The Liberty Lamp: Libertarian News & Editorials

Last night was somewhat boring, at least until I came by an interesting "underground" privacy and law enforcement "watch-dog" site by the name of Anonymity Portal. They have a lot of cool docs on privacy and other such topics, but what I found most interesting was the quanity and quality of information related to your civil rights as it pertains to the police questioning/searching you. If you're a liberty activist, or even just an everyday American, it would be wise to check these documents out. You never know when you might get pulled over or otherwise bothered by the "Men in Blue" for no reason!

The Anonymity Guide has just been updated. Check it out at the title URL. An important update and addition to the section relating to Tor has been made. Changes include a minor correction to the existing documentation, plus new information related to Kaos Theory's Anonym.OS OpenBSD based anonymous networking LiveCD. That's all for now, but more is sure to follow.

ACT ON IT.

Ever wanted to screw around with UNIX (specifically BSD) for fun and profit without actually having to set up a box yourself? Wanted to run highly CPU/memory intensive analysis applications for some reason (atmospheric data number crunching, I don't know)? Do you think it would be cool to use a mainframe for anonymity reasons*? Well now you can...

I recommend and use (every so often when I'm bored) ARPA's Super-Dimensional Fortress (since '87!) and Silence is Defeat. Both are great, and have similar hardware and software specs. However, each has its own unique online community, and privides different software and human user landscape. As far as I know, neither of these hosts a Tor onion router server, but hopefully this will change. The more nodes out there the faster, more reliable, and anonymous the network is. If you can, I encourage all readers to set up a server if possible, even if it's low bandwidth and not on 24/7 (though that would be prererable). If I can do it, you can too damnit! :D

Ever wanted just under $100 million? Well too bad! Instead, you and your other fellow Americans are going to have to pony up at least (keyword being "at least") $936 million in order to enable them to "afford you the privelage" of using some new radio frequencies slated for broadband networking use. Where are all these millions of your hard-earned (but of course never received!) tax dollars going? Well, according to the article linked to here, a good 99% of it or so is going to the Department of Homeland (in)Security and various unknown places in the Pentagon so that they can get a free upgrade on all their wireless crap- at the public's expense!

Long story short, this situation is just one more of a long list of reasons why government does not create any wealth, and even goes so far as to rob the productive members of society of theirs. How immature is that? As adults, people are supposed to stop stooping down to the level of ruining everyone else's things just because you don't have something or are having a bad day. This form of childish behavior is known in history circles as the "Peasant Mentality", and is one of the fundamental tenents of socialism/communism. This whole "I don't have it so I don't want anyone else to have it either" attitude has got to go, along with the governmental heirarchy that perpetuates it.

First of all, on behalf of the entire LAN Team, I'd like to wish everyone a happy new year and best wishes in 2006! May this new year be better than the last, and may all our readers have a safe and prosperus 365 days.

Now for something completely different, to paraphrase Monty Python. My latest adventures into the wide world of literature has produced something quite interesting that I'm sure everyone (or at least most people) would find interesting as well. "What is it", you ask? Well, quite simply, the answer is actually another question: Why Government Doesn't Work- by former two-time Presidential nominee, Harry Browne. This book is in some ways similar to Healing Our World, by Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, but has a unique perspective and aim, which makes it signifcantly different. I would recommend reading both, if you're able. And yes, I know I should expand the Book Reviews Section...

You can read a sample chapter of Why Government Doesn't Work by clicking here.

READ ABOUT IT.