Private online communications part 2 – text chatting

When you use Google Talk to chat with your friends, Google records everything you say. Facebook does the same. Others probably do the same. The only way to ensure you are only communicating with your friends, without your every word being recorded and kept by corporations or governments, is to use OTR. OTR stands for Off The Record. It’s a genius protocol that gives you many desirable properties, like

• Encryption
• Authentication
• Deniability
• Perfect forward secrecy

To understand the value of each of the above properties, please check out the OTR website at http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to use OTR with Jitsi, using your Google account. You can do exactly the same with your Facebook, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, AIM, XMPP or Jabber account!

Private online communication – a matter of decency

I feel there is something inherently indecent about having a private conversation, while someone else is listening in. With modern Internet communication, that “someone else” is usually a corporation or a government.

It’s not the-STASI-is-listening-so-we-better-behave feeling that bugs me. It’s more the “I am a decent human being and I have the right to share my thoughts with my loved ones, and just with them!” feeling.

In that spirit, I encourage as many people as possible to use tools like Jitsi. Not allowing others to snoop on your private life is a matter of human decency, and you deserve it.

Get Jitsi:

Use Jitsi for private voice calls that do not allow eavesdropping:

Anyone with a Google account can make encrypted, private voice calls by using Jitsi as shown above. If you don’t have a Google account, you use any of the (many) other services Jitsi supports (MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, SIP, XMPP, but not Facebook – they don’t support secure calls).

Spread the word!

A Skype alternative worth its salt: Jitsi

I’ve been using Skype, Google Talk and Facebook chat for years to communicate with friends and family. They’re all convenient, reliable and easy to use. But there is a big problem: They are all very easy to record and monitor by 3rd parties. We now know that:

• Microsoft (owner of Skype) keeps records of who talked to whom and for how long. We also have very good reason to believe that there are tools out there (built by private companies and sold to governments) that can eavesdrop on Skype voice calls. Skype executives have been unable to deny that they comply with local law enforcement requests to eavesdrop on Skype calls.
• Google definitely record all of your text chats. They don’t deny they do that, even when you use the “Go off the record” option in Google Talk. We’re not sure what recording they do with voice calls but can be certain that they comply with the law – therefore building “legal intercept” capabilities into their products.
• Facebook record and analyze all of your text chats and will report you to the police if they see anything “suspicious” (source: Reuters). We don’t know what they do with voice/video calls, but again can be certain that they comply with the law – therefore building “legal intercept” capabilities into their products.

So if you happen to live in a surveillance state (think countries of the Arab Spring, think UK with their repeated attempts to introduce surveillance of their citizens, think USA with their record-breaking demands for your personal data from all of the above service providers (Microsoft, Google and Facebook)) then you can expect that all your online communications with your loved ones (voice calls, video calls, text chats) are recorded and stored, or at least eavesdropped upon. They’re all great free services that allow you to keep in touch with people, with one caveat: the government is listening in.

If you have no problem with that, perhaps because you subscribe to the flawed “I have nothing to hide” school of thought, read no further.

If you feel that being spied upon constantly, and having no reasonable expectation of privacy for your online life is not cool, read on.

The work of thousands of visionaries (starting with people like Richard Stallman in the 70′s) has today given us the free tools to protect our online communications to a reasonable degree. These are not tools to stop a police investigation against you from succeeding – these are tools that empower you to opt-out from the surveillance-by-default communications channels most of us use, and instead keep your private thoughts and words only between yourself and your loved ones.

The easiest one to get us started is Jitsi.

Jitsi gives you voice calls, video calls, instant text messages and group chats. It therefore covers 100% of the communication capabilities of Microsoft’s Skype, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, IRC channels and the like. Use Jitsi, and you don’t need to use any of these again.

Why switch to Jitsi?

Because it protects your privacy as much as possible. If you and your loved ones use Jitsi, you can:

• Have end-to-end encryption of your voice and video calls – guaranteeing that nobody is listening in or recording.
• Have end-to-end encryption of your text (instant messaging) chats with Off The Record (OTR) technology – the world’s finest in preserving your privacy with unique features like Perfect Forward Secrecy and Deniability.

As an additional benefit, it’s great to have all of your instant messaging contacts in one window, and Jitsi gives you that. It also runs on Windows, MacOSX and GNU/Linux.

Start using Jitsi instead of Skype, Google Talk and Facebook Chat and stop corporations and governments collecting, storing and analyzing the thoughts you share with your loved ones.

PS: You can only have private communications if both ends of the chat/voice/video call support this. If both you and your loved ones use Jitsi, voice & video calls are private by default. For text chats, you will have to click the lock icon in your chat window (as shown below) until it displays a closed “lock” state.

PPS: No “lock” icon? That probably means that the person you are chatting with is not using Jitsi or a similar program that can protect your chats with OTR. You can only have a private conversation if both ends support OTR.

PPPS: Looking for something like Jitsi for your smartphone? For private text messaging (using the Off The Record protocol) look at ChatSecure for iPhones or GibberBot for Android phones. For private voice calls on the Android, look into csipsimple and Moxie Marlinspike’s RedPhone. Remember, both ends of the conversation need the same technology to create a private channel.

Free tools to protect your privacy online

Most schools, companies, service providers and governments record and analyse as much as they can of your online behaviour: All your emails, chats with your friends, web pages you visit, things you search for, photos you look at and more – all are stored and linked with your identity.

By using these free tools you make it harder for others to observe your online life:

Tor – browse the Internet without revealing your location

Jitsi – make free voice calls without anyone listening in on your calls. Also, chat with your friends via Google Chat or Facebook chat without your conversations being recorded.

TrueCrypt – encrypt your files before storing them online (e.g. on DropBox or Google Drive), so that only you can read them

CryptoCat – have private text chats online, wherever you are (video)

GnuPG – encrypt your emails so that only your recipient can read them [ADVANCED]

TAILS – use computers of other people without compromising your security or privacy [ADVANCED]

Want guidance on how to use any of these tools? Have more to add to the list? Leave a comment.

Book review: “Free Culture” by Lawrence Lessig

I enjoyed reading Lawrence Lessig’s book “Free Culture” – which is freely available online.

Professor Lessig takes the reader through a fascinating trip that drives a single point home: The current blanket copyright protectionism is hurting our culture.

Passages from the book I enjoyed:

A Cold-war era propaganda film, courtesy of the Internet Archive:

Want to see a copy of the “Duck and Cover” film that instructed children how to save themselves in the middle of nuclear attack? Go to archive.org, and you can download the film in a few minutes—for free.

The asymmetry of our reaction to content sharing:

The obvious point of Conrad’s cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention technologies) are illegal. Flash: No one ever died from copyright circumvention. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do.

Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now.

Some fascinating statistics that show how the law penalises the vast majority of culture, just to allow a tiny subset of it to keep on cashing in for their rights holders:

In 1930, 10,047 books were published. In 2000, 174 of those books were still in print. Let’s say you were Brewster Kahle, and you wanted to make available to the world in your iArchive project the remaining 9,873. What would you have to do?

Forget all the works from the 1920s and 1930s that have continuing commercial value. The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result. If you look at the work created in the first twenty years (1923 to 1942) affected by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, 2 percent of that work has any continuing commercial value. It was the copyright holders for that 2 percent who pushed the CTEA through. But the law and its effect were not limited to that 2 percent. The law extended the terms of copyright generally.

[...] most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film.

As one researcher calculated for American culture, 94 percent of the films, books, and music produced between 1923 and 1946 is not commercially available.

A smart fix to blanket copyright law by professor Lessig: Make long-term copyright opt-in:

[...] I proposed a simple fix: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner would be required to register the work and pay a small fee. If he paid the fee, he got the benefit of the full term of copyright. If he did not, the work passed into the public domain.

How “the industry” has opposed the above proposal and what that shows about the war on culture we’re currently going through:

The opposition to the Eldred Act reveals how extreme the other side is. The most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the protection of “property” but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs.

So when the common sense of your child confronts you, what will you say? When the common sense of a generation finally revolts against what we have done, how will we justify what we have done? What is the argument?

On the cool BBC Creative Archive pilot that ran till 2006:

the BBC has just announced that it will build a “Creative Archive,” from which British citizens can download BBC content, and rip, mix, and burn it.

On the Public Library of Science:

The Public Library of Science (PLoS), for example, is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making scientific research available to anyone with a Web connection. Authors of scientific work submit that work to the Public Library of Science. That work is then subject to peer review. If accepted, the work is then deposited in a public, electronic archive and made permanently available for free.

On Peter Wayner’s freely available book “Free for All”:

Peter Wayner, who wrote a book about the free software movement titled Free for All, made an electronic version of his book free on-line under a Creative Commons license after the book went out of print. He then monitored used book store prices for the book. As predicted, as the number of downloads increased, the used book price for his book increased, as well.

This passage made me think again about stuff I’ve published online (blog posts, photos etc) – I am ditching the default “all rights reserved” and going for less restrictive Creative Commons licenses:

Finally, there are many who mark their content with a Creative Commons license just because they want to express to others the importance of balance in this debate. If you just go along with the system as it is, you are effectively saying you believe in the “All Rights Reserved” model. Good for you, but many do not.

On how the term of copyright just keeps being extended:

The term of copyright has gone from fourteen years to ninety-five years for corporate authors, and life of the author plus seventy years for natural authors.

On avoiding knee-jerk reactions and focusing on what matters:

This point about the future is meant to suggest a perspective on the present: It is emphatically temporary. The “problem” with file sharing—to the extent there is a real problem—is a problem that will increasingly disappear as it becomes easier to connect to the Internet. And thus it is an extraordinary mistake for policy makers today to be “solving” this problem in light of a technology that will be gone tomorrow. The question should not be how to regulate the Internet to eliminate file sharing (the Net will evolve that problem away). The question instead should be how to assure that artists get paid, during this transition between twentieth-century models for doing business and twenty-first-century technologies.

You know how the RIAA and MPAA are crying “piracy kills music”? This, of course, has happened before:

See Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Technology Evolution and the Music Industry’s Business Model Crisis (2003). This report describes the music industry’s effort to stigmatize the budding practice of cassette taping in the 1970s, including an advertising campaign featuring a cassette-shape skull and the caption “Home taping is killing music.”

On how copyright is being misused for reckless profiteering, killing creativity:

Jon Else is a filmmaker. He is best known for his documentaries and has been very successful in spreading his art. He is also a teacher, and as a teacher myself, I envy the loyalty and admiration that his students feel for him. (I met, by accident, two of his students at a dinner party. He was their god.)

Else worked on a documentary that I was involved in. At a break, he told me a story about the freedom to create with film in America today.

In 1990, Else was working on a documentary about Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The focus was stagehands at the San Francisco Opera. Stagehands are a particularly funny and colorful element of an opera. During a show, they hang out below the stage in the grips’ lounge and in the lighting loft. They make a perfect contrast to the art on the stage.

During one of the performances, Else was shooting some stagehands playing checkers. In one corner of the room was a television set. Playing on the television set, while the stagehands played checkers and
the opera company played Wagner, was The Simpsons. As Else judged it, this touch of cartoon helped capture the flavor of what was special about the scene.

Years later, when he finally got funding to complete the film, Else attempted to clear the rights for those few seconds of The Simpsons. For of course, those few seconds are copyrighted; and of course, to use copyrighted material you need the permission of the copyright owner, unless “fair use” or some other privilege applies.

Else called Simpsons creator Matt Groening’s office to get permission. Groening approved the shot. The shot was a four-and-a-half-second image on a tiny television set in the corner of the room. How could it hurt? Groening was happy to have it in the film, but he told Else to contact Gracie Films, the company that produces the program.

Gracie Films was okay with it, too, but they, like Groening, wanted to be careful. So they told Else to contact Fox, Gracie’s parent company. Else called Fox and told them about the clip in the corner of the one
room shot of the film. Matt Groening had already given permission, Else said. He was just confirming the permission with Fox.

Then, as Else told me, “two things happened. First we discovered . . . that Matt Groening doesn’t own his own creation—or at least that someone [at Fox] believes he doesn’t own his own creation.” And second, Fox “wanted ten thousand dollars as a licensing fee for us to use this four-point-five seconds of . . . entirely unsolicited Simpsons which was in the corner of the shot.”

Else was certain there was a mistake. He worked his way up to someone he thought was a vice president for licensing, Rebecca Herrera. He explained to her, “There must be some mistake here. . . . We’re asking for your educational rate on this.” That was the educational rate, Herrera told Else. A day or so later, Else called again to confirm what he had been told.

“I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight,” he told me. “Yes, you have your facts straight,” she said. It would cost $10,000 to use the clip of The Simpsons in the corner of a shot in a documentary film about
Wagner’s Ring Cycle. And then, astonishingly, Herrera told Else, “And if you quote me, I’ll turn you over to our attorneys.” As an assistant to Herrera told Else later on, “They don’t give a shit. They just want the
money.”

Else didn’t have the money to buy the right to replay what was playing on the television backstage at the San Francisco Opera. To reproduce this reality was beyond the documentary filmmaker’s budget. At the very
last minute before the film was to be released, Else digitally replaced the shot with a clip from another film that he had worked on, The Day After Trinity, from ten years before.

Stop Google recording your chats

Many Gmail users also use Gchat to talk to their buddies. Why not – the Gchat window is right there, next to their emails and very easy to use.

Problem is, Google automatically analyzes everything Gmail users are emailing or chatting about. It’s obvious that Google stores your emails, but if you’re sceptical about how much of your chats Google records, just go to any of your Gchat contacts and click “More” -> “Recent Conversations”.

Bringing up your recent chats with another Google user

You can now see the contents of all conversations you’ve had with this user. This should make it obvious that everything you type in Google Chat is recorded and stored.

Why is Google recording our chats?

But why do Google record all this? Because by knowing everything you talk about, Google can perfect your “behavioural profile”. The better this profile, the higher its market value.  Remember, if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you are the product! And everything you say or do while logged on to Google services is used to make you a higher-yield product. Google then charges marketing companies (Google’s real customers) for access to this massive data set. Marketers are aching for an opportunity to directly target the more than 350 million Gmail users (as of Jan 2012) with personally targeted, customised ads. Of course this is done automatically with software, and Google is not the only ”free services” provider to sell your data for profit. Facebook follow the same business model, and it appears to be working out quite well for them. Facebook recently reported $3.7 bn (yes, that is billions of US dollars) in revenues. There is a lot of money to be made for companies that turn our entire lives into sellable products.

This is one of the two reasons you would want to stop Google recording your chats.

Why is this dangerous?

The second reason why Google recording your chats is not a good idea is that Google hands over this information (your emails, chats, things you have searched for, YouTube videos you have watched) to the law enforcement agencies of your country. They have no choice – they have to. Google provides a ”Transparency Report“, which is commendable. Unfortunately it falls short of giving us a clear view of just how much personal information has been handed over to government agencies due to the way the numbers are presented.

The following table attempts to answer the question:

“For how many user accounts was Google asked to hand over data to government agencies between January – June 2011″?

Country	# of users (approximate)
USA	11,057
UK	1,444
Spain	709
Italy	1,263
India	2,439
Germany	1,759
France	1,552
Brazil	1,822

You can look up your country by following any of the links in the table.

Given just how much Google knows about us, our friends, and our friends’ friends, it is a troubling thought that all this data, all of our contacts, the videos we have been watching, our chat messages, things we +1′ed, services we use from other service providers (Flickr etc) are recorded by Google and therefore being handed over to government agencies all over the world at this unprecedented rate.

If you believe that nothing you ever type or click on will be of interest to any law enforcement agency, government or court around the world until you and your entire family pass away (but what about your grandchildren? Think 40 years ahead. Could someone in 2052 dig up a record of an internal joke with one of your buddies back in 2012, cast it as proof of extremism and use it to harm your family?), AND you subscribe to the “I have nothing to hide, therefore I have nothing to fear” camp, you can stop reading here.

If you are genuinly uncomfortable with how your online life is harvested and recorded and wish to take steps to protect what little parts of it you can, read on.

Going “Off the record” in Google Chat

Google provide a mostly-hidden feature on their Gchat client that allows you to indicate you want to go “Off the record”. You can see it under the “Actions” menu when you are chatting with someone on Google Chat.

Google say that going “Off the record” means that “Chats [...] aren’t stored in your Gmail chat history…” which sounds good, but does not actually promise your chats are not being recorded.

Google Chat: You are now off the record

Given that Google ”will share personal information with [...] organizations [...] outside of Google if [...] preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to meet any [...] enforceable governmental request“, it is a safe assumption that Google Chat’s “Go off the record” option does not really buy you any privacy.

Getting some real privacy for Google Chat

We will use Free Software tools that allow you to be reasonably confident that Google is not recording what you say over chat.

Before you continue, please understand:

1. To have a private chat, both you and the person you wish to privately chat to, need to follow these steps.
2. If you use multiple computers to chat (e.g. a work computer and a home laptop), you have to repeat these steps in every computer before you use it to chat. You will only have to “prepare” every computer once.

First, download and install the Pidgin instant messaging software

Get the software from http://pidgin.im and install it on your computer.

Done installing Pidgin? Great. Continue to the next step.

Download and install the OTR plugin

The Off The Record (OTR) plugin allows Pidgin users to encrypt their communications. Get it from http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ and install it on your computer.

Configure Pidgin for Google Chat

The first time you start Pidgin you will see this:

Click on “Add…” – a new window comes up. (this may happen automatically before you even press “Add”)

Adjust the settings as shown, using your Google username and password:

Pidgin Google Chat settings – basic

Click on the “Advanced” tab and adjust the settings as shown:

Pidgin Google Chat settings – advanced

Almost there! Now click on “Add” to complete setting up your account.

You should now be connected to Google chat! A list of your online contacts (or “Buddies”) will come up right away:

Pidgin buddy list when logged onto Google Chat

If you see something like the above, congratulations – you are successfully connected to Google chat.

If you get error messages, likely causes are:

1. You didn’t type all settings exactly as shown above
2. You are using Google’s two-step authentication. In that case your “main” Google password is not accepted. You need to create an application-specific password for Pidgin on the computer you’re currently setting up. Why?
3. Your (corporate or national) network firewall is blocking the chat protocol XMPP. It may be possible to bypass it with Tor.

Activate and configure the OTR plugin

From the Pidgin “Buddy List” window go to Tools -> Plugins as shown here:

Scroll down the list until you find “Off-the-Record Messaging”. Tick the box next to it – this will enable the plugin:

Now click on the “Configure Plugin” button:

In the new window that comes up, configure the default OTR settings as follows:

Congratulations! You can now chat privately with buddies who also use the OTR plugin.

You have just made it very difficult for Google or anyone else to eavesdrop or record what you say. Just point your Google chat buddies to this page and get them using the OTR plugin!

Start a private conversation

Note: You can communicate privately only if the chat buddy you’re communicating with has followed the above steps, or is using other software that uses the OTR plugin.

Double-click on a buddy’s name to bring up the Conversation window. Notice the “Not private” button on the bottom right?

This means you have not activated the privacy features yet. But you’re about to!

Click on “Not private” and ask Pidgin to “Start private conversation”:

Pidgin will now attempt to create a secure channel and should display the following:

This is the result we want. “Unverified” is not a problem (but see Improvement 2 below). Pidgin tells us that it has established a secure channel to the other end, and you can use it to chat with your buddy without Google being able to read & record your messages.

Remember to always check the bottom-right OTR status icon. If it says “not private”, you should assume that Google is recording everything you type in that window.

Improvements (optional)

Improvement 1: Ask OTR to always try to initiate private messaging

You can ask OTR to always try to “automatically initiate private messaging” from the OTR plugin configuration menu you used above. Here’s the option you need to tick:

Improvement 2: Verify the identity of people you chat with

You have stopped Google reading, analysing and recording what you discuss with your buddies. But if you have reason to believe someone might be trying to read what you say (e.g. if you’re a whistleblower, journalist, activist,  lawyer, live in the wrong country etc) you can not yet be 100% certain that the person you are talking to, is indeed your buddy and not an impostor, pretending to be your buddy.

To rule out this possibility you should always verify the people you chat with. You only need to do this once for every buddy you wish to chat with.

To do this, click on the “Unverified” button:

Encrypted, but not authenticated. You are talking to someone through a protected channel, but you don’t know yet who that “someone” is.

This brings up the following menu, allowing you to “Authenticate Buddy”:

Asking Pidgin to authenticate the buddy you’re chatting with

You are now presented with the easiest option to authenticate your buddy – asking them a question, and checking that they know the right answer. There are other methods as well, like entering a secret passphrase you have agreed on in advance.

Go ahead and type a question and its answer. It should be something obvious to your chat buddy (example question: “what’s the name of my dog?” or “who did we discuss about last time we met?”) but not to potential impostors. (If you have reason to believe someone is targetting you specifically, using a pre-shared secret is the best way to ensure you are talking to your real friend. After all, any serious adversary can find the name of your dog without too much hassle.)

Example of a question/answer pair

After you click on “Authenticate” you will have to wait for a few moments for your friend to answer the question using his computer:

Waiting for response to authentication challenge

Once your friend successfully answers the question you set, you will see this message:

If you get a “Authentication failed” message instead, your friend probably mistyped something. Please remember (and remind your friend too!) that the answer is CaSe SenSiTive – so in this example the answer “Maxx” is correct, but “maxx” is wrong!

Congratulations! You can now be confident you are talking to the right person! This is an additional benefit to what you achieved already - stopping Google (or anyone else) from monitoring & recording what you say!

A private & authenticated conversation over Pidgin. You know the person you’re talking to is who they say they are, and you know that noone else can eavesdrop on your conversation.

Next time you wish to talk to this person, you will just need to click on the OTR button on the bottom right and the conversation will immediately switch to “Private”. No need to re-authenticate,  unless you or they are using a different computer.

Now the only thing Google knows is

• Who you chat with
• When you chat with them

…which is a significant improvement from before.

What, you still don’t like that? What are you doing chatting on Google Chat then?! Go use CryptoCat over Tor at http://xdtfje3c46d2dnjd.onion/, or if your enemies are pros (and you trust your hardware), TAILS.

Improvement 3: Use Google’s two-step verification & an application-specific password for Pidgin

It’s a good idea to use Google two-step verification. This means that Google will ask you for two pieces of proof that you are the legitimate owner of your account whenever you log in from an unrecognised device. This is an improvement in security, but means that external applications (like Pidgin) can not access your Google account.

Google’s solution is application-specific passwords. These are passwords that only work for one designated application and can not provide full access to your Google account (e.g. to change your account settings).

See Getting started with Google 2-step verification and after you’ve activated it, create an application-specific password for Pidgin on your device.

Then, on Pidgin’s main ”Buddy List” window go to Accounts -> USERNAME@gmail.com -> Edit Account, input the password you just created, ask Pidgin to remember it, hit “Save” and you should be all done.

Now starting Pidgin will automatically log you into Google Chat, without asking for your password.

Tor relays in the Amazon cloud: usage charges

I recently found out about Tor Cloud and think it’s a great idea.

In a nutshell, you can strengthen the Tor network with a few clicks and a small amount of money paid to Amazon.

But how much does it actually cost to run a Tor relay on Amazon’s EC2 service?

Here is what I’m paying after one month of running some Tor relays in the Amazon cloud:

Data Centre (location)	EC2 instance running time		Bandwidth used			Total running cost per instance for one month (USD)
	Hours	Cost (USD)	GB in	GB out	Cost (USD)
California	744	18.60	2.774	2.457	0.29	18.89
Oregon	742	14.84	0.517	0.194	0.02	14.86
Sao Paulo	741	19.85	37.644	21.603	5.40	25.25
Singapore	744	18.60	0.853	0.596	0.11	18.71
Tokyo	744	0	11.873	11.267	2.26	2.26
Virginia	744	14.88	0.828	0.543	0.07	14.95

Remember that there is a “free usage” tier – this probably explains the $0 running cost charged for my Tokyo instance.

Conclusions from the above:

1. Maximum bang for the buck if you can’t spend money on this: Run only one instance, preferably in a high-traffic area like South America. Expect to spend less than $10 per month.
2. Expect to spend approximately $20/month/instance if you’re running more than one instances.
3. I’ll kill all instances but Sao Paulo and Tokyo – at the moment all other instances seem to be receiving so little traffic they’re not worth the hassle.

Stop Facebook recording your chats

Chatting on Facebook is great, but has one major drawback: Facebook records and keeps everything you say. If you think that’s not a problem (e.g. because you subscribe to the “I have nothing to hide, therefore I have nothing to fear” camp), you can stop reading here.

But…

• If you believe privacy is a basic human right
• If you are discussing business confidential information
• If you are a journalist having a confidential discussion with a source
• Or if you’re just having an intimate conversation with a family member

… and you’re not comfortable with Facebook, Facebook’s partners and law enforcement agencies around the world being able to read your conversation at their leisure (even years after it happened!), please read on.

“How can I have a private, unrecorded conversation on Facebook?”

By not using the built-in chat feature from within the Facebook webpage. Instead, we’ll use software that encrypts your messages, so that even Facebook cannot read them.

To do this, you need to know your Facebook username. Note that this is different from your real name, or your Facebook “screen name” (i.e. the name your friends see). If you already have a Facebook username, you can see it by clicking on this link (you need to be logged in to Facebook). If you haven’t set one up, you will see this message:

Facebook General Account Settings: You have not set a username.

Don’t worry – you can get a username right away!

Click on the “Edit” link on the right. It will ask you which username you would like to use, and confirm your Facebook password:

Facebook: Setting up a user name

After clicking “Save Changes” you should be all ready to go with  your shiny new Facebook username:

Your Facebook username

Please note it down – you will need to use your Facebook username (just once!)  it in a bit.

To make sure your new Facebook username is activated, do the following:

• Log out of Facebook (closing the window does not automatically log you out!)
• On the Facebook login page, type your new username instead of the email you have been using for the “Email or phone” field
• Type your usual password for the “Password” field.
• Click “Log In”

I don’t understand why Facebook force people to do this, but this logout & re-login seems to be required to get your new username activated.

You are now ready to setup a private chat system.

Before you continue, please understand:

1. To have a private chat, both you and the person you wish to privately chat to, need to follow these steps.
2. If you use multiple computers to chat (e.g. a work computer and a home laptop), you have to repeat these steps in every computer before you use it to chat. You will only have to “prepare” every computer once.

First, download and install the Pidgin instant messaging software

Get the software from http://pidgin.im and install it on your computer.

Done installing Pidgin? Great. Continue to the next step.

Download and install the OTR plugin

The Off The Record (OTR) plugin allows Pidgin users to encrypt their communications. Get it from http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ and install it on your computer.

Configure Pidgin for Facebook

The first time you start Pidgin you will see this:

Click on “Add…” – a new window comes up.

Adjust the settings as shown, using your Facebook username (Don’t know your username? See above) and password:

Click on the “Advanced” tab and fill in the “Connect Server” field as shown:

Almost there! Now click on “Add” to complete setting up your account.

You may receive a prompt to accept a certificate from chat.facebook.com – this is normal, since it’s the first time Pidgin connects to Facebook from your computer. Accept it:

You should now be connected to Facebook chat! A list of your online friends will come up right away:

If you see something like the above, congratulations – you are successfully connected to Facebook chat. If you get any error messages, modify your account settings and make sure you have typed everything as shown above. Remember, your Facebook username is not your real name!

Activate and configure the OTR plugin

From the Pidgin “Buddy List” window go to Tools -> Plugins as shown here:

Scroll down the list until you find “Off-the-Record Messaging”. Tick the box next to it – this will enable the plugin:

Now click on the “Configure Plugin” button:

In the new window that comes up, configure the default OTR settings as follows:

Congratulations! You can now chat privately with friends who also use the OTR plugin.

You have just made it very difficult for Facebook or anyone else to eavesdrop or record what you say. Just point your Facebook friends to this page and get them using the OTR plugin!

Start a private conversation with Pidgin and OTR

You can communicate privately only if the Facebook friend you’re communicating with has followed the above steps, or is using other software that uses the OTR plugin.

Double-click on their name to bring up the Conversation window. Notice the “Not private” button on the bottom right?

This means you have not activated the privacy features yet. But you’re about to!

Click on “Not private” and ask Pidgin to “Start private conversation”:

“Start private conversation” with OTR on Pidgin

Pidgin will now attempt to create a secure channel and should display the following:

This is the result we want. “Unverified” is not a problem (but see “Improvements” section below). Pidgin tells us that it has established a secure channel to the other end, and you can already use to chat if you wish.

Is this not working? Does your request to “Start private conversation” seem to do nothing? Here is a possible reason. You may need to “enable apps” on your Facebook profile.

Improvements (optional)

With an “Unverified” OTR status you can not yet be 100% certain that the person you are talking to, is indeed your friend and not an impostor, pretending to be your friend.

To rule out this possibility you should always verify the people you chat with. You only need to do this once for every friend you wish to chat with.

Verify the identity of your chat friends

For technical reasons Facebook users have to verify the identity of their friends manually, by comparing so-called “fingerprints“.

On the main “buddy list” Pidgin window, go to Tools -> Plugins, then select “Off-The-Record Messaging” and click “Configure Plugin”. (Yes, you were here earlier)

In the “Off-the-Record Messaging” window click on the second tab “Known fingerprints”.

Then select your unverified friend and click the “Verify fingerprint” button.

You will now be presented with both yours and your friend’s fingerprints. After you have verified that you both see the same fingerprints on your screens, you can change this to “I have…”

This is annoying, as it requires you to use another communication channel with your friend (perhaps telephone or email, depends on who your enemies might be) to confirm each other’s fingerprint, but as of April 2012 this is the only option Facebook users have.

That was the hard part done.

After you click “OK”, you don’t have to worry about this again. Next time you wish to talk to this friend, you will just need to click on the OTR button on the bottom right and the conversation will immediately switch to “Private”.

A private & authenticated conversation over Pidgin. You know the person you’re talking to is who they say they are, and you know that noone else can eavesdrop on your conversation.

Optionally, you can tell that your messages are encrypted by having the Facebook chat window open in your browser. You should only see messages like these:

Congratulations!

Now the only thing Facebook knows is

• Who you chat with
• When you chat with them

…which is a significant improvement from before.

What, you still don’t like that? What are you doing chatting on Facebook then?! Go use CryptoCat over Tor, or if your enemies are pros (and you trust your hardware), TAILS.

The financial services industry view on cybercrime

I recently attended Jim Oakes’ “Cybercrime, Global Underground Economy Developments and Challenges” talk. All the hype about his 30-year service for the police, anti-fraud teams, financial services organisations yada yada made me very sceptical to begin with, but the session turned into a quite useful overview of the (depressingly many) ways you can be ripped off by criminals while doing business with/through your bank.

…

I let this draft lie for a few months now, as I wasn’t sure how to digest the hordes of information in Jim’s presentation into a more friendly, easily digestable message. Shall we just say it’s pretty bad out there?

Practical advice:

• DO NOT use the same password for different websites. Use something like Oplop to generate passwords and a password manager to store them.
• DO NOT do eBanking from your smartphone just yet. I have some reservations about the iPhone, but Android phones can certainly currently not be trusted.
• If you need to do eBanking using a computer (laptop, desktop etc) then start the computer with a bootable CD or USB disk and then do your eBanking. Unless you are personally targeted by law enforcement or criminals, this should give you a computer you can trust. Don’t take my word for it – take Krebs‘ word for it. Computer security is in *such* a sad state.

Cleaning malware while travelling: A case study

I have been on the road for the past few months and using plenty of Internet Cafes for all my digital endeavours. As I result the USB sticks I use to save my pictures, documents etc while I travel have been infected with all sorts of malware.

Malware that is obvious is the least dangerous kind. It means its creators are not organised or skilled enough. The truly worrisome malware is invisible. You don´t know you have it, but it quietly monitors all your actions.

So I was intrigued when my USB stick started displaying typical silly malware behaviour. The folder icons in Windows changed – they were not “shortcuts to folders”, but really they pointed to executables somewhere deep in System32 that would do its nastiness and then show you the contents of the intended folder. Other than that, everything looked normal.

Well, it was obvious malware was there and the USB stick was infected. Antivirus software installed in public Internet Cafe PCs could not detect or clean it, so I had the pleasure of doing it manually. Here is how:

1. Get a system you can trust not to lie to you – to show you the absolute truth and nothing but the truth. A pristine Linux installation does just that, and unless you happen to have a netbook with Linux installed with you while travelling, creating a bootable Ubuntu Linux CD or USB stick is your best bet. The computers I had access to were ancient and could not boot (start) from a USB stick, so I had to create a bootable Ubuntu CD following the steps detailed at http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download
2. Now you are using a computer you can trust. Plug in the infected USB stick. You will probably see all sorts of new files there, stuff you haven´t put there. Delete it one by one. In my case I had filenames starting with “._”, others starting with dot-space, all sorts of tricks that will make files harder to view and control in Windows or Macintosh machines. After you have deleted all files that don´t belong to you, check for an autorun.inf that tries to execute the malware when the USB is connected to a computer. If it´s there, either edit out the malware items or simply delete it (which is what I did).
3. Next, I had a surprise waiting for me as I connected the now clean USB stick to a Windows computer – I could still not see my original folders! The reason is that the malware had hidden the folders by changing their attributes to /system and /hidden – so Windows Explorer does not display them by default. This can be corrected from a Command Prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) by changing directories onto the USB stick and using the “attrib” command. My original folders were “pics”, “stuff”, “maps”, “portable”, “truecrypt”  etc so I issued the following commands to mark them as NOT hidden and NOT system folders:

• attrib -H -S /D /S pics
• attrib -H -S /D /S stuff
• attrib -H -S /D /S maps
• attrib -H -S /D /S portable
• attrib -H -S /D /S truecrypt

Et voila! All was visible, usable and normal again.

Goodbye silly piece of malware!