Straight out of Ghost in the Shell, the Laughing Man makes his appearance in these security camera shots. [William Riggins] wrote us to let us know about his teams Famicam scripts. After taking a screen shot, faces are detected and counted, ‘anonymized’, and the final image is uploaded to Twitter.

The process is rather simple, and sure beats wearing a bunch of white reflective camouflage. All that’s left is detecting specific faces to make anonymous, and of course uploading the script to every camera in the world. Easy, right?

The Janus team have published a preview of their new Privacy Adapter. It’s a small two port router. You just plug it in-line between your computer/switch and your internet connection. It will then anonymize all of you traffic via the Tor network. You can also use it with OpenVPN. The hardware appears to be a Gumstix computer mounted to a daughtercard with two ethernet ports. It will have a web configuration just like a standard router. This looks like a great plug-n-play privacy device. The only improvement we would suggest is adding auto-detect so a crossover cable isn’t required.

Janus is responsible for JanusVM, a virtual machine designed to protect your privacy with technologies like Tor and OpenVPN.

[via @hdmoore]

It works by using a profile-based scheme that supports various anonymization primitives, making it easy to switch between different network protocols and anonymization methods. New primitives can easily be added, and several pre-defined profiles are bundled into the distro. The profiles are all XML-based.

Essentially, there are two major uses for network traces: anonymizing user traffic in order to research it, and anonymizing in-house usage, thus preventing the leakage of sensitive information. It’s a rather rigid scheme, but using profiles for this was a stroke of genius that made it a lot easier, more flexible, and as a result, more useful and powerful.

[via TaoSecurity]
[photo: mlpoulter]

The idea is remarkably simple: [citizenFinerran]‘s suit is made of a jumpsuit fashioned from fiberglass screening with several blank ID cards halved and glued to the suit. The cards are not glued on firmly, but hang in a way that allows them to move as the wearer walks. The motion of the cards creates a visual effect that appears as pixelation on surveillance footage. Though the designer referenced and “imitated” several different methods of creating the pixelated appearance, all of those methods were actually implemented via software on the camera, not by an external hardware solution.

The closest thing to a working invisibility cloak in current development is the work of a team of students and professors at the University of Tokyo. It uses a a coat made of retro-reflective materials, a camera behind the wearer, and a projector. The digital camera captures the scenery behind the wearer and projects it onto the front, creating a form of camouflage on an opaque surface that resembles true invisibility. It’s not without limitations, though, as the projector would have to move with the person wearing the coat to achieve mobile cover. Even then it would only work on one side of the coat, leaving the other side completely exposed. Not really feasible unless a full body display was created.

If evading cameras is the goal, we feel a far more elegant fix is simply to cover your face with a hood or a gas mask. In addition to keeping your identity secret, a hood actually lines up with the philosophical imperatives behind [citizenFinerran]‘s project very well, and it’s less likely to get you beaten up.

That’s just the free version though. Subscribers to XeroBank have access to an anonymous mail server and VPN service. If you’re a subscriber your bowser session is tunneled through XeroBank’s pool of servers and not the Tor network. We think they should have maintained a separate product name since this distinction isn’t clear outside of the FAQ.