[Ma-linux] DCLUG meeting reminder: today, Wed May 19: TOR: onion routing for privacy

[Przemek Klosowski]

The May 2010 meeting of Washington DC Linux user group will take place
on Wednesday, May 19 at 7pm.

The twenty-first century has brought with it a disturbing loss of
personal privacy.  Communications are routinely monitored for content
and traffic analysis can be used to determine which IP addresses are
exchanging meaningful amounts of traffic.  Onion routing is a technique
by which a subset of all network nodes are tasked with relaying
encrypted traffic for clients.  Tor is an implementation of an onion
routing protocol which defends against traffic analysis attacks; it also
implements hidden services only reachable from within the Tor darknet.
Tor is endorsed by a number of human rights and advocacy organizations,
including as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without
Borders, and Wikileaks.org.  Tor is also used by the US Department of
Defense and the US Military.

The presentation will describe the origins of Tor as well as how the
darknet functions.  The threat model Tor was designed under will be
discussed, and a demonstration will be given of how to set up the
client, middleman and exit nodes.  A demonstration of how to set up a
web server as a hidden service will also be given.  Operational security
for clients as well as routing nodes will be detailed.

The meeting location is our usual 2025 M street, NW in downtown DC.
There will be signs in front of the building. The location is within 3
nearby Metro stops, both on the red (Dupont, Farragut North) and
blue/orange (Farragut West, Foggy Bottom [a bit of a hike]) lines.

Parking in the area is available for approximately $5; there's even
parking in the building itself. Street parking requires feeding the
meters until late in the evening. There's a parking lot at 23rd St.
between M and L that is not enforced after 7pm (people have successfully
parked there for years---no one we know was ticketed or towed yet, but
it could happen).

The meeting dates for 2010 are Jun 16, Jul 21, Aug 18, Sep 15, Oct 20,
Nov 17, and Dec 15.

For other details, see our home page

          http://dclug.tux.org