The Tor Browser Launcher is pretty neat.
It downloads the Tor Browser, verifies that it’s properly signed, so you don’t get a fake one planted on your computer, which is a possibility if you went to the wrong Web site or were the victim of a MITM attack, somehow, and then puts launchers and a settings application in your menus.
However, Debian’s package doesn’t work properly on my computer, and when I open it, an invisible window the size of the browser that can’t be closed except from the task manager, or pkill, opens up.
Well, that’s not helpful.
Fortunately, it’s available as a Flatpak too, and that works!
If all else failed, it’s downloadable from the Tor Project directly.
You can verify the bundle’s archive with the .asc key that they provide and then unpack it and then start it with ./start-tor-browser of course, but meh.
I’m lazy.
Moving right along… The Southern Poverty Law Center is probably why you can’t access the Tor Browser’s Web site.
They apparently advise libraries and schools to filter it out as “terrorist”, according to multiple sources I’ve spoken with.
God, these people….
Anyhow… If you already have the Tor Browser on your computer before you get on their WiFi, they can’t do much about that. And after you’re on, you can just use Tor…
Oddly, the library where I live lets Tor function normally even though their firewall blocks the site. I won’t tell here which library because I don’t want to give these jackbooted library thugs(?) any ideas about how to screw around with me if they’re not smart enough to do that already and happen to find this post in Google or something.
The Supreme Court ruled on the issue of Free Speech that you have to be allowed access to the Internet without the firewall in effect, _if you specifically ask for it_.
(Oddly, in Chicago, the city itself, the library doesn’t even block porn. If people are watching it and you complain, they will help you move to another computer, but they won’t stop that other person unless they start playing with themselves or something. Life in a big liberal city is just disgusting everywhere you go. Disgusting, expensive, cramped, polluted, riots breaking out unpredictably. Did I mention expensive? Glad I’m not there anymore.)
However, Tor Browser has another mode, which is intended mostly to deal with situations like the Great Firewall of China, which essentially makes it look like you’re connecting to a Web site in the Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services “cloud”. Obviously, that has privacy issues of its own, but it can’t easily be blocked without a lot of collateral damage.
So hey, there’s something positive that came out of centralizing the Web into the hands of a couple of monopolists? That being said, I’d be careful to use this to evade censorship at the library, but be on guard because your traffic is being tunneled through companies that have affiliations with the intelligence agencies in the United States.
One easy thing you can try if you run into censors and use Brave is to just load a Private Tab with Tor and see if it’s good enough.
If you don’t need a lot of privacy and just need to obfuscate what you’re doing, you can leave it at this and just use a normal browser.
And if none of this works, you can try NordVPN’s obfuscated VPN servers or their browser plug-in, which is basically a proxy that looks like HTTPS instead of a VPN.
So there’s things you can do to avoid government spying at the library and your school and break through even the most pernicious censorship regime, unless they want to do extreme damage to their WiFi network’s usability.
It’s ridiculous that network administrators at a library are stifling free speech based on the SPLC, but suddenly the SPLC’s “naughty software list” makes much more sense.
It turns out that this software gives you most of the tools to bypass authoritarian censors (including those at a public library who try block selected Wikipedia articles so that you can’t read them, on their Windows PC terminals, which tells you that nothing you connect to over HTTPS there is actually secure even if there is no malware other than Windows) such as themselves and read and view whatever you want, and talk to whoever you want, on the Web.
Ironically, they give these tools free advertising by drawing attention to them.
There’s some on there that I don’t even use, even though I knew about them, because they’re proprietary. I don’t think they even mentioned Tox clients though. Those are pretty good if you need anonymous messaging.
Politicians that want to ban your privacy, such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, use Signal (proprietary), which is also on the list. I guess Borisinaro is a terrorist and needs to be moved to UltraMax immediately and fitted for a Hannibal Lecter mask. Tried and convicted by “The Southern Poverty Law Center said so.”.
Where does SPLC get their money, btw? There’s a lot of Hollywood Liberals and GAFAM money in there, but enough of it is in a web of slush funds that make it hard to figure out entirely.
They may well have started out with good intentions. I’m certainly not going to argue that fighting the actual Klan is bad (Because “I hate Illinois Nazis” as much as anyone.), but like most things liberal, they have to paint everything that’s not them as the Klan, including just normal every day decent folks who are trying to raise their kids with some morality and respect for others and for, well, what’s left of the law.
It is perhaps ironic that a lot of kids couldn’t use proprietary GAFAM software if they wanted to because it’s being blocked due to SPLC’s recommendations, and so Matrix is growing.
One told me one one chatroom that their school’s Great Firewall doesn’t know what all of the domains are on which you can use Matrix.
Oddly, Matrix has a lot of kids on it because the grown ups at the school blocked “Skype” and “Facebook” and that ought to be enough, right? It’s not like there is anything other than GAFAM.
An entire generation free of Monopolysoft?
No wonder Skype is dead.
The lying bastards at the SPLC also have to lie through their teeth and accuse platforms that are not GAFAM of being pedophile strongholds.
Just a few short years ago, Microsoft Bing was the preferred place for pedophiles to go.
In at least one case I recall reading about, the police in Texas arrested a man and asked where he got it all, and he said BING. It didn’t do anything at all to filter it. Bill Gates was on the plane with Epstein a lot, trying to buy himself a Nobel Prize. And there was Rick Allen Jones, a CP-hoarder that was literally arrested in the Gates Mansion.
Where’s the warning about Microsoft and Gates?
I don’t recall there ever being one, even though it was more than a little disturbing that the biggest platform for online child sexual abuse material was the default Windows search engine and the default Windows Web browser. For years. And the police did nothing.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Gates Foundation is funding SPLC like they do to corrupt everything else.
Why else would they praise him as anything but some shyster who made good with a crap operating systems (like DOS, which was another incident, but mostly screwing Digital and IBM) called Windows NT which was actually, literally stolen from VMS (which Microsoft settled with Digital about, then betrayed shortly thereafter like they do anyone stupid enough to sign a business deal with them), while attacking his critics and lumping them all in with Alex Jones? It’s not even the first time.
Common Core is nothing more than an attack on public education by billionaires who should be in prison. One of the other promoters is Mark Zuckerberg.
Many, many parents are appalled at the dumbing down of their kids, and parents with a choice take their kids out of failing schools like the ones in Chicago which are a toxic hell stew of political correctness, gangs, drugs, guns, and fat cat public union bosses growing a big fat pension.
They demand school choice vouchers, which is the entire point, because then big business can just run those directly if you want your kids to have any hope at all.
A Chinese dissident who was hailed as a hero in Western media is now being given the silent treatment.
His mistake? Saying out loud that the US is starting to remind him of China (due to authoritarian wokeism), where if you say the wrong thing…..
Well, you don’t just get killed or disappeared….as such. Just professionally ruined.
Perhaps a better example is the concept of “dedma”, a word that Filipino people may be more familiar with, where society will “shun you” and ignore you if it becomes aware you have the wrong views.
Without going too far astray, the wrong opinions to have in America today read like something from bizarro world. If you just say criminals belong in prison and people should be entitled to keep what they earn and the government shouldn’t be throwing thousand dollar bills at people to keep the least productive the most reproductive and pretend it’s all okay for a couple more years until “Build Back Better” causes our country to collapse, and you’re in favor of the entire bill of rights, including the Second Amendment… That’s what happens to you.
They’ve gotten so good at disappearing us using GAFAM, disappearing people who are still in our right minds, that we have to stake out a new frontier and break our old habits and let companies like Facebook turn completely into an echo chamber full of crazy people with distorted thought patterns and advertising bullshit.
I’ve already started my divorce from GAFAM. I’m not replacing my Android phone when it fails, with another Android. I’ll be getting one that runs GNU/Linux.
I don’t care about “apps”. They’re dumb. They’re put there to control people and spy on them by companies who ruined the Web and yet still think its users have too much freedom.
Those companies, including Apple (which fundraises for SPLC), can pay off SPLC through slush funds and proxies to help their assault on your alternatives.
Did you know that there are 7 tracking libraries now in the text messaging app on a Samsung Galaxy phone. One of them even contacts Facebook. Even if you don’t use Facebook! That’s in addition to the Facebook stub apps and the Facebook system service whose only purpose is to wake up and tell Facebook which apps you’re signing into so their tracking libraries can associate them with you, even if “Facebook” isn’t on your phone.
Tracker Control neuters them and I pried out the stubs and disabled the “service”. But this has to be a stop gap solution.
The madness will not end until we shut them down and refuse to use their stinking products.
Oddly enough, Facebook was on SPLC’s list of platforms of concern, but I think it’s mostly to call for more censorship than there already is.
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