New idea on voting for Matt for torch bearer....

I give all credit on this idea to Electronic Vagrant.
He proposed using Tor (download page) to vote for Matt to be torch bearer. Now, yes, this takes a bit of effort. But, if you were thinking about using Tor to do some simple anonymous browsing, then download it anyway and vote for Matt.
Since Matt said it logs IP addresses, this would be a way to get around that.

Two other options:
1) You can download Tor and then use a Firefox extension called Tor button to turn Tor off and on in Firefox. Although more people have viewed this page with IE 6 or 7, I know that many of you use Firefox (and I highly encourage it).
2) You can download a portable (you can run it off a USB key) version of Firefox that is integrated with Tor, called TorPark. Just download, extract and run it. This also means you can put it on your work computer because you don't have to install anything (in case you don't have the permissions).

And don't forget to vote for Matt.

P.S. Remember to use Tor wisely, aka, don't start logging into websites with all of your personal info. I'll be monitoring your traffic on my Tor node.

Tor and other such "anonymous" networks...

Depending on your level of computer/internet savvy (and/or corporate firewall), you may or may not know about (or use) Tor (The Onion Router) or other such "anonymous" networks (I2P is another). It is one way to surf anonymously and usually bypass corporate firewalls. Unfortunately, the basis of the Tor network is other Tor users who host Tor nodes (how many times can I use Tor in one sentence?).

In simple terms, although your internet traffic may be anonymous to the web sites you are visiting, anything you transmit to those sites (logins/passwords/personal info) can be captured by the computers that are making you anonymous.
The reason I highlight this is because recently, a security expert captured lots of usernames and passwords by operating tor nodes. Here's the link to the article from Ars Technica:
Link

The security expert released the info he captured to the public and of course his site was immediately taken down. But, it's back up and here's the link to his recent blog post about the incident:
Link

So, the point is, always be careful of such "anonymous" networks and proxies. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then read at least the first article and learn something.


And as a bonus feature, here are a few tips on how to bypass corporate firewalls (there are many posts on the net about this, but I will summarize a few):
1. Use Google Translator (translate a page from english to english)
2. Use a site like anonymouse.org (not secure)
3. Run your own SSH server (if I know you, you can use mine)