HOWTO create your blog - anonymously
Oct 9th, 2006 by admin
There are many good solutions for browsing the Internet anonymously. Tor is probably the best solution for browsing and publishing anonymously on the Internet today, and can also be used to publish your own blog here at Livelyblog.
But what if you do not want to trust us with your e-mail address? This presents a problem, because you are required to enter a e-mail address when you sign up. This e-mail contains a verification link which you then need to follow in order to activate your blog. This verification is mainly there to stop automatic signups from bots; it also makes this less attractive to spammers who simply want to create yet another spam-blog with dozens of SEO-links to their own site(s).
A very simple solution, if you want to connect anonymously using Tor and do not want to give us your e-mail adress is to use the free Mailinator service. This is a service which makes a new random e-mail addresse just for you upon loading their page. This is a service you can used for e-mail verification when signing up at forums and other services where you think the administrator may be tempted to spam you; the account is alive for a few hours, allows you to get the verification e-mails and click the links in them, and then that e-mail account just dies.
Mailinator is a great tool you can use to signup to Livelyblog without giving us your real e-mail. If you use Tor to connect here and Mailinator for your e-mail verification when signing up then you can be sure we - nor anyone else - will have any idea who you are: You are safe to blow the whistle on your government, employer, foundation etc. without fear.
I thought livelyblog used ssl encryption between the user and the server.
It did for a while. And it will if we find out how to do it securely. WordPress MU is absolutely not made to be served over https. It is possible to change core files to make it login using https, but there are a whole lot of issues which makes https much less secure than it should be. If you login using https and your browser sometimes makes plaintext connections which sends the session cookie then you’re just as unsecure as if you were not using https at all.
The reason https is turned off alltogether right now is that we do not want to give you a false sense of security. Half-secure https gives you the impression that your connection remains encrypted when in fact it’s not, so https won’t be available until or unless we find out how to do it in a way that is really secure.