Ominous Bug found in TOR/Privoxy default setup
Steve
smorrey at gmail.com
Sun Aug 14 09:45:12 MDT 2005
Hello all, this may be a feature but I find it a little unnerving at best.
For a little fun I decided to finally emerge Tor and Privoxy on my
gentoo box (for the reasn why please see gentoo.org, there's just
something fun about doing forbidden stuff:)
Anyways, everything works pretty good except that whenever I'm viewing a
page reffering to Microsoft, it appears that the word MicroSuck is being
inserted into it's place.
At first I didn't think much about it, since I do spend quite a good
deal of my time at slashdot, however I about jumped out of my skin when
I saw a new york times article reffering to M$ as MicroSuck, which is
what first really brought it to my attention. Anyways I bypassed the
proxy just to verify and yep you guessed it, everything returned to normal.
I'm not seeing anything about this "feature/bug/whatever", in bugzilla
or anything, and none of the docs I have read seem to say anything about it.
So I'm curious to know if anyone else could verify this behavior?
If it's reproducible at least I know I wasn't compromised, but then that
begs the question, which one of these programs is causing it, my money
would be on Privoxy, just because the program is intended to search and
replace stuff coming in from the web, but if thats the case it makes me
question what else may be getting replaced on my ultra secure box.
I really hate censorship in all it's forms, and honestly to me this
presents as a form of censorship.
So in short the way I look at it, this is either something particular to
my ebuild (which could be easily disproven by someone else installing
and verifying the behavior on a non-gentoo box)
Or it's a matter of my box having been compromised (which could be
disproven by anyone installing Tor and Privoxy under any distro)
Or it's a feature of the program, an easter egg of sorts and I'm just a
little slow on the uptake...
Anyone?
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