Free XeroBank for blogging / twitter / journalists

We will be offering free XeroBank accounts *very* shortly for the purpose of social communication and anti-censorship. Suggestions wanted. Tell your friends. Stay tuned.

 

Free speech for free!?

Will it be the complete multi-hop XeroBank VPN service or some limited version?

 

that's great

 

In theory, it sounds good, but as a paying customer... I fear it will further degrade my bandwidth and uptime. And, as we know, it's all about me.

 

Actually, it will increase your anonymity through larger crowding sets. As for performance, it will be high-speed of course, this isn't Tor.

 

I appreciate crowding and multiplexing, but in the end, they're moot issues.

As a Panama-based company, XeroBank isn't beholden to any foreign governments. You've yet to "turn over" anyone because of a subpoena, so why even worry about all the other technical issues that support anonymity? Statelessness trumps all that...

 

Great question! Crowding and multiplexing makes a big difference:

Imagine the corporation was still in Panama, but instead we ran a network that didn't have crowding or multiplexing. That is only a jursidictional protection from external information requests. So then you ask who would still have access to your info and trace it back to you?

Domestic police and communications companies, state surveillance, private and state intelligence orgs, corporate owned internet exchanges and landing stations, telcos and more could still easily monitor and correlate the traffic back to you.

Simply putting information requests out of reach is only one level of defense against trivial adversaries, and isn't anonymity or privacy at all. If you can't forcibly exercise anonymity, regardless of information requests being successful, then you don't have anonymity. Privacy is an external org not being able to discover the content of your traffic because it is encrypted. Anonymity is a when external org can see the traffic flows (encrypted or otherwise), but cannot discover the context [still not being able to correlate the traffic back to you when using tracing techniques (thanks to crowding and multiplexing)].

Pro-tip: If you can look under the hood of a network and discover where the traffic is coming from and going to, then it isn't anonymity.

 

This sounds great! I look forward to this with great anticipation

 

As an update, there was a small delay as we were researching some different technologies for this. Because there is unlimited demand for free anonymity, and limited resources, we have to limit the amount of seats available at any one time to make sure all users get a high quality of service and responsive connection. Initially we figured we could offer a few hundred seats at a time to a few thousand live users. After careful design and testing of some new technology, we have increased the resource efficiency by 1000%. So ten times as many users as before will be able to use the service at any one time, and that is scalable. We should have a closed alpha ready within a week of design documents being completed.

 

No disrespect, but I hate when you do this Steve. Ive been on xB for a few months, and that's all well and grand, but when you pop up with a thread about a new release, that then isn't even released (see new deanonymiser threads for months before Aug 1 - and I still don't know that page even changed.)

To add insult to injury it seems more time is spent over here than back at xB's own forums and support queue, based on the posts I read.

One more thing that makes it worse, is I have to come here to find out the latest info about xB, because the xB site has so little and such poor documentation. Yesterday I got the popup that a new version of xB VPN was available, yet there is basically no information at xB about it, I couldn't even find the most basic info at xB, which is frustrating.

I know you guys are constantly working to make services better and be bleeding edge, but it seems like everything takes a backseat to marketing at xB. I'd personally rather have leading edge with more time dedicated to users and docs rather than bleeding edge and the hit or missness of xB docs and support.

This is not intended to be the start of a thread for those that consistently like to come and point fingers at xB, it is just this paying customers $.02 when he sees a new thread like this...

 

CaixFang,

Join the beta club on the forum if you want to know about new releases ahead of time. I debated posting this info on the xb forum, but for those already there, they have xb accounts and are not the same market for freebie-news accounts we are designing. The new xB VPN that was released was discussed on the forum approximately 4 days ago, 24 hours before you got your first popup, and 2 weeks prior for the rc19 core. As for support, we have live chat going up as soon as we finish the support scripts. Enjoy.

ST

 

I wasnt saying that releases wernt mentioned there, only here, I was just saying it seems like there is a lack of information overall available at xB, and generally more info is availble here. Maybe that's a traffic thing, but then again I thought based on your Aug 30th post that you had decided to stop posting so much here and redirect it to xB....

I'm not trying to come off like an ass, I like the service, or I wouldn't be paying for it, especially with as many times as I have directly questioned different aspects of xB. It just *feels* like more attention is paid to getting the word out about new stuff, and we never get fully documented stuff unless we pry, or have specific setup questions.

Again, that is just my personal view...let the thread continue on topic.

 

Ah, I see what you mean. The reason you'll still find some posts here, is that we are designing a new content management system for XeroBank. It is being designed to integrate the forum, blog, knowledgebase, and support documents. It's kind of a huge task, so you will see support threads popup on the forum, you will see sporadic blog posts, and more across different areas. The CMS is where wiki docs and support stuff is going to go, and users will supposedly be able to submit articles and patches and info there. Wilders is just considered one extension for media, just like some of the articles we are planning on writing for the BlackOpsSecurity forum. Most of the stuff is still on the xB forum though. Stay tuned on the blog. We've scheduled 3 months worth of weekly articles already.

 

Hi Steve, What is the BlackOpsSecurity forum? not even a Google search helped me. Thanks!

 

It's a little something I found out about.

 

Interesting. Thanks, Steve.

 

This project sounds interesting. Keep up the good work.

 

Nice one.

I esp. like the anti-Computer Forensics information.

 

Any update on the status of this or any other new XeroBank services?

 

Yes! We finished writing the proxy system and API and protocols on the server. The service and server is complete. We are now working on the client, it uses authenticated SOCKS over SSL. We expect a working beta any moment.

 

That's great news. I'm intrigued by this free system and xerobank in general. I've wanted to use Xerobank but can't really justify spending more on this service than the total cost of my internet access.

 

Google search result

Maybe you used too many secrets... ah, letters.
Doesn't show on first page with blackopssecurity forum.

Are there any posts earlier than Oct. 05, 2009?

I'm going to go see if I can find the Wiki!

Man you been busy. No posts in awhile says a lot.

Free speech! woohoo!

 

Was just in a voice conf with Kyle and Stefan. We got the client working and fetching tokens. More tests to do and a user-interface to be built for creating accounts. Those of you who are signed up onto the XeroBank beta list on the XB forum will get to try out the system first.

 

The browser works. We have Chromium tunneling to Privoxy to perform multithreaded HTTP/HTTPS, Privoxy tunnels over ProxyChains to perform SOCKS5 with Authentication, which is tunneled over Stunnel to create an SSL connection to the XeroBank server.

This has effectively accomplished multithreaded HTTP over SOCKS5 with Authentication over SSL, something that no standalone linux system has done before. Amazing, efficient, FAST! We tested out the system and got 12 Mbps download and 8 Mbps upload @110ms viewing realtime flash video.

We're now debating whether we make it "ready to go" or require the user to enter in a username / password to begin with.

 

Steve, if I'm understanding correctly, you're offering free Xerobank accounts. I don't fully understand how you can offer this because, as you said, there'll be unlimited demand.

How are you going to keep the hundreds of thousands or millions of hyenas and jackals off your system? No offense to the hyenas and jackals on this forum, of course. I'm certainly interested, but I guess I don't fully understand how you can offer this.