Mofo Linux tears down virtual walls

Crossing Frontiers

Article from Issue 190/2016
Author(s):

Mofo Linux enables secure digital communications, even in places where it is politically or ideologically unwelcome.

Mofo Linux claims to help facilitate global freedom of information. It comes with the tools needed to work around politically motivated firewalls in countries such as China, Iran, Turkey, Thailand, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries with repressive regimes. The toolset includes various VPN flavors and other tools such as I2P, Cjdns, and Lantern along with Tor, Tor Browser, and Tor Messenger. The system also offers Arab and Chinese localization in addition to English.

Mofo Linux [1] was forked from Porteus, the portable distribution based on Slax and thus ultimately on Slackware, in 2011. Meanwhile, the system has matured to a fully fledged distribution and changed its underpinnings to Ubuntu 15.10. The live image with installer is available for downloading from SourceForge [2] and weighs in at about 1.6GB. You can burn the image onto an optical disk or transfer it to a USB stick using Universal Netboot Installer (Unetbootin) and the dd console tool. Alternatively, you can try it out in live mode with virtual machines like VirtualBox. The project took over the installer virtually unchanged from Ubuntu. It offers to set up Logical Volume Manager (LVM) as well as to encrypt the entire system or just the home directory.

Tor or I2P

Mofo Linux uses the well-known Unity 7 Desktop interface (Figure 1); however, there are some fairly obscure icons on the left side of the screen. This is where the project locates applications that serve the specific purpose of the distribution. At the top, below the mandatory search box, is the Tor Browser [3]. It directs outgoing requests by the browser across multiple servers of the Tor anonymization network to conceal the identity of the user.

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