Evil Twin Spoofing – Bye Bye Passwords

Ever hear of this – Evil Twin Spoofing? Sounds quite weird but it’s a very simple way of stealing peoples accounts, passwords and basically their entire identity. So that you’re aware here’s a how it works. An identity Thief makes himself comfortable in an airline lounge or his local Starbucks and gets out his laptop. Instead of just then browsing like everyone else, he sets up his laptop as a wireless access point using some free software. He calls his Access Point something friendly and plausible – perhaps Starbuck-Free-Wifi for instance, they then sit and wait.

It won’t be long before people start connecting to this bogus access point and as long as it’s been set up correctly – IE to relay all connections through the legitimate wifi AP then noone will be any the wiser.

Why Would He do This ?

Hopefully you’re one step ahead of me by now, everyone who is using the bogus access point will be unaware that they’re sending every keystroke, every password and every account name they connect to through this computer. Checking their paypal account, buying something from the internet, online banking – anything vaguely like this and the identity thief has struck gold.

You’re not likely to find out straight away of course, depending on the skill of the online thief and what lengths he intends to go to. But likely when you visit the ATM and find your balance at zero or worse then you might find out. Be very careful when connecting to Public free Wifi anywhere if you do use it, either use a product like . or never check anything with a username or password.

Learn all about the issues across the world about online privacy protection.

The Search For an Australian Proxy

You wouldn’t think it would be that hard but if you have tried searching for an Australian proxy you’ll realise it’s not that easy. The reason I’ve been looking for one is a friend of mine (who is from Australia) is feeling a bit homesick and misses some of his home countries TV stations. He also misses that strange Australian Rules game for some strange reason. There is also some strange desire to ensure that his young children have decent access to the Wiggles, which again I find completely bewildering.
Without Australian Proxies

As with most media sites across the world, they are restricted to access from Australian IP addresses, which of course you’ll have to be in Oz to get one.  That is of course unless you connect via a proxy or VPN based there.

Anyway over the fast few weeks I’ve looked pretty hard for a free Australian proxy which he could use. Normally I don’t look for free proxies – it’s pretty much impossible to find a decent US or UK one that lasts for more than a couple of hours but I wondered if Australian ones would be quite as popular. Well to start off I had a look at the obvious places – Proxies by countries (Australia) and indeed found a few. The usual problem though, if after a while filtering and testing you’d find a decent proxy based in Oz then when you went back to it a few hours later it was so slow to be unusable.

There’s frequently none on this site though, but it’s worth a look if  you just have the need for a one-off use for such a proxy.    Anyway I then started looking at some other sites and again found a similar problem – they were both extremely difficult to find and were extremely slow.

There are a few ‘proxy scraper’ tools which are knocking around the internet but they come up with the same sorts of lists and as far as Australian proxies were concerned the list wasn’t terribly long.   In fact I’d pretty much given up when I saw mention of a very fast Open proxy with an Australian IP address on one of  the many proxy IRC channels that exist.

This was indeed super fast and even seemed to hang around for a bit.  Unfortunately a little bit of research showed that it was obviously a mis configured server at an Australian educational establishment.   It was certainly the fastest free Australian proxy I’d ever seen but again after a few days it had disappeared as presumably the admin realised his mistake.

The Search for an Australian Proxy

Remember virtually all these free proxies are either accidentally left open servers or worse ones that have been hacked into and turned into open relay proxies.   Behind them all there is a bandwidth bill to be settled as if you allow unlimited traffic through a server then those bills will start rising fast.  The legitimate ones are set up on cheap hosting accounts using scripts like Glype financed by advertising – this is fine for just the occasional web browsing but you can’t watch online video using  them either.

The problem is that bandwidth and hosting accounts in Australia are rather expensive, so it’s unlikely you’ll find many proxies to use that are based in  Australia.   Even the proxy and VPN service providers in most cases don’t bother with Australian proxies due to demand and costs.   The demand for Australian stuff will probably grow though with Foxtel broadcasting more sports, Ten Sports with more free stuff and of course the big National channel ABC which people will definitely like access to.

I had a look at using Tor and Foxy Proxy but no luck here either, it was very difficult to find an Australian exit node you could use that all these channels needed.  In the end I had to recommend a company to provide the service there are one or two who do supply servers in Australia.   I never suggest ones who charge you per server as this get’s really expensive and very annoying when you want to access some content in a different country like Hulu, Pandora in the US or even UK channels if your travelling or on holiday.

So here they are one of the best VPN suppliers I have found, very cheap subscription, don’t force you into direct debits, you can subscribe for a month at a time and best of all they give you access to every single one of their servers included in the subscription.   Try them out for a month and see what you think – they’re called . .  They also have specific configurations to allow faster access to their Australian proxy from Europe and the US.  If you do try them also check out the other media sites using their other servers – Hulu, NBC and Pandora using the US proxies are great.  Use the UK Servers for  BBC Iplayer, Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5 for some great content that streams really quickly.  You’ll also find some great sites in other countries like M6 Replay in France and some great Canadian TV Sites using those servers.

So my recommendation for a cheap, fast Australian Proxy is . , the basic subscription also gives you access to hundreds of other servers in different countries, including some fantastic Japanese proxies.

Quick Update – Nov 10th, 2015

Identity Cloaker have also added some Australian Proxies as well although to be honest I haven’t really tested them for speed yet – might be worth checking them. They are similar price but safest to try the 10 day trial first to see if it works ok for you – .

Chinese Internet Censorship

Censorship in the People’s Republic of China is defined by the suppressing or restrictions of publications. Chinese Internet Censorship is implemented and enforced through the People’s Republic of China’s ruling body, the Communist Party of China.

The censorship of the media is to prevent the masses viewing something that the Communist Party of China does not wish then to view. Their control expands over the television, radio, newspapers and the internet.

The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs class the media situation that extends to the internet as being “very serious”. They have ranked the government of China among the worst.

The Communist Party of China censors the internet as a way of control. Censorships help to prevent any reformist or rebellions from taking place, or at least helps to minimise this risk.

In February 2009, Li Dongdong, General Administration of Press and Publication, introduced an array of regulations that would govern journalists. Any one who opposed or contravened these laws would be placed on a list and be unable to continue to work as a member of the press. These were designed, so Li Dongdong announced to “to a halt to fake news”. The editor of China Youth Daily criticised the new regulations and was later dismissed for opposing the censor.

Chinese Internet Censorship – some Stats

According to a study carried out by Harvard University, there are over 18,000 websites which are blocked and banned within the People’s Republic of China.

52 cyber dissidents have been imprisoned for their online communications. This is a worrying fact and one where it is clear to see the extent of which some countries will go to, to ensure total control through censorship.

In recent months, discussions and negotiations have taken place to reduce the number of barred websites; Yahoo, Wikipedia and YouTube to name a few, and restrictions on these have been relaxed, although with limitations.

In has been suggested that by banning and restricting the internet access to mainland China, it helps to ensure that their own e-commerce industry booms.

There is also an issue of self-censorship within the internet debate. As some companies from Hong Kong are opting to regulate themselves by the guidelines decreed from the Communist Part of China. This giving them an opportunity to expand in an unsaturated e-commerce industry, this obviously is advantageous for the company, but it does raise some moral questions as to whether regulating themselves in this manner advocated the Republic of China’s regime and the impact that this is having on the inhabitants ability of freedom of speech.

Learn all about the issues across the world about online privacy protection and why you might feel the need to buy a vpn service in the future too.