Ever want to surf the web anonymously? Forget unreliable and sometimes illegal open proxies that are usually compromised or misconfigured servers. Forget web proxies that spam you with ad frames and pop-ups. Try Tor, an open-source anonymous peer-to-peer network. Using Tor and Firefox is extremely easy. More about Tor in this Wikipedia entry.
I tried the following steps in Arch Linux, but they should apply to any modern operating system. (By the way, Arch Linux is my favorite Linux distribution. I’ll likely write about it at some point.)
To verify if your browser connections are anonymized by Tor, visit TorCheck. You can also visit any of the many sites which show you your IP address. If Tor is working, the IP address shown should be different from yours.
Windows users who need an even simpler method of using Tor should check out the XeroBank (xB) Browser. Read more about it at Wikipedia.
Be warned, don’t use Tor to do anything illegal. Tor has known weaknesses and does not guarantee your anonymity if someone wants to catch you badly enough.
If you’re interested in helping the Tor network grow, consider running a Tor relay.
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Regardless if you have the most sophisticated caching mechanisms in place (like WP Super Cache), the simplest and most effective way of surviving flash traffic from sites like Digg is to redirect the traffic to a mirror, like the free CoralCDN.
I personally think that the Coral Content Distribution Network is one of the most amazing yet underrated web invention in recent years. It’s so effective yet simple to use it’s like magic to end-users. By loading a URL like “http://www.tummblr.com.nyud.net/archivepage/“, that page is fetched and cached on the CoralCDN, which is a peer-to-peer network comprising of servers all over the globe. So Digg can send thousands of users to my CoralCDN mirror and use no more of my host’s resources and bandwidth than if a lone visitor hit my site. Read more about Coral on their homepage.
Without further ado, here is the .htaccess code that will redirect visitors from high traffic sites like Digg to your CoralCDN mirror.
# Heavy Site Redirect to Coral Cache
# Links incoming from heavy sites are redirected to the Coral Cache
# Exception: Coral Cache Proxy Servers
# Exception: Googlebot crawler
#
# CONFIG: Replace “yourdomain.com” with your target domain name.
# CONFIG: Follow the HTTP_REFERER RewriteCond examples to add or remove
# domains to the list of redirected sites.
#
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^Googlebot
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !(^|&)coral-no-serve$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?digg\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?slashdot\.org [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?slashdot\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?fark\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?somethingawful\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?kuro5hin\.org [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?engadget\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?boingboing\.net [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([^/]+\.)?del\.icio\.us
RewriteRule ^(.*)?$ http://www.yourdomain.com.nyud.net/$1 [R,L]
</ifmodule>Credit: Benjamin Yu
Note: Removed “:8080” from “http://yourdomain.com.nyud.net:8080/” since CoralCDN now runs on port 80, the standard HTTP port. Yay! 
Here is a list of BitTorrent trackers I know of that track any torrents, whether you upload the torrent to their site or not, and track for any users whether they are registered on their sites or not. Basically, if you need trackers for a torrent that’s open to the public, use these trackers. In fact, use all of them so that you have super-duper redundancy in case your primary tracker goes down. One of the weaknesses of the BitTorrent protocol is its reliance on centralized trackers. The use of redundant trackers (along with the DHT feature) all but eliminates this weakness. Read on for the list.
Continue reading ‘20+ open and public BitTorrent trackers’
