One of the detainees, a 31 year old man, was apprehended in the southern city of Almeria sometime after May 18th, according to the police. There was a server in his apartment in the northern port city of Gijon from which they believe Anonymous attacked the Web sites of the Sony Playstation online gaming store.

They’ve also stated that the same computer was also employed in coordinated hacks against two Spanish banks, BBVA and Bankia, as well the Italian energy company Enel. Government sites in Spain, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Iran, Chile, Colombia and New Zealand were also attacked using this server, the police claim.

This investigation was opened last October after the attack on the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s Web site in protest against Spanish legislation increasing punishments for illegal downloads.

The other two suspects were apprehended in Barcelona and Valencia, respectively. Unfortunately, the police’s statement did not state the timing of these arrests clearly nor did it mention whether any of the three arrested were still being detained. They were, however, expected to be charged with forming an illegal association to attack public and corporate web sites. The charged group members could face up to three years in prison if found guilty.

It is clear that Anonymous has not been the sole perpetrator of the attacks against Sony. About a dozen of Sony’s web sites and services around the world have been hacked and, as the public is well aware, the largest breach caused the PSN Network to be completely shut down for close to a month and compromised the sensitive information of countless users. While Anonymous and other “hactivist” groups have cheerfully advertised their responsibility for some of the attacks, no one has come forward to claim the PSN attack that cost Sony so much downtime. LulzSec has even been quiet on that score and they have not been shy about proclaiming to the world whenever they’ve successfully caught a corporation with its proverbial pants down.

Sony has estimated that the combined attacks will cost it about $173 million in damages, including legal costs, lower sales and free offers to lure back customers and information technology spending. Mami Imada, a spokeswoman for Sony in Tokyo, told the press that she had no information regarding the arrests made in Spain and declined further comment on behalf of the company.

The attacks by Anonymous members were accomplished by making use of a computer program called LOIC to crash Web sites by flooding them with “denial-of-service” attacks, according to police. They know this because, since October, they’ve been analyzing more than two million lines of chat logs and Web pages used by the group. This also allowed them to identify the leadership in Spain that had the capacity to “make decisions and direct attacks.”

Among recent attacks, “hactivists” also brought down the site of the Spanish National Electoral Commission last month, right before regional and municipal elections. It was that attack, on May 18th, that proved to be a fatal step for the 31 year old team member as it led to the arrest in Almeria.

It’s clear that this year might very well end up the year of the hackers. It leads those of us who use computers regularly, and that would be the great majority of us, to wonder what’s really going on and how safe our data is in the cloud. Even data stored by respected companies like Sony or banks does not seem to be safe in these times.

How do you react when a site that you are a user of gets hacked?

Only a handful of additional information are known about the service at this time. It is expected to cost about $5 per month which is a more than acceptable price considering the bandwidth requirements to run such a networking service. They state that they do not log traffic data of any kind which would make it impossible to identify the connections made by a user of the service in case of a server seizure.

It is very likely that the new service will come under heavy traffic the minute it becomes public. Similar services such as Relakks were not able to cope with the massive signups after they have gone public.

Interested users can enter their email address to be informed when the anonymous virtual private networking service goes public.

This means that the old ‘If they block port 6881 I simply use another one” game does not work anymore and even encrypting your bittorrent traffic will not have a positive effect on the amount of connections allowed. This means that your only choice in this matter is to reduce the number of open connections at any given time to a value that lies below Sandvine’s limit.

I think we all agree that this is not the most user friendly behavior considering that it effects all Bittorrent users not only those that download the latest movies, music and games.

There are however a few possibilities that I would like to outline to avoid Sandvine and use Bittorrent as usual.

1. Switch to another ISP

This is not easy. I hate switching Internet Service Providers because it could mean that I would have to be without Internet for some time. It could also mean that I would have to pay more or get less for the same amount of money. I would for instance only go back to ISDN if I would have no other choice.

You should definitely search for the ISP name plus a set of keywords such as Bittorrent, traffic shaping, port blocking to make sure that the new ISP is not using Sandvine or similar applications as well.

2. Use Relakks

VPN or SSH connections should work but do cost a few dollars a month. The good thing about those services is that you are not only able to avoid traffic shaping like that of Sandvine or other applications but remain completely anonymous in most cases.

I can only speak forRelakks which is a Swedish VPN solution that costs about 5 Euro (6 Dollars) a month. Your IP is not visible to the connected computers, only the IP of Relakks is shown to them which is great if you want to remain anonymous (to them).

This is probably the better way than to switch to another ISP immediately. I would suggest to try it out for a month and see if the speed that you get is sufficient and that it is indeed working as intended against Sandvine and other traffic shapers.

Whenever you try to access a website you type its url into the address bar. The url is then send to the DNS server who looks up the IP for that website and sends it back to your browser to be able to make the connection to the website. To censor one would simply return no IP or a different IP that redirects to another website. (something like, no no, this is no website that you should visit, bla bla)

This means that the website that you want to access exists of course but the information on the dns server was changed to prevent access. There are two options that let you access the website. The first would be to simply enter the IP address of the website that you want to visit instead of the url. You can use scripts that are freely available on the internet to lookup the IP of an url.

This method is only working if there is only one url that is using that IP. You are out of luck if many websites are hosted on the same server. The second method which is reliable and working for all occasions helps us in this case.

If you change the DNS server that your computer is using to lookup the IP you will receive the correct result. Let us say that you life in China and that China banned access to Wikipedia. Instead of using a Chinese DNS server you use one from the United States which has the information that you need to access Wikipedia.

OpenDNS, a free service, would be one alternative as would be the following list which I have taken from freerk.com

• dns2.de.net – 194.246.96.49 (Frankfurt, Germany)
• ns1.de.eu.orsn.net – 217.146.139.5 (Hildesheim, Germany)
• resolver.netteam.de – 193.155.207.61 (Alfter-Impekoven, Germany)
• sunic.sunet.se – 192.36.125.2 (Stockholm, Sweden)
• master.ns.dns.be – 193.109.126.140 (Leuven, Belgium)
• ns1.lu.eu.orsn.net – 195.206.104.98 (Belvaux, Luxembourg)
• merapi.switch.ch – 130.59.211.10 (Zurich, Switzerland)
• prades.cesca.es – 192.94.163.152 (Barcelona, Spain)
• michael.vatican.va – 212.77.0.2 (Vatican City, Italy)
• dns.inria.fr – 193.51.208.13 (Nice, France)
• ns0.ja.net – 128.86.1.20 (London, UK)
• nic.aix.gr – 195.130.89.210 (Athens, Greece)
• ns.ati.tn – 193.95.66.10 (Tunis, Tunisia)
• ns1.relcom.ru – 193.125.152.3 (Moscow, Russia)
• trantor.umd.edu – 128.8.10.14 (College Park, MD, USA)
• ns1.berkeley.edu – 128.32.136.9 (Berkeley, CA, USA)
• merle.cira.ca – 64.26.149.98 (Ottawa, Canada)
• ns2.dns.br – 200.19.119.99 (Sao Paulo, Brasil)
• ns2.gisc.cl – 200.10.237.14 (Santiago, Chile)
• ns.uvg.edu.gt – 168.234.68.2 (Guatemala, Guatemala)
• ns1.retina.ar – 200.10.202.3 (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• ns.unam.mx – 132.248.253.1 (Mexico City, Mexico)
• ns.wide.ad.jp – 203.178.136.63 (Osaka, Japan)
• ns.twnic.net – 192.83.166.11 (Taipei, Taiwan)
• ns3.dns.net.nz – 203.97.8.250 (Wellington, New Zealand)
• box2.aunic.net – 203.202.150.20 (Melbourne, Australia)

Changing the DNS Server is a matter of minutes. It depends on the operating system that you are using. In Windows XP you open the control panel and click on network connections. You right-click your connection and select Properties from the context menu.

Select the Internet Protocol (TCP / IP) and click on Properties in that menu. Click on use the following DNS server addresses and enter a preferred and alternate DNS server into the fields. Make sure you enter the IPs. Apply and close the menu and restart your computer. Once that is done you are using the new DNS server which should bypass the censorship.

Looking up the IP reveals 83.233.243.50 which is not a IP that my provider is assigning to me normally. A Whois Lookup revealed a Swedish IP address owned by Labs2, the company that is hosting the website and providing the backbone of the Relakks network. This means that no one is currently able to identify me through my real IP because it is not revealed when I’am connecting to their service.

My download speed is almost maxing out like usual. You might remember that I had really lousy download and upload speeds. Those are almost my normal speeds that my connection is capable of: I normally have 1.8 MBps and with Relakks enabled I average 1.4 MBps. So normal download speed is great, what about P2P connections like torrent downloads ?

The connection seemed normal. It is rather problematic to tell for sure but the speeds looked good after a while which is the usual behavior with p2p downloads. All legal of course, hehe.

I can only say that this is becoming a great service, suggest you give it a shot.

Many schools and universities already banned the Meebo website from their networks and it was almost impossible to access Meebo from within the network. The Meebo team created a application called Meebo repeater which acts as a proxy and makes it possible again to use Meebo from within the network. The only catch is that it has to be running on a computer all the time, they suggest you run it from your computer at home which would mean you should pay a flat fee for the internet, otherwise this would not be practical.

All you have to do is download the Meebo repeater from the Meebo website, unpack it and run it. The Meebo repeater will automatically configure the service and tell you the internet address that you will have to use to connect to Meebo. You might have to configure your firewall to allow Meebo repeater access to the net.

Meebo repeater is open source and able to use SSL and standard connections to the Meebo network. If you can’t live without Meebo use th Meebo repeater, works great.

Setting up the service was pretty easy as well on my windows xp system. I only had to create a new VPN connection entering the details they provided on their website and was free to connect to their system with the username and password I entered when I registered my account with them. My first try was to check on the IP address that I was surfing with and it differed from the usual ones I was using. A quick ip look up revealed that the IP belonged to Arabic Computer System Co. which seems kinda strange to me.

I had no means to investigate this further because the service is currently really slow. They announced at their website that more users than expected signed up for the service and that everything is slower than expected. They are trying to fix the matter. Will keep you updated on this.

Talking about anonymity. Someone pointed out that the service does not mean true anonymity and I can only agree to that. Relakks does know what you are doing which means every law enforcement agency with a search warrant will still be able to retrieve your ip and actions and trace it back to you. I don´t think that this is a big problem at the moment unless you are the kind of person who is committing heavy crimes on the internet.

“Relakks provides services to help individuals to assure the security and integrity of their information. Relakks’ responsibility stems from the strong Swedish tradition of protecting the integrity of private life and all forms of communication between individuals. “

Basically Relakks is a service that lets you surf the web anonymously using everything that you use normally including web surfing, p2p networks, usenet, ftp downloads, irc and everything else that you can think of. How is this achieved ?

“The Service consists of an encrypted VPN tunnel between your computer and RELAKKS. The IP-number you receive from your existing ISP is only used to connect your computer to RELAKKS, from there on RELAKKS substitute your existing IP-number with a new IP-number from RELAKKS. This gives you a number of advantages::

• Your existing ISP will not be able to intercept and track your applications or communication
• Your existing ISP can not limit what you can do nor limit what information you can access
• Other organizations or individuals can’t intercept or track your applications or communication.�?

The creators guarantee the same speeds that your connections allows without slowdowns. You might want to take a look at the following topics that are answered on the Relakks website: Security, Question & Answers, Legal.

The service is not free but costs 5$ a month which is not a huge sum compared to the advantages and security that you gain by using the service. A yearly subscription costs 50$.

If I get enough response I might give the service a try and write about it later on. Let me know.