of the message. You will receive a response that includes a link to a Tor Browser archive via Dropbox, Google Docs or Github. Further details about this feature are available on the Tor Project website.

Start off by making sure you are on the Tor Browser download site. (The https indicates that the connection between your browser and the website is encrypted, which makes it harder for an attacker to modify the file that you are about to download.)

Figure 1: Tor Browser page

Step 1. Click [Download Tor Browser] to get directed to the bottom part of the page, which includes links for downloading Tor Browser.

Figure 2: Tor Browser download links

Step 2. Click the appropriate download link and save the package somewhere convenient (in your Desktop or Documents folder, for example, or on a USB storage device).

Step 3. Click [Save File] through the following window to start downloading Tor Browser:

Figure 3: Saving the Tor Browser file

You do not have to install the Tor Browser as you would most software. If you prefer, you can extract it to a USB storage device, for example, and run it from there.

To install the Tor Browser, follow the steps below:

Step 1. Navigate to the folder in which you saved the Tor Browser package. In this example, we assume you saved the file in your Downloads folder.

Figure 1: The Downloads folder containing the Tor Browser file

Step 2. Right-click on the Tor Browser file and then click [Open].

Figure 2: Opening the Tor Browser file

Step 3. Select the language you would like to use Tor Browser in and click [OK].

Figure 3: Tor Browser Language Installer

Step 4. Select the folder where you would like to install Tor Browser in. This example installs Tor Browser on the Desktop.

Figure 4: Tor Browser Installation Location

Step 5. Once you have chosen where you want to install Tor Browser, click [Install]. The following window should appear while Tor Browser is being installed:

Figure 5: Installing Tor Browser

Step 6. Click [Finish] through the following window, to complete the installation of Tor Browser:

Figure 5: Completing the Tor Browser Setup Wizard

By selecting [Run Tor Browser] in this window, you will proceed to running this browser.

The first time you launch Tor Browser, it will ask you how it should connect to the Internet:

Direct Access: Select this option if your access to the Internet is unrestricted and if the use of Tor is not blocked, banned, or monitored where you are located.

Restricted Access: Select this option if your access to the Internet is restricted or if the use of Tor is blocked, banned, or monitored where you are located.

After you initially configure and launch Tor Browser it will continue to connect to the Tor network with no additional configuration. But you can change these settings at any time from within the Tor Browser. You may need to change them when you are travelling, or if the situation changes in your country. To do so, see Section 3.3, How to reconfigure access to the Tor network.

Once you have installed Tor Browser, the Tor Browser Setup Wizard will direct you to the following window:

Figure 1: Tor Network Settings

If access to the internet (and to the Tor Network) is not restricted in your location, perform the following step to configure Tor Browser:

Step 1. Click [Connect] to launch Tor Browser

Figure 2: Connecting to the Tor Network

After a few moments, Tor Browser will open:

Figure 3: Tor Browser

If you want to use the Tor Browser from a location where the Tor network is blocked, you will have to use a bridge relay. Bridges are not listed in the public directory of Tor relays, so they are more difficult to block. Some bridges also support pluggable transports, which try to disguise your traffic to and from the Tor network. This helps prevent online filters from identifying and blocking bridge relays.

The default pluggable transport, called obfs4, also makes it slightly more difficult for others to figure out that you are connecting to the Tor network. In general, though, Tor is not designed to hide the fact that you are using Tor.

You can learn more about bridges on the Tor project website. There are two ways to use bridges. You can enable the provided bridges or you can request custom bridges.

Once you have installed Tor Browser, the Tor Browser Setup Wizard will direct you to the following window:

Figure 1: Tor Network Settings

Step 1. If your connection to the Tor network is blocked or otherwise censored, Click [Configure]

Note: If you have already configured the Tor Browser, you can activate the screen below by following the steps in Section 3.3

Figure 2: Tor bridges configuration

Step 2. Select Yes

Step 3. Click [Next] to display the bridge configuration screen.

Figure 3: The bridge configuration screen

Step 4. Select Connect with provided bridges.

Step 5. Click [Next] to display the local proxy configuration screen.

The Tor Browser will now ask if you need to use a local proxy to access the Internet. The steps below assume that you do not. If you do, you can check your regular browser settings and copy over your proxy configuration. (In Firefox you can find these settings in the Options > Advanced > Network tab of Connection Settings. In other browsers you might find them under Internet Options. You can also use the Help feature within your browser for further assistance.

Figure 4: The local proxy configuration screen

Step 6. Select [No].

Step 7. Click [Connect] to launch Tor Browser.

Figure 5: Connecting to the Tor network

After a few moments, Tor Browser will open.

You can also connect to the Tor network through custom bridges, which are used by fewer people than the provided bridges and are therefore less likely to be blocked. If you are unable to access the Tor Project website, you can request custom bridge addresses by sending an email to bridges@torproject.org using a Riseup, Gmail or Yahoo account. Include the phrase, get bridges in the body of your message

If you can access the Tor Project website, you can obtain custom bridge addresses by visiting https://bridges.torproject.org/options and following the steps below.

Step 1. Click Just give me bridges!

Figure 1: Obtaining Tor bridges

Step 2. Fill in the captcha and press enter.

Figure 2: Captcha

This should display three bridge addresses:

Figure 3: Bridge addresses

Step 3. Once you have your custom bridge addresses, you can type them into Tor Bridge Configuration screen shown below.

Note: If you are launching Tor Browser for the first time, you can find the Tor Bridge Configuration screen by follow the first few steps of the previous section. To find this screen if you have already setup Tor Browser, see the following section.

Figure 4: Tor bridge configuration screen

At any stage, if you need to access the Tor Network a different way, for example if you have travelled to a country that blocks Tor, you can update your settings from within the browser by following the steps below:

Step 1: Click the button to activate the Tor Browser menu

Figure 1: The Tor Browser Configuration menu

Step 2. Select Tor Network Settings to change how Tor Browser connects to the Internet.

Figure 2: Tor Network Settings

This screen allows you to enable or disable the use of Bridges and add custom Bridges, among other configuration changes.

When you are done, click [OK] and restart the Tor Browser.

It is important to remember that Tor Browser only provides anonymity for the things you do within a Tor Browser window. Your other online activities do not use Tor just because it is running.

Note: In keeping with a policy of privacy by design, Tor Browser is configured in such a way that it does not save your browsing history to your hard drive. Each time you quit Tor Browser, your browsing history will be deleted.

Tor Browser hides your IP address from the websites you visit. If it is working properly, you should appear to be accessing websites from a location on the internet that:

The simplest way to confirm this is by visiting the Tor Check website, which is located at https://check.torproject.org/.

If you are not using Tor, it will display the following:

Figure 1: Tor Check showing that Tor is not working properly

If you are using Tor, it will display the following:

Figure 2: Tor Check showing that Tor is working properly

If you want to check your apparent IP address using a service that is not associated with the Tor Project, there are many options online. Examples that support https encryption (which makes it more difficult for someone other than the service provider to "fake" the result) include:

If you access these websites without using Tor Browser, they should display your real IP address, which is linked to your physical location. If you access them through Tor Browser, they should display a different IP address.

You can create a "new identity" for your Tor Browser. When you do so, Tor Browser will randomly select a new set of Tor relays, which will make you appear to be coming from a different IP address when you visit websites.To do this, follow the steps below:

Step 1. Click the button to activate the Tor Browser menu

Figure 1: Creating a new identity in Tor Browser

Step 2. Select [New Identity] from the menu.

Read this article:
Tor Browser for Windows - Online anonymity and censorship circumvention

Police in three European countries have raided dozens of homes and offices linked to suspected cybercriminals, including the alleged operators of a secret forum used to trade illicit wares, officials said Wednesday.

More than 1,000 investigators searched over 120 premises across Germany late Tuesday in connection with crimenetwork.biz, a so-called darknet site that is allegedly used to buy and sell stolen goods, drugs and medication.

The darknet is a part of the internet hosted within an encrypted network and accessible only through specialized anonymity-providing tools, most notably the Tor Browser.

German federal police said in a statement that the raids followed a four-month criminal probe during which investigators sifted through over a million posts and private messages exchanged by some 260 members of the darknet forum.

It said that 153 members of the forum were identified, including 11 people considered to be part of the "leadership level" who now face charges of forming a criminal organization.

In a separate set of raids Tuesday, police in Germany, Latvia and Britain on Tuesday targeted 10 premises and 12 people suspected of stealing money from online banking customers in Germany.

Prosecutors in Frankfurt said the suspects used so-called phishing attacks to gain access to victims' passwords and then obtained duplicate SIM cards for their cellphones.

Using those SIM cards they were able to receive text messages from the victims' bank containing an authorization code needed for money transfers.

Prosecutors said the main suspect is a 34-year-old Belarusian citizen who was arrested in Frankfurt in February. A 27-year-old dual citizen of Kazakhstan and Germany was arrested Tuesday, as was a 47-year-old Moldovan citizen living in London.

Read this article:
Europe-wide raids against cybercrime networks - ABC News

Mozilla released version 52 of Firefox, which brings new security features, as well as support for WebAssembly, a low-level programming language for the web. The new version of Firefox also coincides with a new Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR), which means the Tor Browser will soon benefit from all the security features that have been added to Firefox over the past year, including the browsers new sandboxing architecture.

Firefox 52 brought quite a few new features, especially in the security department.

WebAssembly

One of the most important features added to Firefox 52 is support for WebAssembly, a low-level programming language that can make web apps run at near-native speed.

This will make WebAssembly especially more useful for browser games, advanced web apps, and software libraries. Mozilla has been one of the primary developers of the language, as it wanted to offer a standardized alternative to Googles Native Client API, which boasts similar performance. The organization seems to have succeeded in that goal, as WebAssembly should soon be adopted by all the major browsers.

Strict Secure Cookies

Firefox 52 also supports Strict Secure Cookies, a policy that forbids HTTP websites from setting cookies with the secure attribute.

(Non-) Security Warnings

Google and Mozilla have promised for many months a new This connection is not secure warning that will appear in login boxes on pages that use HTTP, rather than HTTPS.

Both Google and Mozilla will progressively ramp up their warnings until all HTTP web pages are greeted by big red notifications that they are not secure. However, for now, the two companies are only warning about pages that require passwords or credit card information.

An Untrusted Connection error will also appear when Firefox 52 users visit a website whose certificate is chained to a root certificate that still uses the SHA-1 algorithm (such as those imported by the user). All the major browser vendors have had plans to deprecate SHA-1 for a couple of years now. With Google researchers proving that a collision attack on SHA-1 is now practical, there are even more reasons to avoid connections based on SHA-1 algorithms. However, for now, Mozilla will still allow users to bypass this warning.

Improved Multi-process, Sync Support

The multi-process architecture has also been enabled for Windows users that use touchscreen devices. The browser also got an enhanced sync feature to enable users to send and open tabs from one device to another.

Dropping NPAPI, Battery Status API Support

Support for the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) has been removed for virtually all plugins with the exception of Flash. Mozilla also removed support for the Battery Status API, which could have been used by some services to fingerprint users, thus significantly reducing privacy on the web.

Along with the regular release of Firefox 52, Mozilla also announced a new Firefox ESR, which has caught up with the features of the latest mainstream version of Firefox.

The ESR version is a release of Firefox that only receives security patches for almost a year (seven Firefox releases, to be exact). That means it falls behind in supporting new features as they appear in the regular versions of Firefox. This is usually a good thing for enterprise users, but also for certain organizations such as the Tor Project, which build the Tor Browser on top of Firefox ESR.

New features tend to introduce new bugs and it also takes time to validate them and to make sure they dont break anything. Therefore, something like Firefox ESR is more appealing to the Tor Project. However, sometimes staying almost a year behind is not that good, especially when the main browser introduces significant security improvements.

One of the major security improvements weve seen last year in Firefox is the switch to a better sandboxing architecture, which separates the UI and the content in a different process. That should make it harder for JavaScript exploits that may live inside a web page to make modifications to the browser itself.

As Firefox has kept seeing more and more exploits against it due to the fact that it doesnt have as good of a sandboxing architecture as Chrome does, the Tor Project has started to build its own sandboxing. However, the hardened version of the Tor Browser is only available on Linux for now, and its still in the alpha stage. The Tor browser should still benefit from Mozillas own sandboxing, especially on Windows.

This year, Firefox should continue to receive security upgrades, but it wont be until Firefox 59 (the next ESR version) that the Tor Browser will be able to implement them as well.

See the rest here:
Firefox 52 Brings New ESR Version, Security Upgrades, And WebAssembly Support - Tom's Hardware