ParanoidLinux Escaping From Doctorow Book 'Little Brother'

ParanoidLinux is a fictional operating system designed to obscure the activities of its users. A group of enthusiastic fans of the idea have decided to bring this idea to life.


(Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother)

The essential feature set of ParanoidLinux is described in the novel:

It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
(Read more about ParanoidLinux)

You can find out more at the ParanoidLinux site; here's the plan:

  1. Fork a new branch of Incognito Linux, http://anonymityanywhere.com/incognito/ , which already contains many of the packages we want to include, and can be installed on bootable CD or bootable USB.
  2. Update the fork with the latest versions of each of the included packages.
  3. Call the new distribution "ParanoidLinux 0.1".
  4. Start updating the distribution with the new items on our Wishlist, such as the chaff generator.
Other contributors are already arguing with The Plan, mostly insisting that chaff generation and wifi switching are essentials of any V0.1 release. Excellent.


(Little Brother cover [non-etext version])

Via Frolix_8.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/5/2008)

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