Anti-surveillance tool ProxyHam will never see the light of day

Cybersecurity
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Privacy talk at DEF CON canceled under questionable circumstances

Earlier this month, several news outlets reported on a powerful tool in the fight between those seeking anonymity online, versus those who push for surveillance and taking it away.

The tool, ProxyHam, is the subject of a recently canceled talk at DEF CON 23 and its creator has been seemingly gagged from speaking about anything related to it. Something’s off, as this doesn’t seem like a typical cancellation.

Designed to augment existing privacy tools, ProxyHam is a Raspberry Pi computer with Wi-Fi enabled. There’s three antennas; one is used to connect to a public Wi-Fi network, and the other two are used to transmit Wi-Fi signals over a 900 MHz frequency.

By using a 900 MHz radio, ProxyHam can connect to a Wi-Fi network up to two miles away, and blend-in with traffic on that spectrum. So if the person using it were to be tracked via IP address to a physical location, all anyone would find at that location is the ProxyHam box.

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Sounds like someone got ahold of them. Let’s make a clone! Also let’s launch maidsafe before this happens to the safe network.

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Caudill plans to showcase the ProxyHam next month during the DefCon hacker conference which would be held in Las Vegas. During the conference he will teach the attendees to build the device thus he plans to release the hardware specs, the source code along with the blueprint of the device. All the instructions will be displayed on his website and ProxyHam’s Github page upon the launch of the device.

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It seems likely any decent radio hacker could design this from scratch so I don’t think derailing this project will kill this technology. Certainly not for criminals and terrorists, but also for devs outside the US.

FYI One of my neighbours used to have a commercial gadget that let him use the WiFi from a local pub half a mile away.

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There’s no need to worry about this for maidsafe because the code is available online to anyone who wants it. Even if the code was forced down from github, each developer/non-developer who cloned the code using git has a copy. If your extra worried and want a copy for yourself, all you need to do is run this command:

git clone https://github.com/maidsafe/maidsafe_vault

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best to also clone

git clone GitHub - maidsafe-archive/crust: Reliable p2p network connections in Rust with NAT traversal. One of the most needed libraries for any server-less / decentralised projects
git clone GitHub - maidsafe/sn_routing: Routing - specialised storage DHT
git clone https://github.com/maidsafe/maidsafe_client
git clone GitHub - maidsafe-archive/maidsafe_types: types for maidsafe clients and vaults (simple with only invariant checks) *
git clone https://github.com/maidsafe/maidsafe_vault

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and

git clone GitHub - maidsafe-archive/safe_nfs

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I’ve download all maidsafe files and have them on Outlook Onedrive, Google drive, Box.com, Amazon drive, Mega.co.nz and even got them on a USB drive. Maybe I should also burn them to a CD.

It would be fun if a ProxyHam wifi was developed attached to a drone. Set to fly to a different location every hour. LOL
:stuck_out_tongue:

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EDIT again … made a new topic for the git update script see here.

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The genie is already out of the bottle. I’ve seen a couple of articles like the one below stating it’s pretty easy to assemble a Proxyham. There’s also some debate on the legality of it all. Some say no issue b/c it’s on the public 900mhz band even with encryption. Not sure how using wifi from Starbucks will jive but I imagine there will be ways to incentivize folks to share their bandwidth for an anonymous, free-speech and non-spying network.

I would be great if the device can receive wifi from multiple sources at once. And I’m sure there must be a way of allocating one’s wifi for the common good. Donations of 2-5% wifi from multiple sources could have a significant impact on network usage I imagine.

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As expected, the loss of ProxyHam was not significant, and so I think unlikely to have been due to hidden hands:

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