Displaying items by tag: Proxy

The Surfeasy private proxy network suffered an outage today starting around 10:00am and lasted for about an hour. There was no indication that there would be any maintenance or other issues with the network, but the service dropped offline leaving people with active sessions exposed and anyone that tried to connect unable to. Even attempting to connect to the Surfeasy home page resulted in a “This website is offline” error from the Cloudflare hosting service that Surfeasy uses.

In preparation for launching their own internet, the Iranian government has decided to block Google. This move should “protect” Iranian citizens from big bad internet freedom. An official known only by his last name Khoramabadi stated "Google and Gmail will be filtered throughout the country until further notice“. The Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) said that this move was provoked by the anti-Islamic movie posted on YouTube that Google refused to remove. As we all know, Muslims don’t take these kinds of things lightly and we saw many newspapers or TV shows that made fun of their religious figures have received death threats shortly after the incident.

As we reported when they first went into effect the UK and Netherlands’ bans on the Pirate Bay are doing very little to stem the flow of traffic to the popular file sharing search engine. According to a report by the BBC (which cites data from ISPs) the peer to peer traffic is back to around normal about seven days after the event took place. Now, what is interesting here is that The Pirate Bay has very little to do with peer to peer traffic (although it can be argued that Torrents and Magnets are Peer to Peer). It is a small, but vital distinction that the industry seems to forget all the time. Still the entertainment industry in both the UK and the Netherlands still has the wrong idea in mind when they try to view the Pirate Bay as the root of all file sharing.

There is a lot of talk in the news about a very old piece of malware. This malicious code was called DNSChanger and was part of a criminal enterprise that intended to route people’s traffic through their own servers instead of the intended servers. This opened the victims up to countless other potential infections. The Malware was discovered back in 2004 and had a small amount of fame for its time. The impact of this particular infection was rated into the millions of Windows based PCs. Although the malware was identified and six people were arrested for it, the authorities did not know what to do about the infected systems (which is VERY odd).

This morning as a powered up the systems I use to get on the internet and research the day’s articles I found that I was not able to get anywhere although everything appeared to be working the way it should. My Cable modem was working, my edge firewall had an valid IP address, and DNS all looked ok. Still no traffic was being routed out. I flushed the IP address and DNS resolvers internally and externally to no avail. Finally I power cycled the modem, after an unusually long period of time the modem came back up, but with an IP address that was nothing like the ones I have be receiving from RoadRunner for the past several years. It was not even close to the same subnet.

With all of the issues surrounding online privacy and internet snooping many are very concerned about having their personal information reviewed, logged, scanned and then stored away for sale by the companies that are tracking this. This issue is a very real one and as the companies we work for can (and do) put system in place to monitor, log and block certain types of traffic we are not surprised to see this become a very hot topic. The issue has become so large that there are multiple protests about privacy and personal data security happening in many countries. So what are you to do if all you really want is to check your Hotmail or maybe do some quick shopping without giving up all of your details?  A Canadian company by the name of SurfEasy has a possible answer for you. So sit back, relax and read along as we talk about the SurfEasy Plug-in Privacy device.

I love old sayings. One reason is that some are just plain funny, but another is that so many are true. In this case the old saying is “If you squeeze something too tight it will slip out between your fingers”. This is exactly what is happening with the tight internet controls that are being worked on right now.  As Google, Twitter and others are working on hiding dissenting topics and tweets that governments do not want visible in their countries people like the TOR (The Onion Router) Project are working to get around those restrictions.