My Sojourn Into the Underground World of Domestic Terrorists and Pornographers
It amazes me how quickly one can find himself surrounded by the dregs of society when he embarks on a simple task of wanting to watch live baseball. This article might get a little technical but I will dumb it down for the non-techno-dorks who might read this.
For the record, I have purchased for the last three years MLB.TV which gives me internet access to every major league game. I use the service to watch “out of market” Arizona Diamondback games, which for me in California is almost every game except when they play the Dodgers 16 times a year and on the odd Angels encounter. In order for MLB to enforce their out of market requirement, they track the IP address of anyone accessing their videos. Because I live in California, my IP address restricts Dodgers games and therefore I am forced to watch it on TV, except we pay for basic cable, which limits our channels to Discovery and 20 latin and asian programming. Thus, I am forced to listen to the game and watch MLB Gametracker, which leaves me alot of free time during the game to do stuff like… look up ways to bypass the IP restriction.
Tracking IP addresses is nothing new, literally every website does it. In my search for a way to “mask my IP” I found a plethora of sites I visit regularly that have identified me as a California websurfer, such as Drudgereport, CNN, MSN, Reuters and many many more mainstream sites.
As a disclaimer, masking your IP is not illegal. It is the equivalent of restricting your phone number, though annoying to your friends and placing you into the creepy privacy crazy category, it is completely legitimate.
After browsing various different programs, I came across a forum describing how to post anonymously on the web. For those types of people who fear FBI intrusion and want to comment on our current plight in Iraq and feel that the government gives a crap about their trivial, unresearched comments on the war, this article described a manner that allowed for your web traffic to be tunneled through several computers before being spit out in some foreign country and thus completely untraceble back to your own home.
Perfect, the MLB will never know what hit them.
The forum directly me across a variety of different blogs that detailed the various methods that I could use to mask my internet surfing, and I quickly became aware of the increasing nervous nature of the writers and commenters that I was reading. This was not the jovial, usual banter that one must sift through in researching computer tips, this was something much more morose.
Needless to say, I found a freeware application that i liked called TOR and decided that I should look into it a bit more. What I found was incredibly interesting and inspired this writing. TOR was developed by the the United States Navy for use by military personnel oversees that needed to avoid the peering eyes of less friendly countries.
Well that works for me. Anything developed by the military is my cup of tea. Except, the military quickly realized that the effectiveness of TOR relied on the number of rogue computers that provided a pathway to conceal the route that the traffic took and that they could never individually provide such a network, so they released it to the public.
The network was taken over almost completely by pornographers and now over 90% of its traffic is based in pornography. The other 10% comprises dissidents and the occasional Diamondback fan who just wants to watch when they play the Dodgers. I found it incredibly fascinating that the military has essentially masked its out of country operatives in a network of its own dissenters and naked photos. It is a brilliant move and restored my faith in what I had often considered an inept intelligence network.
It was thrilling to watch my traffic bounce out of Belgium and to use Google to search and watch my search results come up in German and then in Japanese. Also, the type of advertisements that showed up no longer invited me to meet hot girls in Woodland Hills but instead just wanted to sell me Nutella. For those that want advice on how to best hide your traffic from the intruding government and advertisers let me know and I can help walk you through it, we rogue techno geeks need to stick together.
As a second disclaimer this is in essence a pubic notice of my intent for masking my IP address in the rare event that the FBI is already tracking me and feels that I might firebomb a church. I only wanted to watch baseball, everything I said to you in Minot is still true. I have no intention of robbing banks.
Great article on how one guy used it to read embassy communications from around the world. Link.
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Comments
I had read about tor before too, that wasnt the point. It was bouncing around in the underbelly of people who use tor.
And for the record there are dozens of programs that are much more user friendly than tor but it is its iconic freeware status that attracts these pillars of society.
of course fritoP. knew about tor… where else can he obtain the illegal porn it takes to fuel his dementia?
I can’t believe I read all of that…and not a single mention of the how the dbacks crushed the dodgers…my husband (for the 5.5 seconds he was home last night) wanted sooooo bad to call his brother-in-law to see how he was holding up 
Yikes! Leave it to Megan to tear open the wound and dump road salt in it. Yeah, its been a tough series for the boys in blue. I expected Loaiza to be bad Monday, I don’t know what happened to Billz last nite. Here is a hot tip…. be on the lookout for a cindypost re the new video screen at Chase Field. un-freakin-believable. Tell MattDawg he has to make the trip after the 15th. trn is going to Costa Rica, so he will just have to settle for the online experience.
The ONLY thing Mattdawg has managed to do aside from work is purchase 4 games worth of tickets (his usual handicap seats) I’ll pass it on…
..after yesterday’s game, we will no longer talk about the Dodgers and DBax in the same sentence. Well, until July or whenever the next time it is they meet.
does that mean we dont get pictures of the new big screen at Chase? I have been waiting so patiently.
beyond fascinating… awesome post