Electronic Spy Network - A TOR Connection?

What operating systems and applications are involved?

It's sad that "we" all know that if it had anything OTHER than MSWin, that would have been in the headline and lead sentence of most of the paragraphs.

By their silence, Windows is loudly proclaimed.

The article explicitly mentions Outlook Express in one case:

"One monk reported that he was looking at his screen when his Outlook Express program launched on its own and began sending out e-mails with infected attachments."

Also mentions infecting .doc and .pdf files that were passing through a mail server.

> Also mentions infecting .doc and .pdf files that were passing through a mail server.

Ok, infected PDF is not a nice thought.

I bet you 10-to-1 that the infected PDF in question is only dangerous when using Adobe Acrobat Reader on Windows.

What about TOR??? Should I stop using it?

And I bet it's not a real PDF, but a .exe.pdf, because windows is too stupid to identify real file types, and is easily fooled by bogus extensions.

What a nice contrast with the story below:

The world's governments: Get intruded in spring 2007. Notice it in June 2008 (~13 months) and fix it in March 2009 (another 11 months). Assuming that it's now fixed. The story doesn't say. Total time 2 years.

Those communist Linux hippies: Get intruded 2008-08-12 07:49:05. Notice it 22:51:00 (15 hours and 2 minutes). Everything investigated, fixed, deployed and policies updated at 2008-09-19 02:41:29 (6 days and 4 hours). Total time 6 days and 19 hours.

Excellent, Sander!

One thing that I find attractive about the FOSS environment is that there work is not done based on a cost-benefit analysis. If it's not done right, fix it. There's a lot of feedback. It seems that, "Just be happy with what I give you" is a bigger problem in the proprietary world.

It's been my experience that voluntary cooperation is always more efficient (and beneficial) than coercive interaction.

Sander has just put a number on that.

WOOT!

What ya'all said! Linux is the TRUE path to happiness.

My only objection to the article is that it gives the impression that Tor or other anonymizing software are somehow evil and designed to make it easier for malicious activity to take place. It doesn't say that outright but both the title and text give that implication. Some of us don't like Big Brother watching everything we do and don't like to be advertising targets either. There are plenty of valid uses for Tor.

Oh, and yeah, Sander nailed it.

Caitlyn, I haven't had time today to think it through, but I had the same thought about the article's slant against Tor.

Of course there was a slant against TOR, TOR is the only thing in it that's F/OSS.

Evil! Evil!

I think PatriotInternet.com is cute, they are selling tunnels so that all your traffic seems to originate with them.

I'm wondering when they're going to be shut down like anon.pnet.fi