Given the shifting state of the law, people seeking an abortion, or any kind of reproductive healthcare that might end with the termination of a pregnancy, may need to pay close attention to their digital privacy and security. We've previously covered how those involved in the abortion access movement can keep themselves and their communities safe. We've also laid out a principled guide for platforms to respect user privacy and rights to bodily autonomy. This post is a guide specifically for anyone seeking an abortion and worried about their digital privacy. There is a lot of crossover with the tips outlined in the previously mentioned guides; many tips bear repeating.
PeeringDB, as the name suggests, was set up to facilitate peering between networks and peering coordinators. In recent years, the vision of PeeringDB has developed to keep up with the speed and diverse manner in which the Internet is growing. The database is no longer just for peering and peering related information. It now includes all types of interconnection data for networks, clouds, services, and enterprise, as well as interconnection facilities that are developing at the edge of the Internet.
We believe in, and rely on the community to grow and improve the PeeringDB database. The volunteers who run the database are passionate about security, privacy, integrity, and validation of the data in the database. Even though PeeringDB is a freely available and public tool, users strictly adhere to the acceptable use policy, which prevents the database being used for commercial purposes and discourages unsolicited communications. This is largely policed by the community and has been very effective since PeeringDB was launched.
The Internet Weather Map™ (IWM) is a free service that maps latency on the Internet. As an Open Community project, it uses data from volunteers all over the world to feed back latency on the Internet into a central database. Then that data is aggregated, and displayed in table and map formats, allowing you to see how the fast sections of the Internet are running. While it practically not possible to map out every segment of the entire Internet, the IWM product traces tens of thousands of segments to give you an informed idea as to it's overall latency.
The Latency Map is the heart of the service, which displays a map of any delays on the Internet, as well as in a table format. While the table displays the slowest segments, the map normally only displays delays (latency over 300ms). The data on this tab will refresh every 60 seconds, so there is no need to re-load the page manually.
Tools allows you get information on your domain name, including an MX Record Lookup, and some additional diagnostics.
This site is dedicated to preserving the history of early computer security digests and mailing lists, specifically those prior to the mid 1990's. This includes the Unix 'Security Mailing List', through to the Zardoz 'Security Digest' to the Core 'Security List', i.e. those preceeding BugTraq. These forums are a valuable insight into the embryonic development of the field of computer security, especially as it relates to the Internet, and the development of the Doctrine of Disclosure. Goes all the way back to the RTM worm in 1988 at the very least.
This is the set of code and utilities for running and managing the tilde.club server.
A crowdsourced mapping project which aims to document the trunk lines underlying the Net, and where privacy violations and surveillance infrastructure can watch it. Has open source, cross-platform software for download that runs traceroutes to various places, correlates the data, and uploads it to the project (anonymously, by default) for analysis.
Daniel J. Berstein's homepage. There are tools and code galore here - check it out!
Cult of the Dead Cow.
Publishing things on the Net for as long as the Net exists.
A website that can extract many different sorts of information pertaining to IP addresses and networks, least of all querying several dozen blacklists to see if an address has been flagged as a spammer's.
A bundle of open source cryptographic software for Microsoft Windows with an installer to make it simple to set up. Includes GnuPG, WinPT and GPA (keyring managers), GPGol (a plugin for Outlook 2003), GPGee (a plugin for the Windows Explorer), and a copy of Claws (an e-mail client that uses GnuPG transparently). Also includes handbooks for newbies with crypto.
A website that answers a single question: is website /foo/ down for everyone on the Net, or is it just you?
A good blog post about using SSH's little-known proxy functionality to tunnel traffic back through your home network to prevent eavesdropping. The best thing is, you don't have to set up a proxy on the other end because SSH does it for you.
A collaborative website which maps wireless access points all across the world using information donated by enterprising wardrivers.
Open source captive portal software for setting up your own wireless hotspot.
The book that started the Creative Commons movement.