Sometimes, you have way too many balls in the air.  I saw the shiny bauble (Tor on my Droid 2) and I had to chase it.  Here is what happened:

1. I tried to download the tool from the Tor site.  That proved fruitless.  I was connected via 802.11 to my home network.  And my home network has content filtering through a third-party.  And this site was blocked.
2. Consequently, I had to disconnect from the home network and connect via the 3G network.  The download still had some problems.
3. So I downloaded to my PC and connected up the USB cable.  From there, I moved and launched the package installer.  The installer did it’s job and Tor was on my phone.
4. Too bad I couldn’t connect to the Tor network.  I tried the default test site from my Android browser and was greeted with the fact that my browser wasn’t using Tor.  That made some sense as I hadn’t pointed my browser to a local proxy that was configured to use the Tor connection.  Since Orbot uses Privoxy, I had the proxy.  I just had to configure the browser to use the proxy.
5. Unfortunately, changing the proxy on the default Android browser is not as easy as you might think.  There are plenty of articles about how to update the settings if you have rooted your phone; I have not as I want to see what an average user can do with their phone.  But most articles also said that you could use adb to update the settings.
6. I went ahead and tried to use adb.  But I had some issues getting adb to work from my PC to my Android phone.  The basic trouble is that I had already change my SDK to support Gingerbread.  And adb was moved in the new SDK to the platform-tools directory.  That one was easy to fix: I just had to change my PATH to include the new directory.
7. The next attempt was also unsuccessful; I had authorization problems.   Rather than keep stumbling, I turned to “off-the-shelf” solutions to update the proxy setting.
8. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools in the Android Market to change the proxy settings.  Once I downloaded one of them, I changed my browser’s proxy settings and retried the test that comes within Orbot.  The results of that test are found in the image above.

I’m not done with my tests.  But I am encouraged that I can now encapsulate everything from within a Tor tunnel.  More to follow…
-Roo

This week was quite surreal.  I’ve spent almost thirty-five years working with computers.  [Note: That includes a few years as a teenager.]  I’ve built computers from scratch.  I’ve held practically every job you can imagine in the software industry.  But I have never been officially certified in anything.  So I’ve been confronted with one of my own personal boogeymen: I must take a test that I must pass in order to keep my job.  What’s up with that?

I have chaffed at the utter indignity of it all.  And I’ve been more than a little bit apprehensive about the upcoming test.  [Note: I’m taking my test on December 27th.  So I would really appreciate your prayers.]  And I’ve also laughed at the ridiculousness of such tests.  As a senior leader, I recognize the importance of such things.  And as an individual contributor, I recognize the fact that such tests are really poor predictors of performance. But as a man called by God to set an example, I must set any and all of these other considerations aside.  I must prepare as if I were doing this for the Lord – as indeed, I am.  And I must demonstrate my faith with my gentle attitude.   So I am soldiering on.

So after a long week of staring at LCD monitors, I was so glad to get home and just relax. Of course, that didn’t happen.  Things have just kinda stacked up at home.  So I finally got some time to attend to some overdue items.

I finally got my revised taxes submitted to my state’s department of revenue. This is always arduous, frustrating and altogether soul-rending.  But I just needed to set aside a few hours to pull all the pieces together.  Hopefully, the state will understand what I have submitted.  But if they don’t, this will take a whole lot more time to iron out.  But I’ve taken the first few steps in the journey.  So I have a smile on my face.

I also had to assemble all of my ‘dependent’ verification documents for my employer.  BTW, I’ve never had to provide so much data before.  I had to get birth certificates for everyone.  I even had to find my marriage certificate. Unfortunately, the marriage certificate was in a safety deposit box at a bank that I haven’t visited for over twenty year.  Neither Cindy nor I could find the keys for the safety deposit box.  So after paying to have the lock drilled out, we retrieved our marriage certificate.  And we bought a fire box so that we could securely store all of these documents in the house.  As of now, all of the older and newer documents that need to be protected against calamity are now safety tucked away in a hiding place that can survive fires or tornadoes.  With this done, I got all of the ‘dependent’ information bundled together and sent to my employer.

In addition to this, I’ve finally finished all of the retirement consolidations that I’ve been doing over the last few months.  It’s nice to have all of the administration in one place.  And it is good to have my retirement savings properly invested in a diverse number of well-managed funds.  I can’t wait to do my next quarterly review in order to see how well (or poorly) we’ve done with my new plans.  I certainly can’t do any worse than I did when almost everything was vested in (and through) only one corporation.

But these things aren’t what prompted me to write this post.  Yes, all of these things were woefully overdue.  But this morning, I got a chance to ‘geek out’ – just a little.  My classes have focused on information security.  And I have always been an idiot-savant in this area.  I’ve never had any formal training in the subject – even though I was a senior security engineer about twenty-five years ago.  I’ve always learned by doing.  And I have a passing familiarity with the subject.  [Note: If you don’t believe that last statement, just read some of my posts over the years.  You’ll see that I am wholly entranced by security and privacy matters.]

With the purchase of my Android phone, I’ve had to confront a whole lot of privacy issues.  I use my phone to securely connect to my home computers.  To do this, I tunnel VNC through SSH.  I also store some fairly important documents on my phone.  So I use Truecrypt (on my PC) to create and store a secure backup of a small number of important files.

But I’ve always had to encrypt the data myself.  Or I’ve had to use other tools on my phone and/or PC.  Basically, all of these tools were file-oriented solutions.  At the same time, there were very few options to securely encrypt streams of data between the phone and other computers.  Yes, I could use https to build a secure tunnel to the site I was interacting with.  But if I wanted to secure all traffic, I was out of luck – until now.

The folks at the Tor project have released an Android tool named Orbot.  I had a little trouble downloading the tool OTA.  But I finally got it by transferring the package to my SD card.  Over the next few days, I’ll be testing this tool to see how it works.  I am pretty darned psyched that this tool is now available – and it’s about time that phones could participate on the Tor network.

-Roo

This week was quite surreal.  I’ve spent almost thirty-five years working with computers.  [Note: That includes a few years as a teenager.]  I’ve built computers from scratch.  I’ve held practically every job you can imagine in the software industry.  But I have never been officially certified in anything.  So I’ve been confronted with one of my own personal boogeymen: I must take a test that I must pass in order to keep my job.  What’s up with that?
I have chaffed at the utter indignity of it all.  And I’ve been more than a little bit apprehensive about the upcoming test.  [Note: I’m taking my test on December 27th.  So I would really appreciate your prayers.]  And I’ve also laughed at the ridiculousness of such tests.  As a senior leader, I recognize the importance of such things.  And as an individual contributor, I recognize the fact that such tests are really poor predictors of performance. But as a man called by God to set an example, I must set any and all of these other considerations aside.  I must prepare as if I were doing this for the Lord – as indeed, I am.  And I must demonstrate my faith with my gentle attitude.   So I am soldiering on.
So after a long week of staring at LCD monitors, I was so glad to get home and just relax. Of course, that didn’t happen.  Things have just kinda stacked up at home.  So I finally got some time to attend to some overdue items.
I finally got my revised taxes submitted to my state’s department of revenue. This is always arduous, frustrating and altogether soul-rending.  But I just needed to set aside a few hours to pull all the pieces together.  Hopefully, the state will understand what I have submitted.  But if they don’t, this will take a whole lot more time to iron out.  But I’ve taken the first few steps in the journey.  So I have a smile on my face.
I also had to assemble all of my ‘dependent’ verification documents for my employer.  BTW, I’ve never had to provide so much data before.  I had to get birth certificates for everyone.  I even had to find my marriage certificate. Unfortunately, the marriage certificate was in a safety deposit box at a bank that I haven’t visited for over twenty year.  Neither Cindy nor I could find the keys for the safety deposit box.  So after paying to have the lock drilled out, we retrieved our marriage certificate.  And we bought a fire box so that we could securely store all of these documents in the house.  As of now, all of the older and newer documents that need to be protected against calamity are now safety tucked away in a hiding place that can survive fires or tornadoes.  With this done, I got all of the ‘dependent’ information bundled together and sent to my employer.
In addition to this, I’ve finally finished all of the retirement consolidations that I’ve been doing over the last few months.  It’s nice to have all of the administration in one place.  And it is good to have my retirement savings properly invested in a diverse number of well-managed funds.  I can’t wait to do my next quarterly review in order to see how well (or poorly) we’ve done with my new plans.  I certainly can’t do any worse than I did when almost everything was vested in (and through) only one corporation.
But these things aren’t what prompted me to write this post.  Yes, all of these things were woefully overdue.  But this morning, I got a chance to ‘geek out’ – just a little.  My classes have focused on information security.  And I have always been an idiot-savant in this area.  I’ve never had any formal training in the subject – even though I was a senior security engineer about twenty-five years ago.  I’ve always learned by doing.  And I have a passing familiarity with the subject.  [Note: If you don’t believe that last statement, just read some of my posts over the years.  You’ll see that I am wholly entranced by security and privacy matters.]
With the purchase of my Android phone, I’ve had to confront a whole lot of privacy issues.  I use my phone to securely connect to my home computers.  To do this, I tunnel VNC through SSH.  I also store some fairly important documents on my phone.  So I use Truecrypt (on my PC) to create and store a secure backup of a small number of important files.
But I’ve always had to encrypt the data myself.  Or I’ve had to use other tools on my phone and/or PC.  Basically, all of these tools were file-oriented solutions.  At the same time, there were very few options to securely encrypt streams of data between the phone and other computers.  Yes, I could use https to build a secure tunnel to the site I was interacting with.  But if I wanted to secure all traffic, I was out of luck – until now.
The folks at the Tor project have released an Android tool named Orbot.  I had a little trouble downloading the tool OTA.  But I finally got it by transferring the package to my SD card.  Over the next few days, I’ll be testing this tool to see how it works.  I am pretty darned psyched that this tool is now available – and it’s about time that phones could participate on the Tor network.

-Roo