In the post for the last section of the Coincidance discussion group, I admitted that I didn't know what Robert Anton Wilson was talking about in the last sentence of the book when he referred to "a centering process which I hope the reader has by now grasped intuitively since it cannot be expressed symbolically." I didn't grasp "intuitively" what the centering process was. I didn't grasp it at all.
Michael Johnson, as part of his new posting on "Robert Anton Wilson's Tale of the Tribe: Scrying for Shards," offers an apparent explanation:
RAW, in discussing Bruno, puts in bold print:
Bruno's universe, infinite in both space and time, has no "real" or
absolute center, since wherever you cut a slice out of infinity,
infinity remains. Thus every place an observer stands becomes a relative
center for that observer. -p.205, TSOG
You're at the center, right where you are sitting now.
"Tale of the Tribe" is the book project that RAW discussed at the end of TSOG but never completed. Michael has a good discussion about it and links to this site, which I think is a kind of syllabus for Steve Fly Agaric's Maybe Logic Academy course (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.) See also the discussion thread on TofT that Steve started years ago at the Maybe Logic Academy forum (h/t Eric Wagner for pointing it out to me.)
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Latest news from Daisy Campbell
Daisy Eris Campbell, busy with her plans to stage Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger, is temporarily asking people to hold onto their would-be donations and support the official funding drive, due to launch next year. She explains (after I asked if Yanks can donate $23 instead of 23 pounds),
"I'm asking all would-be donators to hold fire now until we launch the official crowd funding campaign in the new year, as we want to make sure that goes with a bang.
"When that does go live there will be an option to donate both £23 (about $36) and $23 (about £13) and plenty more for flusher RAW fans! The rewards will differ accordingly... "
I'll update with news as it becomes available.
"I'm asking all would-be donators to hold fire now until we launch the official crowd funding campaign in the new year, as we want to make sure that goes with a bang.
"When that does go live there will be an option to donate both £23 (about $36) and $23 (about £13) and plenty more for flusher RAW fans! The rewards will differ accordingly... "
I'll update with news as it becomes available.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Golden apples from Italy
(I occasionally get submissions for this blog from readers. This one comes from Fausto Marcon of Italy, a Robert Anton Wilson fan who started writing to me a few weeks ago. Using a compendium of bits and links from Wikipedia, Fausto's piece taught me a lot about apples, golden and otherwise, and I thought I would share it with you. Note that it is perfectly OK for me to reprint Wikipedia material in my blog. Or, at least, it seems to me I have complied with Wikipedia's terms. If you are curious what they are, go here.
Fausto said I could give him a name as a new pope, but don't popes choose their own names? I was tempted to dub him Pope Italo I, for Italo Calvino. Fausto lives in Treviso, not terribly far from Venice. He is the chief editor of eartbooks and is on Facebook. -- The Mgt.)
Fausto said I could give him a name as a new pope, but don't popes choose their own names? I was tempted to dub him Pope Italo I, for Italo Calvino. Fausto lives in Treviso, not terribly far from Venice. He is the chief editor of eartbooks and is on Facebook. -- The Mgt.)
I
"An apple a day keeps the doctor away"-
"An apple a day keeps the doctor away"-
(a reality tunnel research about apples)
by Fausto Marcon
Umbrella term
Apple
The apple is the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree, species Malus domestica in the rose family (Rosaceae). It is one of the most widelycultivated tree fruits, and the most widely known of the many members ofgenus Malus that are used by humans.
I throw the apple at you, and if you are willing to love me, take it and share your girlhood with me; but if your thoughts are what I pray they are not, even then take it, and consider how short-lived is beauty.
—Plato, Epigram VII
In the wild, apples grow readily from seeds. However, like most perennial fruits, apples are ordinarily propagated asexually by grafting. This is because seedling apples are an example of "extreme heterozygotes", in that rather than inheriting DNA from their parents to create a new apple with those characteristics, they are instead significantly different from their parents.
Apples are self-incompatible; they must cross-pollinate to develop fruit. During the flowering each season, apple growers often utilize pollinators to carry pollen. Honey bees are most commonly used. Orchard mason beesare also used as supplemental pollinators in commercial orchards.
Tomato
History
Mesoamerica
Aztecs and other peoples in Mesoamerica used the fruit in their cooking. The exact date of domestication is unknown: by 500 BC, it was already being cultivated in southern Mexico and probably other areas. The Pueblopeople are thought to have believed that those who witnessed the ingestion of tomato seeds were blessed with powers of divination. The large, lumpy tomato, a mutation from a smoother, smaller fruit, originated in Mesoamerica, and may be the direct ancestor of some modern cultivated tomatoes.
Spanish distribution
Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés may have been the first to transfer the small yellow tomato to Europe after he captured the Aztec city of Tenochtítlan, now Mexico City, in 1521, although Christopher Columbus, a Genoese working for the Spanish monarchy, may have taken them back as early as 1493. The earliest discussion of the tomato in European literature appeared in an herbal written in 1544 by Pietro Andrea Mattioli, an Italian physician and botanist, who suggested that a new type of eggplant had been brought to Italy that was blood red or golden color when mature and could be divided into segments and eaten like an eggplant—that is, cooked and seasoned with salt, black pepper, and oil. However it wasn't until ten years later that tomatoes were named in print by Mattioli as pomi d’oro, or "golden apple".
Italy
The recorded history of tomatoes in Italy dates back to 31 October 1548 when the house steward of Cosimo de' Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, wrote to the Medici private secretary informing him that the basket of tomatoes sent from the grand duke's Florentine estate at Torre del Gallo"had arrived safely." Tomatoes were grown mainly as ornamentals early on after their arrival in Italy.
Fruit or vegetable?
Botanically, a tomato is a fruit: the ovary, together with its seeds, of aflowering plant. However, the tomato has a much lower sugar content than other edible fruits, and is therefore not as sweet. Typically served as part of a salad or main course of a meal, rather than at dessert, it is considered avegetable for most culinary uses. One exception is that tomatoes are treated as a fruit in home canning practices: they are acidic enough to process in a water bath rather than a pressure cooker as vegetables require. Tomatoes are not the only food source with this ambiguity: green beans, eggplants, cucumbers, and squashes of all kinds (such as zucchiniand pumpkins) are all botanically fruits, yet cooked as vegetables.
Tomato records
The massive "tomato tree" growing inside the Walt Disney World Resort's experimental greenhouses in Lake Buena Vista, Florida may be the largest single tomato plant in the world. The plant has been recognized as a Guinness World Record Holder, with a harvest of more than 32,000 tomatoes and a total weight of 522 kg (1,151 lb). It yields thousands of tomatoes at one time from a single vine.
Golden apple
The golden apple is an element that appears in various national and ethnicfolk legends or fairy tales. Recurring themes depict a hero (e.g., Hercules orFăt-Frumos) retrieving the golden apples hidden or stolen by a monstrousantagonist. Alternatively, they are depicted as divine food and the source of immortality in Norse mythology.
Discordianism
The contemporary religion Discordianism draws upon the Golden Apple of the goddess Eris, also known as the "Apple of Discord" which was used by this goddess to set off the conflict among the goddesses of Olympus that lead to the Trojan War as a result of Eris not being invited to a party (the so-called "Original Snub"). Emblazoned upon the apple is the word "Kallisti" meaning "to the fairest". The golden apple can be seen as a metaphor for a practical joke meant to cause cognitive dissonance in the target.
Golden apples in other languages[edit]
In many languages, the orange is referred to as a "golden apple". For example, the Greek χρυσομηλιά, and Latin pomum aurantium both literally describe oranges as "golden apples". Other languages, like German,Finnish, Hebrew, and Russian, have more complex etymologies for the word "orange" that can be traced back to the same idea.
Identity
Frequently, the term "golden apple" is used to refer to the quince, a fruit originating in the Middle East. The tomato, unknown to the ancient world of the Greeks, is known as the pomodoro in Italian, meaning "golden apple" (from pomo d'oro). One reason that oranges might be considered to be "magical" in so many stories is because they bear flowers and fruit at the same time unlike other fruit.
Apple of Discord
An apple of discord is a reference to the Golden Apple of Discord(Greek: μῆλον τῆς Ἔριδος) which, according to Greek mythology, the goddess Eris (Gr. Ἔρις, "Strife") inscribed "to the fairest" and tossed in the midst of the feast of the gods at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, thus sparking a vanity-fueled dispute among Hera, Athena and Aphrodite that eventually led to the Trojan War[1] (for the complete story, see TheJudgement of Paris). Thus, "apple of discord" is used to signify the core, kernel, or crux of an argument, or a small matter that could lead to a bigger dispute.
Apples and oranges
A comparison of apples and oranges occurs when two items or groups of items are compared that cannot be practically compared.
The idiom, comparing apples and oranges, refers to the apparent differences between items which are popularly thought to be incomparable or incommensurable, such as apples and oranges. The idiom may also be used to indicate that a false analogy has been made between two items, such as where an apple is faulted for not being a good orange.
Oranges as a type of apple[edit]
In many languages, oranges are, implicitly or explicitly, referred to as a type of apple, specifically a golden apple or a Chinese apple (conferhesperidium). For example, the Greek χρυσόμηλον (chrysomelon) and Latinpomum aurantium both literally describe oranges as golden apples. In other languages like German, Finnish, Polish, or Russian the terms for the bitter orange (a related species) are derived from Latin pomum aurantium. Additionally, the Hebrew word תפוז (tapuz) is a shortened form of תפוח זהב(tapuakh zahav), or golden apple.
In Dutch, sweet oranges are called sinaasappel, which is derived fromChina's apple. The Latvian apelsīns, Icelandic appelsína, Swedishapelsin,Norwegian appelsin, Finnish appelsiini, Russian апельсин (apelsin) and German Apfelsine share similar etymology.
Eris (mythology)
The most famous tale of Eris recounts her initiating the Trojan War by causing the Judgement of Paris. The goddesses Hera, Athena andAphrodite had been invited along with the rest of Olympus to the forced wedding of Peleus and Thetis, who would become the parents of Achilles, but Eris had been snubbed because of her troublemaking inclinations.
She therefore (as mentioned at the Kypria according to Proclus as part of a plan hatched by Zeus and Themis) tossed into the party the Apple of Discord, a golden apple inscribed τῇ καλλίστῃ (Ancient Greek: tē(i) kallistē(i)) – "For the most beautiful one", or "To the Fairest One" – provoking the goddesses to begin quarreling about the appropriate recipient. The haplessParis, Prince of Troy, was appointed to select the fairest by Zeus. The goddesses stripped naked to try to win Paris' decision, and also attempted to bribe him. Hera offered political power; Athena promised skill in battle; and Aphrodite tempted him with the most beautiful woman in the world:Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta. While Greek culture placed a greater emphasis on prowess and power, Paris chose to award the apple to Aphrodite, thereby dooming his city, which was destroyed in the war that ensued.
Isaac Newton
Apple incident
Reputed descendants of Newton's apple tree, (from top to bottom) at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, and the Instituto Balseiro library garden
Newton himself often told the story that he was inspired to formulate his theory of gravitation by watching the fall of an apple from a tree. Although it has been said that the apple story is a myth and that he did not arrive at his theory of gravity in any single moment, acquaintances of Newton (such asWilliam Stukeley, whose manuscript account of 1752 has been made available by the Royal Society) do in fact confirm the incident, though not the cartoon version that the apple actually hit Newton's head. Stukeley recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on 15 April 1726
Apple Inc.
Logo
According to Steve Jobs, Apple was so named because Jobs was coming back from an apple farm, and he was on a fruitarian diet. He thought the name was "fun, spirited and not intimidating".
Apple's first logo, designed by Ron Wayne, depicts Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. It was almost immediately replaced by Rob Janoff's "rainbow Apple", the now-familiar rainbow-colored silhouette of an apple with a bite taken out of it. Janoff presented Jobs with several different monochromatic themes for the "bitten" logo, and Jobs immediately took a liking to it. While Jobs liked the logo, he insisted it be in color to humanize the company. The logo was designed with a bite so that it would not be confused with a cherry. The colored stripes were conceived to make the logo more accessible, and to represent the fact the Apple II could generate graphics in color. This logo is often erroneously referred to as a tribute toAlan Turing, with the bite mark a reference to his method of suicide. Both Janoff and Apple deny any homage to Turing in the design of the logo.
In 1998, with the roll-out of the new iMac, Apple discontinued the rainbow theme and began to use monochromatic themes, nearly identical in shape to its previous rainbow incarnation, on various products, packaging and advertising. An Aqua-themed version of the monochrome logo was used from 2001 to 2003, and a Glass-themed version was used from 2003 to 2013. With the release of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks in fall of 2013, the logo appears flat and white with no glossy effects.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were Beatles fans, but Apple Inc. had trademark issues with Apple Corps Ltd., a multimedia company started by the Beatles in 1967, involving their name and logo. This resulted in a series of lawsuits and tension between the two companies. These issues ended with settling of their most recent lawsuit in 2007.
Forbidden fruit
Forbidden fruit is a phrase that originates from Genesis concerning Adam and Eve in Genesis 2:16–17. In the narrative, the fruit of good and evil was eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As a metaphor, the phrase typically refers to any indulgence or pleasure that is considered illegal or immoral.
Apple
In Western Europe, the fruit was often depicted as an apple, possibly because of a misunderstanding of, or a pun on mălum, a native Latin noun which means evil (from the adjective malus), and mālum, another Latin noun, borrowed from Greek μῆλον, which means apple.[4] In the Vulgate,Genesis 2:17 describes the tree as de ligno autem scientiae boni et mali: "but of the tree (lit. wood) of knowledge of good and evil" (mali here is thegenitive of malum). The larynx in the human throat, noticeably more prominent in males, was consequently called an Adam's apple, from a notion that it was caused by the forbidden fruit sticking from Adam's throat as he swallowed.
Apple (symbolism)
Apples appear in many religious traditions, often as a mystical or forbidden fruit. One of the problems identifying apples in religion, mythology andfolktales is that as late as the 17th century, the word "apple" was used as a generic term for all (foreign) fruit other than berries, but including nuts.[1]This term may even have extended to plant galls, as they were thought to be of plant origin (see oak apple). For instance, when tomatoes were introduced into Europe, they were called "love apples". In one Old English work, cucumbers are called eorþæppla (lit. "earth-apples'), just as in French,Dutch, Hebrew, Persian and Swiss German, the words for potatoes mean "earth-apples" in English. In some languages, oranges are called "golden apples" or "Chinese apples". Datura is called 'thorn-apple".
Ethnobotanical and ethnomycological scholars such as R. Gordon Wasson,Carl Ruck and Clark Heinrich write that the mythological apple is a symbolic substitution for the entheogenic Amanita muscaria (or fly agaric) mushroom. Its association with knowledge is an allusion to the revelatory states described by some shamans and users of psychedelic mushrooms.[2][3][4]At times artists would co-opt the apple, as well as other religious symbology, whether for ironic effect or as a stock element of symbolic vocabulary. Thus, secular art as well made use of the apple as symbol of love and sexuality. It is often an attribute associated with Venus who is shown holding it.
Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007), known to friends as "Bob", was an American author andpolymath who became at various times a novelist, philosopher, psychologist,essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and self-describedagnostic mystic. Recognized as an episkopos, pope, and saint ofDiscordianism, Wilson helped publicize the group through his writings and interviews.
Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". His goal being "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
The Golden Apple refers to the Golden apple of discord, from the Greek myth of the Judgement of Paris. In the trilogy it is used as the symbol of the Legion of Dynamic Discord, a Discordian group; the golden apple makes a number of appearances, for example, on the cover, on a black flag, and as an emblem on a uniform.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels written by Robert Sheaand Robert Anton Wilson first published in 1975. The trilogy is a satirical,postmodern, science fiction-influenced adventure story; a drug-, sex-, andmagic-laden trek through a number of conspiracy theories, both historical and imaginary, related to the authors' version of the Illuminati. The narrative often switches between third and first person perspectives and jumps around in time. It is thematically dense, covering topics like counterculture,numerology, and Discordianism.
The trilogy comprises The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, andLeviathan. They were first published as three separate volumes starting in September 1975. In 1984 they were published as an omnibus edition, and are now more commonly reprinted in the latter form.
Shooting an apple off one's child's head
Shooting an apple off one's child's head, also known as apple-shot(from German Apfelschuss) is a feat of marksmanship with a bow orcrossbow that occurs as a motif in a number of legends in Germanic folklore (and has been connected with non-European folklore). In the Stith Thompson Motif Index it is F661.3, described as "Skillful marksman shoots apple from man's head" or "apple shot from man's head", though it always occurs in the form of the marksman being ordered to shoot an apple (or occasionally another smaller object) off his own son's head. It is best known as William Tell's feat.
"A Pembrokeshire proverb. Eat an apple on going to bed, And you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread."
"Ait a happle avore gwain to bed, An' you'll make the doctor beg his bread; or as the more popular version runs: An apple a day Keeps the doctor away."
Monday, December 9, 2013
'Nothing is Beyond Our Reach'
Forbes reports that a new rocket launched by the Office of National Intelligence chose a huge tentacled octopus as the logo for the mission.
At the Robert Anton Wilson Fans group on Facebook, Dan Clore comments, "Looking at the NROL-39 logo, people could be forgiven for mistaking it for a version of the Lovecraftian elder god Cthulhu, who wants to swallow the Earth whole."
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Colin Wilson has died
Author Colin Wilson has died, age 82. He wrote a biography of Aleister Crowley and books about mysticism and the paranormal and it seems reasonable to suppose there was overlap between his readers and those of Robert Anton Wilson.
Indeed, RAW read Colin Wilson; Colin Wilson's name pops up in RAW's writings, as in this autobiographical essay on H.P. Lovecraft's influence on RAW's writings:
Like Colin Wilson (no relative, as far as I know), I am also temperamentally incapable of writing the typical Lovecraft ending – the note of bleak cosmic despair that makes HPL strangely akin to mainline fiction of our day with its ever-defeated heroes and ever-hostile universe. I use Lovecraftian horror because I think it is an aspect of the truth, a poetic mythos that says something real about our predicament as mammals aware of our own fragility and mortality. I cannot restrict myself to that horrible perspective, because I think it is only one aspect of many.
In the comments for the Nov. 27, 2013, entry for this blog (on RAW's "famous" admirers), Michael Johnson writes, "from a letter RAW wrote in Ireland to his old San Francisco friend Kurt Smith on 29 November, 1984, RAW's writing about interviewing Colin W. in Cornwall two weeks earlier, presumably for New Age magazine: 'Colin is charming, intelligent, generous, a fan of my works, conceited, arrogant, humorous; all in all, I like him. He gave me a pile of his books, which I have been reading.') I couldn't find the letter at rawilsonfans.com.
Indeed, RAW read Colin Wilson; Colin Wilson's name pops up in RAW's writings, as in this autobiographical essay on H.P. Lovecraft's influence on RAW's writings:
Like Colin Wilson (no relative, as far as I know), I am also temperamentally incapable of writing the typical Lovecraft ending – the note of bleak cosmic despair that makes HPL strangely akin to mainline fiction of our day with its ever-defeated heroes and ever-hostile universe. I use Lovecraftian horror because I think it is an aspect of the truth, a poetic mythos that says something real about our predicament as mammals aware of our own fragility and mortality. I cannot restrict myself to that horrible perspective, because I think it is only one aspect of many.
In the comments for the Nov. 27, 2013, entry for this blog (on RAW's "famous" admirers), Michael Johnson writes, "from a letter RAW wrote in Ireland to his old San Francisco friend Kurt Smith on 29 November, 1984, RAW's writing about interviewing Colin W. in Cornwall two weeks earlier, presumably for New Age magazine: 'Colin is charming, intelligent, generous, a fan of my works, conceited, arrogant, humorous; all in all, I like him. He gave me a pile of his books, which I have been reading.') I couldn't find the letter at rawilsonfans.com.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Internet privacy in a box, or on a thumb drive
Want to surf the Internet without being spied on by the NSA or big corporations? Read on.
A few days ago, Michael Johnson sent me an article about a product I hadn't heard about.
The article from MIT's Technology Review discussed the Safeplug, a $49 device that routes Internet traffic through the Tor network, which provides a degree of anonymity to Internet usage by making it harder for a snoop to see which sites you are visiting. It does this by routing your Internet activity though a bunch of different computers so that someone trying to monitor you (a company gathering data on you for marketing purposes, for example) can't figure out your IP address and therefore identify you. It can also let you visit sites that are being blocked.
One downside of the device is that if you aren't a computer expert, you might be giving yourself away, anyway. As the Technology Review article explains, "Mehmet Güneş, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who studies anonymity tools, says that users of the Safeplug will only remain truly obscure if they adjust their online behavior in other ways. 'Tor provides unlinkability from source to destination, and people confuse that with anonymity,' he says. While using Tor people can easily leak identifying information via the Flash plug-in, other media add-ons, or information they type or send, says Güneş."
I'm guessing that the people this product is aimed at -- folks who know so little about computers they can't figure out how to download and install a Tor browser bundle, which costs nothing -- are exactly the people who won't know how to avoid leaving the other telltale clues the professor is referring to.
An alternative to Safeplug, something that I'm using right now to compose this blog post, is a free Linux product called TAILS, which stands for "The Amnesic Incognito Live System."
TAILS is a software product that is built using Linux, an open source computer operating system that can be used as an alternative to Windows. Linux is free, will run on most computers that ordinarily use Windows, and usually comes with a graphical computer interface and set of applications that most people can figure out how to use, with a little trial and error.
Because Linux is an open source product, it isn't owned by anyone, which means that anyone can create their own version of Linux. There are hundreds if not thousands of different flavors of Linux, including well-known varieties such as Ubuntu.
TAILS uses Debian Linux, one of the common varieties of Linux, but tinkers with it to add a variety of privacy-protecting tools and configurations.
It forces all of your Internet sessions through Tor, like Safeplug does, but it adds many other features. The browser it uses, Iceweasel (the "politically correct," i.e. open source version of Firefox) has a bunch of configurations and extensions built in. It connects to websites using https whenever possible (which means that many of your connections are encrypted), blocks ads and doesn't save a history of the sites you've visited. There's even an onscreen keyboard, which you can use if you're paranoid and think someone is keylogging you. (If you aren't paranoid enough yet, follow the link and learn what "keystroke logging" is! By the way, the network administrator where you work can use keystroke logging and figure out what you're typing on your computer anytime he feels like it. Have a nice day!)
TAILS runs from your thumb drive. It doesn't use your computer's hard drive, so when you finish running it, there's no trace of what you've been doing on your machine. (You can save data and software configurations on an encrypted area of your thumb drive, or upload stuff into the cloud). A PGP applet is built in, so you can easily encrypt messages and files. I've found I can use the applet to encrypt messages I've pasted in Gmail messages, and decrypt messages that others have sent to my Gmail account.
TAILS comes with the normal productivity tools most people need, including a word processor (OpenOffice), text editor and image editor. It's rather light on entertainment software and didn't recognize my sound card, so when I want to listen to music or watch a TV program or movie, I have to use Ubuntu. It might work fine with your computer's audio hardware.
To use TAILS, you'll need to follow the instructions on the site for downloading it and sticking it on a hard drive. TAILS is upgraded every few weeks to fix security patches, so you'll be expected to download an upgrade often. The site explains how to do this while keeping your bookmarks, data, etc.
Unless you quit your job and devote hours a day to studying computer security, it's very difficult to become a computer security expert. It's a specialized field of study. A huge advantage of TAILS is that it's put together by computer security experts who have figured out computer security for you. If you run it, and follow their instructions for using it, you are protected against most computer security hazards. Using TAILS costs nothing, if you can scrounge up an a thumb drive drive, which in any case isn't very expensive if you have to buy one.
The downside is that you will have to take time to download TAILS, update it, and figure out how to use it. TAILS does have quite a bit of documentation, and it's generally rather well done and easy to follow, especially compared to the documentation for other Linux software programs.
A few days ago, Michael Johnson sent me an article about a product I hadn't heard about.
The article from MIT's Technology Review discussed the Safeplug, a $49 device that routes Internet traffic through the Tor network, which provides a degree of anonymity to Internet usage by making it harder for a snoop to see which sites you are visiting. It does this by routing your Internet activity though a bunch of different computers so that someone trying to monitor you (a company gathering data on you for marketing purposes, for example) can't figure out your IP address and therefore identify you. It can also let you visit sites that are being blocked.
One downside of the device is that if you aren't a computer expert, you might be giving yourself away, anyway. As the Technology Review article explains, "Mehmet Güneş, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who studies anonymity tools, says that users of the Safeplug will only remain truly obscure if they adjust their online behavior in other ways. 'Tor provides unlinkability from source to destination, and people confuse that with anonymity,' he says. While using Tor people can easily leak identifying information via the Flash plug-in, other media add-ons, or information they type or send, says Güneş."
I'm guessing that the people this product is aimed at -- folks who know so little about computers they can't figure out how to download and install a Tor browser bundle, which costs nothing -- are exactly the people who won't know how to avoid leaving the other telltale clues the professor is referring to.
An alternative to Safeplug, something that I'm using right now to compose this blog post, is a free Linux product called TAILS, which stands for "The Amnesic Incognito Live System."
TAILS is a software product that is built using Linux, an open source computer operating system that can be used as an alternative to Windows. Linux is free, will run on most computers that ordinarily use Windows, and usually comes with a graphical computer interface and set of applications that most people can figure out how to use, with a little trial and error.
Because Linux is an open source product, it isn't owned by anyone, which means that anyone can create their own version of Linux. There are hundreds if not thousands of different flavors of Linux, including well-known varieties such as Ubuntu.
TAILS uses Debian Linux, one of the common varieties of Linux, but tinkers with it to add a variety of privacy-protecting tools and configurations.
It forces all of your Internet sessions through Tor, like Safeplug does, but it adds many other features. The browser it uses, Iceweasel (the "politically correct," i.e. open source version of Firefox) has a bunch of configurations and extensions built in. It connects to websites using https whenever possible (which means that many of your connections are encrypted), blocks ads and doesn't save a history of the sites you've visited. There's even an onscreen keyboard, which you can use if you're paranoid and think someone is keylogging you. (If you aren't paranoid enough yet, follow the link and learn what "keystroke logging" is! By the way, the network administrator where you work can use keystroke logging and figure out what you're typing on your computer anytime he feels like it. Have a nice day!)
TAILS runs from your thumb drive. It doesn't use your computer's hard drive, so when you finish running it, there's no trace of what you've been doing on your machine. (You can save data and software configurations on an encrypted area of your thumb drive, or upload stuff into the cloud). A PGP applet is built in, so you can easily encrypt messages and files. I've found I can use the applet to encrypt messages I've pasted in Gmail messages, and decrypt messages that others have sent to my Gmail account.
TAILS comes with the normal productivity tools most people need, including a word processor (OpenOffice), text editor and image editor. It's rather light on entertainment software and didn't recognize my sound card, so when I want to listen to music or watch a TV program or movie, I have to use Ubuntu. It might work fine with your computer's audio hardware.
To use TAILS, you'll need to follow the instructions on the site for downloading it and sticking it on a hard drive. TAILS is upgraded every few weeks to fix security patches, so you'll be expected to download an upgrade often. The site explains how to do this while keeping your bookmarks, data, etc.
Unless you quit your job and devote hours a day to studying computer security, it's very difficult to become a computer security expert. It's a specialized field of study. A huge advantage of TAILS is that it's put together by computer security experts who have figured out computer security for you. If you run it, and follow their instructions for using it, you are protected against most computer security hazards. Using TAILS costs nothing, if you can scrounge up an a thumb drive drive, which in any case isn't very expensive if you have to buy one.
The downside is that you will have to take time to download TAILS, update it, and figure out how to use it. TAILS does have quite a bit of documentation, and it's generally rather well done and easy to follow, especially compared to the documentation for other Linux software programs.
Friday, December 6, 2013
More on conspiracies from Groupname for Grapejuice
Robert Anton Wilson's first Cosmic Trigger book had an uncanny ability to describe strange events, and then offer different explanations for what might be causing them.
znore at Groupname for Grapejuice can do that, too. In fact, his new post, Retangling the Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy 2, refers to Cosmic Trigger and has some mind-blowing theories about conspiracies. Just as znore has me convinced "Yeah, he might have something here," he repudiates the theory and goes on to the next one. Highly recommended.
You might consider reading part one first (which I also blogged.)
znore at Groupname for Grapejuice can do that, too. In fact, his new post, Retangling the Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy 2, refers to Cosmic Trigger and has some mind-blowing theories about conspiracies. Just as znore has me convinced "Yeah, he might have something here," he repudiates the theory and goes on to the next one. Highly recommended.
You might consider reading part one first (which I also blogged.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)