activism software
some guy posted about some interesting software for activists. posting it here so i don’t forget about it
1)Mailman hacked to work encrypted mailist lists.
I wrote a patch for mailman to work with encrypted mailing lists.
I’ve seen a number of attempts at this but all use the model of creating a key pair for the list and having lists members encrypt emails to the list and the server decrypts and recrypts them to each list member. The problem with this is that as a list user you have to trust you the sys-admin of the box hosting your list and the more lists a box hosts the bigger the target the box becomes as a tar get for intrusion, both legal and technical.
The patch makes it so when a list is created it can be defined as encrypted mailing list, and then the list’s administrator creates the PGP key pair and distrubutes both the public AND private keys off list to all the list member. An encrypted list can be configured to to accept or reject unincoming mails that are unen crypted and add rejection and reminder messages can be set through the mailman w eb UI. Also list members can configure if they want to receive the PGP messages with in the body of the message or as an attachment.
Patchs for mailman 2.0.8 and 2.0.9 can be downloaded from shaft.bitmine.net/~joshuae/mm-2.0.8-0.5.5.gz and mm-2.0.9-0.5.5.gz.
2)Linux Network Toolbox
The Linux Network Toolbox is a credit card sized cd that holds a complete set of networking tools and X windows. This is important because during a office occuption you can put this disk in a CD drive and it can start emailing documents on the hard drive to be picked up from an email account later on.
Link: http://lbt.linuxcare.com/index.epl
3)Boy in the bubble and Localhost encrypted mail proxy
Boy in the Bubble is an attempted to create a secure install of Windows, by installing Windows on top of VMWare on top of an debian installation with an encrypted file system.
With Network Associates stopping development on PGP and the general quality of plugs-in for mail clients on windows, there needs to be a simpler and standard way to use PGP. The localhost proxy does this by sitting between the client and mail proxy and automatic encrypting and decrypting mail as it comes in by reading commands in the Subject line.