kaos.theory’s Anonym.OS was probably the most widely covered project to come out of this year’s Shmoocon. This was spurred by Wired’s article which was picked up by Slashdot, Ars, and others. Anonym.OS is a live CD based on OpenBSD 3.8 that provides anonymous internet access and aims to be usable by anyone. On the network it appears as a Windows machine to hide among the majority of internet users. The CD does several things to protect the user, starting with secure operating system. The main component is Tor, which we’ve covered before, All traffic is sent through Tor and since the disk uses local DNS look-up you don’t have to worry about DNS requests leaking. I really like this project because kaos.theory has done all of the dirty work like setting up really strict packet filter rules and forcing everything through Tor. Of course, I would have liked it even if it was just an OpenBSD live CD that used Fluxbox. The only two apps it has now are Firefox and GAIM. They are taking suggestions for what to add in the future and will probably be adding cryptographic filesystem support so that users can save safely. If they added Gimp and a hard drive install script I would be using this at every con I attended.

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