Monthly Archives: August 2005

How to get round being blocked and banned

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Or….. learning to love Tor and Privoxy.

http://www.privoxy.org – http://tor.eff.org

On 18 August, I got an email from a friend who tried to visit another site. She said “I couldn’t look at the page, though, because he has me blocked out. Could you try it and send me a screenshot?“. Tut tut, stupid move is blocking someone. Stupid because it’s easier to work round than implement. I emailed my friend back, putting the url’s to Tor and Privoxy into the email. I got a reply – “now I can look at that wretched vermin’s site anytime I want.”.
Normally I’d create a little how-to for using programs, but this time there is no need. Very good guide here for Windows and other systems are covered too. It’s very very easy to setup.

Legality ? Totally legit. Tor is supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation while Privoxy is Free Software and hosted at Sourceforge.

So why hide ? Lots of reasons…

  1. Maybe like my friend you have been blocked from a website and you’d really like to see it
  2. Maybe you want to see what the Google.ch site looks like seeing as they appear to be localising searches more
  3. Maybe you want to compare prices between iTunes UK and iTunes Europe
  4. Maybe you are a Brit living abroad who wants to download BBC material which they will be protecting by using GeoIP
  5. Maybe you want to login to your WP blog using Privoxy just so you too can see ‘You must enable sending referers’
  6. Maybe you want other sites to not know where you came from, or what browser you have, or what OS you have, or who you are.
  7. And maybe you just want to do it because like much other code on the net, it’s a tool. And tools have good uses, and bad uses. But just because something could be used for bad does not mean to say we shouldn’t talk about it at all does it ?

Snippets

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Comments can now be edited by you for a period – currently 30 minutes – from the time you post them. It’s an alpha plugin so if you notice wierdness, feedback would be cool. Kudos to Jalenack for writing it.

I reinstalled Neverwinter Nights. I played this at some point before but I cannot remember why I stopped or how far I got. My head is wierd like that. And how shallow am I ? Instead of thinking of a game plan, or studying stats, or creating a new character I just picked the most attractive female image :)

Know any porn barons / baronettes that want / need a blog to help their business ? You do ? Wonderful – send them my way ;)

Clicking Restart and seeing the computer behave correctly is a wonderful thing after editing the registry and clearing it of junk. I use cleaners regularly but even so there was stuff in there that was clearly not needed – registry. Stupid idea.

Things to write up when I get the drive to do so:

  • Style comments based on author/ping/trackback
  • Various upgrade guides
  • Why you should learn to love Tor and Privoxy
  • Installing Last Visit
  • and update some Codex PDF’s

Styling

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I’ve been fiddling … the comments file now differentiates between my replies, pingbacks and trackbacks and applies a style to each accordingly. Not rocket science but nice nonetheless. Surprisingly easy too and I’ll have a go later at writing it up.

I’m after a freeware telnet client that remembers passwords. I have remembered my last entry, then after doing that I remembered Gary’s comment on that entry so I did it again. And I’m still stuck. Ideas ?

Blogger sued for comments ?

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Scoble links to a guy who reports that another blogger – albeit a high-profile guy by the looks of things – is being sued for comments left on his blog. Heh … what next ? Sue every blog ? But they can’t can they ? After all, Google, Yahoo and MSN all now have huge open blogging so in theory you could sue them for providing the space for a blogger to say something that someone else then libels a company in. Stupid – can’t happen. Maybe we should have “I am not liable either for the contents of any site linked from here, nor am I liable for the comments or guestblogging or the feeds which I may or may not use at any time on any page in my blog.” Yep …. few more sentences of legalese and that’ll be snappy enough !