Here’s a short post on 2 nice, free pieces of software that I use, like and recommend: Tor and Vidalia.

A couple weeks ago on a week end, I found myself waiting for a train with no wireless Internet connexion but a public network I couldn’t access via port 80 (http) since the network administrator had locked it. After a short analysis, it happened that Port 443 was naively opened. Vidalia, the user interface controller for Tor, and the same Tor – a onion proxy software, helped me overcome this frustrating situation (when there is a signal but you can’t use it) and browse the http web normally until my train arrived. Since I had finished my book already and my phone couldn’t get through, it saved me time and I could keep up with what happened on the blogosphere. Actually, it was better than merely ‘normal’ since Tor allows you to browse the web anonymously ie without letting traffic analysis tricks collect information on you. At the end of the day, I would say that Tor and Vidalia are nice and useful pieces of software to have somewhere on your hard drive just in case you find yourself stuck in a place where the existing public network http port access to wireless Internet is restricted and it’s secured http port isn’t. This use case isn’t necessarily the initial goal of Tor + Vidalia (privacy rather), but well, it’s cold in Paris, building heaters aren’t turned on yet so I use my laptop as a heater as I’m writing these lines. So why not use Tor + Vidalia in such a dishonest way…

Resources:

For those keen on privacy, here’s another trick, published by Debian guru Sam Hocevar on his blog, to prevent DoubleClick from gathering information about you. I tried it and it just works.

A superb explanation on how Tor works on Wikipedia (Tor was born in a US Naval Research lab!).

Download Tor.

Download Vidalia.

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