Author: travisalber

Instructional technology major at the University of Michigan - Dearborn. Avid gamer and computer entusiast. Fan of Detroit Tigers baseball and anime.

Internet anonymity and you

Many of us have been told ‘be safe on the internet, don’t let anyone know who you are’, but how many of us actually know how to do that? Sure don’t give away your full name or address to people online, but what about the things you don’t have control over like your data uploads and downloads. How do you protect that? Thats where TOR comes in. 

TOR stands for ‘The Onion Router’ and what it does is bounce your data between randomly selected predetermined nodes so that data can never be tracked directly back to you. When the data is bounced each node can only see the previous node the data came from and the next node the data is going to so no node knows the complete path the data took.

But why is it important to hide your digital footprint? With TOR individuals can access news sites, chat rooms, or other websites that are blocked by their internet service provider. Journalists can use it to safely connect to whistleblowers when other methods of contact would be to risky. On TOR’s own website they even claim that certain branches of the U.S. Navy uses TOR for open source intelligence gathering.

So next time you need to hide your personal data check out TOR for a secure connection.

Burnie Burn’s vlog comes to a close

This week something that doesnt happen often came to pass, a Rooster Teeth show ended. Burnie’s vlog which ran for just under a year aired its final episode on Rooster Teeth’s website.

If you are at all familiar with Rooster Teeth you will know that Burnie Burns founded the company in the early 2000’s to produce the web based cult classic show Red vs Blue. Something that Rooster Teeth is not known for is ending shows, heck Red vs Blue is in its fifteenth season. Sure some shows faded after not coming back from break, looking at you sportsball, but a FINAL episode is a rarity.

Burnie’s vlog would update RT fans on what projects were going on behind the scenes as well as entertain with events like ‘cartooning a Tesla’ or ‘Ellie goes to sniper school’. For many it was nice to see Burnie outside of just the weekly podcast and the vlog will be sorely missed. I see no better way to wrap the vlog than how Burnie did so himself…