textfiles/uploads/bootstrap.txt

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|             Better homes and Bootstrapping 0.03b               |
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|by                                                              |
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|ME-tan    ***    April-May 2009                                 |
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*****************************Intro*****************************
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At this moment in time more and more countries are trying to implement 
firewalls, blacklists and seek to end "Net neutrality". In the past only 
countries such as China and Thailand have been implementing them which is not 
surprising considering these countries have massive issues with lack of free 
speech for the people. More recently, it appears that blacklists are being 
discussed and even tested in countries that are a little more "first world". 
Australia has been testing an extensive blacklist that was recently leaked. 
The UK is trying to put through law to force all ISPs to subscribe to the 
Internet Watch Foundation blacklist and both the US and EU have been 
discussing putting in place legal frameworks to allow the internet to be 
either tiered, with the different tiers sold as "access packages" by ISPs or 
areas being simply blocked.

The reasoning for this is usually being sold to the press and public as a 
means to control such unwanted things as child pornography. Some are also 
adding less serious matters such as controlling intellectual property or for 
just plain commercialisation of the internet towards the majority of users we 
have now who only use the internet for their email, or social networking such 
as using Facebook, Myspace, Bebo et alumni, and some casual browsing. The 
problem comes that the cost of this is the internet becomes censored. The 
problem with censorship is it that historically there is a feature creep 
whereby the censorship ends up applying gradually to more and more things and 
the scope of it increases. Further down the line the situation may arise that 
someone's blog post about getting a good shoeing by the Metropolitan Police in 
London gets his website on the blacklist because it may be considered as 
inciting civil unrest/terrorism. Considering that in recent years in the UK we 
have had someone detailed under the prevention of terrorism act for heckling 
the PM, and just a couple of weeks ago a newspaper seller died of internal 
injuries after getting pushed to the ground by riot police after he walked 
through an area where there were anti capitalism protests that day; so this 
kind of thing is becoming more plausible.

During a discussion on 4chan's technology board regarding writing to European 
Members of Parliament to petition them in support of net neutrality I 
suggested that if the internet does become censored then it would be wise to 
consider other forms of media to preserve free speech. The worldwide web used 
to me a much more rough and ready place 15 years ago. People used to trade 
porn and illegal software openly on websites without getting shut down, Shock 
sites such as Goatse.cx were considered almost an initiation to new users. 
Ever wondered what sex had to do with bicycle frames? Try searching for them 
on the internet before Google was invented and you'll find out. Before the 
internet was being used by regular people who were not academics, materials 
and conversations were performed using technology. Bulletin board systems 
using plain old telephone lines were very popular for many years. While 
dial-up is slow now and even slower then, the simple protocols used allow 
people to post on them efficiently such as people use internet forums now, and 
even send emails to each other internationally using systems such as FIDOnet 
and DOVEnet where BBSes would forward messages between each other, to allow 
messages to travel large distances. It may take several days but it would get 
there. Despite the internet being censored in several countries it is still 
being used however, as it is much less tracable. The phone calls are hard to 
tap, can be made from public phones and are doing such things as allowing 
people access to  up to date medical techniques in North Korea for example.

As well as using BBS software people were also trading data much too large to 
be carried over 2400 baud dialup. There is a saying: Never underestimate the 
bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes. The act of carrying data in 
portable media such as CDs (formerly known as WORMs for "write once, read 
many"), hard drives, computers, even today with modern things such as USB pen 
drives and MP3 players is known as "sneakernet". People would share the data 
around schools, colleges, LAN parties and meets to allow it to get around. 
Often these were CDs with large collections of shareware and freeware on them 
as well as a good amount of cracked pirate software. 

Another communication method that has been used in the past and is still being 
used is radio. This falls into 2 main types: CB radio which is good for 
beginners, simple to use, very good for local and mobile communications. 
Amateur radio or Ham radio colloquially is for more advanced users. It 
requires an exam to become licenced at it but it allows you to use bands and 
transmission powers that allow you to communicate internationally, communicate 
in morse code and communicate in computer encoded written word or "Teletype" 
CB radio does allow some international communications by people bouncing 
signals off the atmosphere when the right atmospheric conditions are present. 
This is known as Skip or DXing. People are currently using radios which are 
often illegally modified to allow them to communicate like this in the space 
between CB bands as many countries use different standards for CB. The 
protocol is to call each other on 27.555MHz, then agree on a different 
frequency to use in a manner similar to that used by Ham operators. This is 
known as "Freebanding"

Enough background, Here we will go into actually implementing these 
technologies with current equipment. If more people contribute to future 
revisions of this file then I will add more technologies and techniques to the 
list.

*******************Bulletin Board Systems*******************
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Bulletin Board Systems, or BBS, were invented in the late 70s by computer 
hobbyists, and used throughout the 80s and 90s, waning in popularity in the 
late 90s but still being used and developed today by hobbyists. They 
originally used one or more telephone line to allow a user to connect to the 
system and later allowed people to use Telnet and SSH over the internet. Users 
can create and use a login, post messages, play games and send long distance 
electronic messages to each other. Many boards were specialised for specific 
topics such as boards for teenagers, boards for hackers, crackers and phreaks, 
boards for support groups such as lesbian, gay, and transgender issues, pretty 
much anything. They were similar to the internet forums we use now. They also 
allowed people to upload files to the board, or download files precategorised 
by the system operator of the BBS, known as the SysOp. 

As this guide is intended as a guide for emergency replacement of internet 
communication I will concentrate on setting up a system that will work for 
both internet communication such as Telnet and Plain Old Telephone System 
(known as POTS).

Modems have changed over the years. In the past all of the conversion of the 
serial output of the computer to the modulated hiss that goes down the phone 
line were done by the modem itself. This is known as a hardware modem. They 
require very little computer power to operate and will allow anything that can 
output RS232 serial to communicate over a phone line. Any modem that is 
totally external, has a phone socket on one and an a serial port on the other 
it is a hardware modem. More recently Modems were designed to shift this 
processing to the computer itself. They are little more than glorified 
soundcards and require much more computing power to operate. These are known 
as software modems or winmodems. A hardware modem can run off a 2mhz 
Microcontroller but a winmodem needs at least a pII processor to run at full 
speed. This is an issue because the winmodems fake a serial port to the system 
which will require specific software to communicate with it. This software was 
usually written for Windows only and this will cause problems to Linux users, 
although inventive open source software developers have written linux drivers 
for many kinds of winmodem. The other problem is that this port may be on an 
odd number and the software may not be able to be configured to communicate 
with it: Older systems had com ports 1 to 4 found on specific addresses and 
interrupt request locations within the system that were standardised. This 
goes back to before operating systems supported plug and play and were able to 
reconfigure hardware on their own to resolve conflicts. Many pieces of 
software hard coded to look in these places, a software modem will unlikely be 
in the same IRQ and DMA as the standard hardware ones even though the com port 
number is set the same. All USB dial up modems are software modems but 
suprisingly many GSM modems, such as those in older Nokia business phones such 
as the 6310i are hardware modems as far as the system is concerned. This means 
that it is going to be relatively easy to configure a BBS to connect to the 
mobile phone network.

Most commercial BBS software was written to work in old OSes. Old platforms 
such as Amiga and Atari ST are not much good to us. DOS based ones will be 
more useful, Windows 9x based ones may also be feasable. I'm not sure how 
usable Mac System based ones will work on a modern OSX Mac. In this guide I 
will be concentrating on Synchronet. This software is available for Windows 
and Linux, with older versions for Dos and Amiga. 

While I am a Linux user I am not familiar with how to get dialup working 
properly on it so do not have the knowledge to write a guide for how to 
implement Synchronet on Linux. This would be worthwhile however as the 
robustness of Linux plus it's ability to work well on older hardware can be 
useful for certain projects. While not encouraging it myself one of the 
speakers at last years' HOPE conference mentioned that he and his friends 
installed a BBS under the air conditioning at a supermarket, took power from 
it, and connected it to the credit card verification line that was only ever 
used to make outgoing calls during trading hours so it was not discovered for 
a very long time, if ever. If you are reading this from a heavily censored 
country it may be the kind of guerilla tactic needed in order to keep 
information free.

I will be working with Windows XP here due to its compatibility with hardware. 
It has much better support for winmodems than 2000 or the 9x series does, will 
just about run well enough on a pII machine up with a hardware modem to 
support a BBS, will run on cheap hardware such as netbooks and is reasonably 
stable when installed straight off the windows CD(I have had issues with OEM 
provided ones that preload tons of crap with it)

**Installing Synchronet**

Go to www.synchro.net. Download the Win32 version of Synchronet,  any text 
files you feel you need, and a copy of SEXPOTS (Synchronet EXternal Plain Old 
Telephone System). Unzip and run the setup.exe. Use the default installation 
directory and use the "normal" installation which installs all files. After 
the installation finishes the setup will run Synchronet for the first time and 
present you with the configuration wizard. You are requested to use internet 
for setting up but it is not necessary. You can cancel the wizard and set 
things up manually for dialup support or just feed it any old IP address to 
complete the wizard for ease. Setting up with Telnet support allowing the BBS 
to be accessed over internet is a good idea even if you plan to make this a 
dialup capable BBS unless you are a staunch conspiracy theorist and worry 
about getting data mined.

The wizard will provide you with a working BBS with basic configuration, 
configured for people to access it over the internet or local network using 
Telnet. It is configured with access to DOVEnet which is an inter-BBS 
messaging system allowing different boards to share messages and have common 
areas. While it is interesting to leave this running for now it is not useful 
to someone who wishes to run the machine purely for dialup.If you run click in 
the synchronet control panel: BBS, Configure (note, not configuration wizard 
which is the next one down), in Message Areas you can remove the DOVEnet ones. 
From this configuration app you  can also manage other areas of the BBS. This 
part is covered well by the text files that accompany the software

SEXPOTS is an application that you can set to listen to incoming calls from 
your modem, then forward it on to a telnet port on the system, effectively 
turning any telnet BBS into one that supports dialup. Unzip it to a location 
on the C drive, then create a shortcut to it on the desktop. Edit the shortcut 
to read sexpots.exe -com 1, create another one ending in -com 2 and so on for 
every modem you have. You need to run a new instance of the application for 
each modem. You can monitor the status of each modem in the dos window that 
appears when you run the application. Stick all the shortcuts in startup in 
the start menu.

SEXPOTS can also run as a service. NT based operating systems such as NT4, 
Windows 2000, Windows XP and so on have the ability to run services which are 
the windows equivalent of daemons in unix. These are small applications that 
perform specific tasks within the system that you call on to do certain 
things. Most of this is pretty simple stuff that most people don't even think 
about. Dos based windows such as 3.1 and 9.x based windows up to Windows ME do 
not support this as they still have a lot of MS DOS in them hiding in the 
background. NT was a different development platform which was used in all the 
business operating systems up until XP. NT was adopted because it was much 
more stable and a better platform. The problem was up until Windows 2000 there 
was no DirectX for NT based systems so MS couldn't move the gamers, a core 
windows market, over to NT until then. If you install it as a service you will 
need to write a .ini file to go into the same directory as the executable 
file. Noone has bothered to put up an example of one so I can't advise what 
the correct formatting of this file should be without experimenting. I can't 
be bothered to do this as the ghetto method of shortcuts in startup works for 
me.

**Connecting**

Every copy of MS windows either comes with Hyperterminal or it is available 
off the install CD. If you don't have it, go into add/remove programs, go into 
windows components and you will usually find it in with communications 
options. It is a pretty good application for accessing BBSes as it has lots of 
features, particularly ANSI which allows it to display a colored character set 
often used to display colourful artwork in BBSes. If you have seen people 
pasting artwork into IRC it appears a lot like that. Some of it is very good 
and worth checking out. When you run the application it will ask you to set up 
a connection. You give the connection a name, chose an icon (many of which 
referring to long since departed companies that offered BBS services), then 
tell it how you want to connect. If you tell it to connect to TCP/IP you 
connect over Telnet (useful for testing locally on the BBS even if you are 
running dialup only) If you select a modem it will dial on that, if you tell 
it to connect to a com port it will communicate to that. If you have a modem 
on that com port you can still dial up but you will need to speak directly to 
the modem. I will cover this briefly later on. If you select a modem you will 
be prompted to feed it area codes, country, telephone number much like setting 
up a dial up internet connection. When you connect the modem will dial and you 
will be presented with the BBS login. You can enter "new" here to generate a 
new account. You will be prompted SY: the first time around which is the sysop 
password you set when configuring the BBS. This will set up the Sysop's login 
account. If you have already done this you can either log in if you have an 
account, or if you are a new user to someone elses BBS it will allow you to 
create an account. 

If you are connecting directly to a com port, you will either have another 
computer on the end of it on a null modem cable or a modem. If you are 
speaking to a modem there are some commonly used useful commands to type in to 
get it to do things:

AT = Attention = go do something. The letters following it tell the modem what 
to do, see below.
ATA = Answer. This will make the modem pick up the phone if someone is ringing 
it. You will see RING appearing in the console every 5 seconds if the phone is 
ringing.
ATD1234567890 = Dial. ATD followed by the telephone number will make the modem 
dial that number.
ATH = Hook, puts the phone on/off the hook and hangs up a connection
AT&F = resets the modem back to normal if it has been doing stuff, gets it 
ready for making a new connection

You will also see ATS0=1 in the SEXPOTS console which is the command to tell 
the modem to auto answer after 1 ring. The modem's manufacturer will be able 
to provide more comprehensive details of all the AT codes your modem will 
support. 

This is enough info on BBSes, it is enough to set up a simple one over a phone 
line or telnet and connect to it. You can find out more about customising the 
BBS and setting it up to play games and network in different ways from the BBS 
community.


**************CB, Freebanding and Ham radio**************
_________________________________________________________

Telephone networks and the internet are a good way of communicating but it 
always relies on companies and corporations to provide the medium for 
transmitting information. Since I am operating under the "what if" scenario of 
the internet becoming unavailable or becoming heavily censored. Radio provides 
a medium whereby you provide all the equipment yourself and rely on yourself 
for communication. There are methods of transmitting data over this medium but 
is is requires more advanced Ham radio licencing. Even then transmitting data 
over Ham is very slow compared to dialup. BBS was designed to work on 
extremely slow connections so it can be modified to work over packet radio 
bands. As I do not know much about this I will concentrate on voice 
communications. 

**CB radio**

Most countries will allow people to use low power short range communications, 
usually in the 11 metre/27MHz  band. This is known as Citizen's Band or CB. 
Different countries however have different standards. in the US people are 
commonly using AM and SSB, while in Europe people are primarily using FM. 
Different countries allow different bands to be used for their channels and it 
may be illegal to posess a radio capable of operating in a band intended for 
other countries. Most countries also limit output power to around 4 watts, and 
have made illegal people amplifying the signal to have more range, either by 
modifying the radio to output more power or by feeding the output of the radio 
into a linear amplifier, also known as "boots" or a "burner" before going out 
to the aerial. People are however doing this anyway. 

CB is intended for people to use in about a 10 or 20 mile range. It is 
commonly used by truckers to communicate with each other, discussing the 
location of traffic jams, government roadside checks (such as VOSA in the UK 
checking for illegal loads, using illegal fuel etc), location of food, 
truckstops and prostitutes. All the things a trucker needs. It is used by 
farmers to communicate to farmhands operating farm equipment. It is used by 
off-road enthusiasts to communicate and dig each other out of the mud and is 
it used by CB enthusiasts to communicate with each other recreationally. Each 
band usually has its allocation of frequencies divided into 40 "channels" 
making the radio easy to operate, only needing to specify which channel you 
wish to talk on, which band if your country allows more than one (In the UK 
you have the old 40 channels that were originally the only ones legally 
allowed to be used, known as the "muppets band" and the newly introduced 
centralised European band, called the CEPT band. You can now get "80 channel" 
CBs which have both bands) . Many of the channels are empty much of the time. 
Countries usually select channel 19, sometimes 10 to start talking with each 
other then move to another channel to keep 19 open, although what happens in 
reality is channel 19 fills up with idle chitchat.

CB is good for local communications. While there are walkie talkie versions 
these are cumbersome compared to the small VHF ones that are built for doing 
that. They do get much more range however so may be worth considering. This is 
still what people used before everyone had mobile phones, and used it to save 
money on phone calls. It also allows you to easily conference with many people 
which is less easy to do with phones before technogy such as Skype came along. 
It is good for putting into cars so if you are driving in a convoy, say as 
part of a road trip or car club you can talk between cars without needing to 
get mobile phones out and annoy the police. They are also very good for 
talking with friends in your local community, there is no bill at the end of 
it, and so on. While anyone can listen in to the conversation , in the UK at 
least, OFCOM will only investigate you if you cause interference or do 
something to really piss them off. The band is otherwise unpoliced and is 
excellent fun for messing around on.

You can use mobile rigs in cars, walk around with handheld radios and so on, 
but you get a bit better range by having a base station set up in a house. You 
can attach large aluminium antennas to the house which will give you much more 
range both because the aerial is higher up, and because longer ones have more 
gain, better making use of the broadcasting power you have. It is recommended 
to use base station setups for DXing which I will go into later

**Antennas and SWR** 

All radios need an antenna or aerial. When you are recieving radio it doesn't 
really matter how long it is. When you are trying to transmit, things are not 
so simple. If you ever got to do the experiment in school where you stretch 
out a slinkie between two people or stretch out a rubber band between two 
points with an electric motor on one end and so on, then shake one end so you 
send waves down the line. When you shake it just right points of the wave 
appear to stand still. These are called "standing waves". The same thing 
happens with radio waves going into an antenna. If the total length of wire 
and antenna are just right a standing wave will happen. The problem is this 
tends to reflect your broadcasting power back into the radio, and fry things. 
Commercially bought antennas have adjustable lengths or adjustable coils in 
them to stop these standing waves. When setting up you also need to purchace a 
SWR (standing wave radio) meter which you connect in line with the antenna 
when setting it up. It will come with instructions on how to use it but 
basically, you set the switch on it to calibrate or forward, start 
broadcasting on channel 20 and turn the knob until the meter reads full. Set 
the switch to reverse or normal or whatever else it says then broadcast again. 
It needs to be less than 2. 3 or higher and you have a short or are in danger 
of damaging the radio. If you then change to channel 40 take a reading, do the 
same on channel 1 if the meter reads higher on 40 make the antenna shorter, if 
it is higher on 1 make it longer until they are the same. It will probably end 
up being less than 2 and you will have a tuned antenna. Even if the antenna is 
sold to you as pretuned still run it through the SWR meter to make sure.

Antennas also come in certain lengths. The length of a 27Mhz wave is around 11 
metres. This is why it is called the 11 metre band. To get the best 
broadcasting patterns, antenna lengths are fractions of this length. A car may 
have a 1/4 wave antenna. This literally means the length of broadcasting 
element is 1/4 of the wavelength. Base antennas may be 1/2 wave or 5/8 wave. 
Usually the closer to full wave the better but this is impractical. I also 
gather that the particular fractions also give the antenna certain properties 
or broadcast in different patterns which may be useful for certain 
applications. This is something I don't know much about so will leave it 
there. 

**DXing**

DXing is the term for long term radio communication. Communicating normally 
over CB is line of sight between antennas. The wave can follow the ground and 
allow it to pass over land features. The wave is also capable of bouncing off 
the ionosphere if it has been irradiated just right by the sun. This is known 
as "skip". It allows radio users to use the atmosphere as a communications 
sattelite, sometimes bouncing off it several times to broadcast around the 
world. The Ham radio users do this often and have bands and techniques 
accessible to them that regular CB users do not. Skip depends on the sunspot 
cycle as it is these that irradiate the atmosphere allowing skip to happen. 
The next time this peaks is in 2012, it will cause interference with the power 
grid and annoy people, but be fantastic for DX. Screw the power grid, get a 
honda generator or plug the kettle into your UPS until the power cut finishes 
and smoke a J. It'll all be cool. 

Skip does have a downside. People broadcasting on their local bands will 
unintentionally skip and end up bringing up the background noise of the radio. 
You might not be able to reach the guy at the end of the street with your CB 
but you'll be able to reach Germany fine.

People who DX as a hobby also like to collect proof that they did it. They do 
this by arranging to send each other ornately designed 8x10" cards containing 
pictures and the callsign of the person who they spoke to. They call these QSL 
cards. They get their name from the Q codes used originally as short codes in 
morse for longer phrazes but are now adopted by Ham and other radio users. It 
just means "contact" in this case. They send these to PO boxes usually so they 
don't have to use their home addresses. They may also send these inside 
envelopes as some countries wanting to stop illegal DXing will look out for 
these being sent as postcards. The callsigns are based on the Ham system but 
are not official callsigns issued by the government. They are in the format 
12AB123, where 12 is the country code, AB is the initials of the DX club that 
the broadcaster is a member of and the last digits are the number of that club 
member. For example, 26TM001 would be country code 26 = UK, TM = Tango Mike 
who are one of the large DXing clubs in the UK, and 001 is the member number. 
I am not a member of Tango Mike and have no idea who is at 001 so this is not 
me before people ask. DXers often use linear amplifiers and large antennas to 
assist them. I have learned that pretty much everyone involved in radio be it 
Ham or CB is breaking or bending the law somewhere...

**Freebanding**

I mentioned that different countries have different bands. Some people have 
decided to illegally use the space between the bands to broadcast on. As I 
mentioned, the band is very unpoliced so most of this is going under the 
radar, or is known about but not worth bothering with.. They are also kind of 
a gobetween for regular CB and Ham which is a much more complicated way of 
communicating, but has much better range and benefits.

Freebanders are currently contacting each other using US style AM/SSB radios, 
modified to work on 27.555MHz Upper side band or USB. They are doing this 
intending to DX. They observe the techniques detailed above and that pretty 
much covers it. The freebanders however talk in terms of frequencies rather 
than channels. The radio I have for listening into this, a President Madison, 
still works in terms of channels and bands and I use a chart to work out what 
frequency that channel will be when trying to move to a particular frequency. 
There are not as many people doing this as are DXing on the regular channels 
at present.

**Ham Radio**

I do not know much about Ham radio right now so will give a brief descripton. 
Ham radio is the colloquial term for amateur radio. Like CB it allows people 
to broadcast with their own equipment. Unlike CB it requires people to take 
exams in order to operate the equipment, be issued with a callsign by a 
central authority and they must use that callsign when communicating. The 
upshot of which is that you then become legally allowed to use bands that most 
people are not allowed to use, and use them at much higher powers than CB 
users. Long distance communications are a hobby on CB by those with the skill 
to do it but communicating around the world is much easier on the ham bands. 
Ham radio also allows you to broadcast in encoded written words, known as 
teletype. It will also allow people to communicate in pure data known as 
packet radio. This last part may be useful to people reading this as I gather 
there are methods to incorporate BBS technology into it.


*********Couriering, wardriving and sneakernet***********
_________________________________________________________

Before widespread internet was available in homes, we would share data between 
friends. The one guy with usenet access would download the warez compilation, 
copy it to a bunch of floppies then we would take it to another friend with 
access to a WORM drive (write once, read many, old name for the original 1 
speed CD burner), make CDs, and share the CDs around. This is still going on 
today with people sharing data using USB pen drives, DVD-Rs etc among students 
and work colleagues and so on. It is colloqually known as "sneakernet" as you 
are physically taking the data and walking to other places rather than using 
an infrastructure to do it on. This is also being used in Cuba where internet 
is restricted and heavily censored. Visitors to the country are getting USB 
drives from trade shows and so on and these have ended up in black markets to 
allow people to traffic data around. If it works there it can work anywhere, 
and just requires a little organisation. Sneakernet also covers people sharing 
data during LAN parties. I have known people purchase new drives solely for 
filling while attending large lan parties as most people are sharing while 
playing despite it not necessarily being official.

Couriering is the act of deliberately moving data between distribution points. 
Lets say you have a BBS without internet connectivity, and you wish to get 
some data to it do distribute to your users. What happened in the past is a 
courier was appointed to make the long distance calls required or to travel to 
another location, get the data and bring it back to the other users. They 
would in return get status within the community and also have best pick of the 
cracks and applications before anyone else. These days people only usually 
donate bandwidth to provide services to others. It is also worth considering 
if you need to move large amounts of data within a particular community by 
driving around with mass storage devices.

Wardriving is the act of using a car containing a laptop, using scanning 
software such as kismet and Netstumbler to find open wireless access points 
and use them for surfing someone elses internet, and downloading from their 
network shares. It also includes people using cracking software to break the 
WEP keys and WPA passwords to gain access to otherwise secure networks 
although for the most part people don't do this, preferring to look for easier 
networks. They do this because most people who buy wireless access points do 
not read the manual and leave them in default configuration. Older units 
default to having no encryption on them at all. I see no reason why people 
cannot run a dedicated open access point to allow people to drive by and 
communicate with it. It would let members of the community have access to a 
BBS over telnet, a webserver with a forum, shares of files and so on. It may 
be something worth considering and I may run such a system with my spare 
access point.

********************Tor and Darknets**********************
_________________________________________________________

People have long predicted the eventual control of the internet. One solution 
has been to set up nodes on it with encrypted traffic running between it in 
order to prevent people monitoring the traffic. This system is called TOR and 
is being endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Another method is to 
set up a virtual private network only between a small network of people you 
trust. This is called a Darknet. 

**Darknets**

A Darknet is simply a small group of people who are connected using a VPN in 
the same way that people connect to a corporation in order to keep company 
information private. This small group of people are going it to allow them to 
share content over the internet without being monitored. The downside being 
that members of the network have to be trusted as any one of them can monitor 
traffic from within the network, so it would be easy for a mole to try and 
expose the contents if someone had a vested interest, such as the police 
covertly gaining membership to a darknet containing illegal information 
pertaining to organised crime. This can only work if all members of the 
network are trusted not to rat out the other members. VPN is a complicated 
thing to set up so I will not go into it in this file

**Tor**

Tor is a more complicated system that allows for anonymised browsing of the 
internet. The network has a number of nodes. You connect to a random node with 
headers stating what destination you require. It then encrypts the traffic, 
sends it to another node via a random number of other nodes with random 
routes, assembles your traffic and then sends it unencrypted to and from the 
target website. This pattern traffic creates concentric rings within the 
network known as "onion layering". The website only sees the address of the 
Tor node and the traffic is extremely difficult to monitor within the nodes. 
Anyone can use it but it is slow, and many websites such as internet forums 
are blocking Tor nodes because people are using it to troll the forum without 
being traced. The upshot is it is very private. Anyone can also run a node as 
the software for it is open source. You can also have tor protected websites 
with a .onion address, which provides it with a hidden location in order to 
protect the server from people trying to trace its location. 

I do not have information on how to set up a tor node and only know the basics 
of using Tor, so will leave that to other people to write files on. Please see 
http://www.torproject.org/ for more information.

*********************Finishing up************************
_________________________________________________________

This concludes Better homes and Bootstrapping. If I write one with more up to 
date information I will release it with a new version number. If someone else 
wishes to add more detail or more chapters please add yourself to the credits 
and send me a copy of it. I will upload it with a new version number. As a 
disclaimer please do not do anything dumb which I may have suggested in this 
file: If you get busted it is not my fault. Please email comments to me on 
me-tan (at) wtfux.org I will provide email details for things like fidonet 
mail if I get myself on that system in the future. 

EOF