http://undergroundmedia.org/introducing-torcasting
Introducing Torcasting The following article is taken from the original Torcasting (to vist site you must be running Tor setup as your browsers proxy!) site with their permission. Introduction With the coming of technologies, or shall I say novel uses of technologies such as what makes Podcasting. . .well. . .Podcasting. There is a need for people to voice dissident opinions and share information or news using this technology without worry of getting on a watch list or even loosing their jobs as at least one example has from voicing a non-popular opinion in thier community. So in order to have a true voice one has to also have the ability to be anonymous. Privacy is a key component of freedom of press and expression. This is where Tor comes in. For those who are not familiar with Tor it is an onion routing project. So to understand what it is one must understand what an Onion Router is. An onion router is a means of creating tunnels amongst a group of servers that encrypt traffic and create multiple layers of security and in turn privacy for those connecting to the network. Hence the name onion being that an onion has multiple layers around it until you get to the core. You can find a great overview of how Tor works on their site: http://tor.eff.org/overview.html How to Torcast? There are many reasons a person or group might wish to use the anonymity offered by Torcasting. A few basic reasons might be: -Located in a country with a repressive government -Views they express are out of the norm -Wishing to be anonymous -Whistle blowers The list could go on and on of why people would need to keep their location or identities from being easily traced. Tor and Torcasting offer this to them with ease using the existing technologies they already have on hand. Namely a computer and Internet connection. By also utilizing peer to peer (p2p) technologies it would make the distribution of their Torcasts even easier and more efficient than ever before. When you use Tor you have the ability to setup hidden services. Which means you can setup a web server to only be made available to other Tor users. This means that the server you are running and the services it offers are anonymous. For our purposes of Torcasting you will want to setup a server to distribute your mp3 files via RSS. Just as you would do with conventional Podcasting. Setting Up Tor Windows Users Depending on what operating system you use would dictate how you would setup Tor. For Windows users you can download the installer from the Tor site: http://tor.eff.org/download.html The you will also want to get a proxy server to utilize the Tor service once you install it. From experience the best one to use is Privoxy. Which you can download from their site: http://www.privoxy.org/ For install directions with screen shots see the Tor documentation: http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc-win32.html Linux/*nix Users For Linux/*nix users you can find binary packages for Debian as well as RPMs depending on your distro. *BSD users can also find ports of Privoxy in their ports trees. Or you may choose to compile from source. You can find the links to the needed packages from the above download links under the Windows section. Starting a Hidden Service In order to distribute the Torcast you will need some sort of web server running. For Windows users the easiest way to get a web service up and running is to install WAMP: http://www.wampserver.com/en/presentation.php This will install Apache web server, PHP5 scripting language, MySQL database server, and administrative tools easily. Allowing you to have a full server environment on your computer in minutes. Linux/*nix users would already (most likely) have access to these things or else install the packages as needed. Overall install and configuration are out of the scope of this article. Once you have your server environment running you need to configure your service to run as a Tor service. For the Tor documentation of configuring a hidden service see: http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc.html#hidden-service Since you will most likely be running your server only for your Torcast publishing. You will most likely want to configure Apache web server as follows. Set the default port from 80 to something like 9999 for the server to run on. Then using your torrc add edit the line to: HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:9999 Then be sure to block port 9999 on your firewall so people will not be able to happen upon the server running on that port from the outside of your network. Publishing Your Torcast Once you have your hidden server up and running and your first Torcast recorded in mp3 format. You will need to publish it to your site. There are numerous ways to publish your Torcast and have it available via an RSS feed. There are many options in terms of doing this so we will cover a few examples of how to do this. You may also choose other means of making the podcast feed and optional companion site. EasyPodcast - Allows you to easily tag, generate the RSS file, and upload your recording via FTP. Being that you are running your own server you can skip the last step of uploading the file via FTP. As far as having a site or blog to go along with your Torcast an easy means of publishing content is WordPress. WordPress is a powerful content management system for having a blog with included support for enclosures needed to make an RSS feed for your Torcast. Listening to Torcasts This is perhaps the easiest part of the whole process. If you are a listener and already have Tor setup and running on your computer as a client. All you need to do is find the proxy settings of your podcatcher (podcast client software) and set the address to localhost and the port to 8118. Then you will be able to not only download the Torcasts from the servers running as hidden services. But also be able to download your usual podcasts, this time using Tor to do so anonymously. Distributing Torcasts via Bittorrent Another way to help in the distribution of your Torcasts is to utilize a Bittorrent tracker to help distribute the files and have others seed them to increase the overall available bandwidth. For this option you might consider using BlogTorret as your tracker. You can also use something like TorrentFlux as a means of seeding from the same server you are tracking from. This will insure there is always one seeder available for your Torcasts. Conclusion With the advent of networks that all for anonymous communications such as Tor, with their ability to run hidden services. It is only natural to use them as means of distributing information that might be considered controversial or provocative. Or just for the reason of protecting ones privacy. Other future uses of this can also be for video distribution using the same technologies as outlined in this article. This will be covered at a later date in another article. You can read more about Torcasting and the technologies used behind it on their website which is only accessable if you are yourself running Tor. You can also listen to the original Torcast with access to it via an RSS feed to use with your podcatcher. Be sure to stop by the Tor site to learn how Tor can help protect your privacy while using IRC, web browsing, IMing, etc. The Original Torcasting Site: http://wxblbr35xnrtutkz.onion/
