Liberation!

There’s recently been large (in internet nerd scale, at least) publicity given to the Chaos Computer Club’s “Freedom Stick“, a flashdrive with a pre-installed Tor/Vidalia enabled copy of Firefox, aimed at tourists and Chinese citzens aiming to circumvent the national firewall during the Olympics.

Interesting enough, I suppose. Other than a brief moment of “what a delightful, noble goal,” I didn’t give the project much thought…

…until I realized that this exact same piece of technology could get me around Mobile Wrench’s corporate firewall.  If the Freedom Stick could circumvent the Chinese Government’s web resrictions, odds are it can get by a mere corporate firewall.

And lo-and-behold, a far less noble use for this great development is born; using their software package on a $5 jumpdrive, I can now Facebook and Reddit and Flickr to my heart’s content while at work – other than bandwidth & speed concerns (the Tor network tends towards slow at the best of times, so some stuff’ll time out regularly), I can go wherever the fuck I feel like online.