Because of my parents recent sellout merger with a larger company, I had to make sure that my Internet activity went unnoticed for the time that I am still here. I have a server at home already. The rub is that I recently upgraded to the Tomato firmware because of some issues I have with DD-WRT. In my haste to upgrade, I forgot to set up port forwarding to my server and forgot to set up the ssh daemon on my WRT54G. Thankfully, my friend Tesseract has a server at Drexel University that I have an account on. So with a little:

ssh user@remote.host.com -C -D 1080

And configuring my applications to utilize a SOCKS5 proxy server through localhost:1080 and configuring Firefox to tunnel the DNS requests through the ssh connection, we go from:

Unproxified:

To

Proxified:

This, coupled with passwordless ssh login and a brief entry into your .profile / .bash_profile file to set up a command alias, you have a very powerful, secure and easy solution to utilize anywhere you may be using your laptop on an unsecured wifi access point at Panera or the like. Or to simply get around corporate firewalls. One caveat on the latter; your company’s sysadmin may become interested at the sudden increase of encrypted traffic on his/her network and become suspicious as to what exactly you are doing. So happy holidays and safe hacking!