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In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Although he was released shortly afterwards, information about the arrest had been kept quiet until his lawyers were able to get the charges dropped.

Tor is a privacy tool designed to allow users to communicate and browse anonymously on the Internet. It’s endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistle blowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists. Tor provides anonymous web browsing software to hundreds of thousands of users around the world, according to its developers. The largest numbers of users are in the United States, the European Union and China.

The police were investigating a bomb threat posted to an online forum for German police officers.
The police traced one of the objectionable posts on the forum to the ip address for Janssen’s server. Up until his arrest, Alex Janssen’s Tor server carried over 40GB of other random strangers’ Internet traffic each day.

Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shut-down the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a different city, over 500km away.

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The ability to have a believable claim to plausible deniability is something that some of us have been attempting to get for a while by having an open wireless access point at home. 40GB of Internet traffic from perfect strangers may be more significant in the eyes of a court than the possibility of one or two of your neighbors connecting to your wireless network. All of this, for now, remains theoretical. No Tor related case has made it to the courts.. but it’s just a matter of time until one does.

Let’s just hope that court will be clued in about technology, at least a wee bit more than the police in this case… Although the phrase “People that trade freedom for security shall recieve neither.” remains true, the ignorance of the police is worrying.

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KURTZ: I think the argument that I’ve heard Olbermann make in the past about Fox News — it’s not an argument that I embrace — is that, because it poses as a news organization and puts out dangerous misinformation –

BECK: But that’s what he’s doing!

KURTZ: – and is — is a cheerleader for the Bush administration, that it’s misinforming our society. But you know what?

BECK: Howard –

KURTZ: They’re entitled to do that.

BECK: Let me ask you this question. Who makes you weep more for journalism: Keith Olbermann or me? That’s quite a question.

Some more non-Bean stuff from Atkinson: Amazing Jesus, Welcome to Hell, Conservative Conference, Smut, With Friends Like These, Fatal Beatings, a day in the life of the invisible man, Beekeeping (w/ John Cleese), Blackadder explains how the first Wold War started, Blackadder explains the Russian Revolution, Blackadder on a secret mission

Credit: STS-41B, NASA

At about 100 meters from the cargo bay of the space shuttle Challenger, Bruce McCandless II was further out than anyone had ever been before. Guided by a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), astronaut McCandless, pictured above, was floating free in space. McCandless and fellow NASA astronaut Robert Stewart were the first to experience such an “untethered space walk” during Space Shuttle mission 41-B in 1984. The MMU works by shooting jets of nitrogen and has since been used to help deploy and retrieve satellites. With a mass over 140 kilograms, an MMU is heavy on Earth, but, like everything, is weightless when drifting in orbit. The MMU was replaced with the SAFER backpack propulsion unit.

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Quick: You’re walking by a store window and you see a sign that says, “20% off the original price plus an additional 25% off the already reduced sale price.” So, how much is the discount” Consumers often mistakenly think the total discount is 45% off the original price when, in fact, the true discount is 40%. A thought-provoking new study from the October issue of the Journal of Consumer Research explores why consumers frequently think a double discount is a better deal than a single discount of the same total magnitude.

“Retailers frequently use the strategy of double discounts for their regular promotions or to induce customers to open a credit card account with them. Such errors in peoples’ judgments of the net effect of multiple price discounts . . . have implications for a variety of marketing settings including advertising, promotion, pricing, and public policy,” write Haipeng (Allan) Chen (University of Miami) and Akshay R. Rao (University of Minnesota).

Here’s a hint, people: if you cannot know what the price is by simply looking at it, it’s likely that the retailer is trying to pull a fast one on you. Stop doing business with that retailer at once.

Hoist the colors!