Don't Miss It!!...from Covenant Kids

Don't Miss It!!

This time of year is extraordinarily busy - gift shopping, tree decorating, food cooking, family gathering, and finishing up end of the year projects.  We are inevitably tied to our phones and computers, not to mention the distraction of television, Internet and radio. Our lives can get very loud with the sound of work, school, church, appointments and life in general.  Sometimes things get so loud, in fact, that we miss listening to what is most important. We may miss our child asking for attention or comfort; we may miss our spouse asking for quality time or even out on a date; and we all too often miss the still quiet voice of our Savior, asking us to remember He is the reason for the celebration of the season. In a magazine article I read recently, one adoptive father recognized the busyness that deters his attention and affection from his precious daughter. Therefore, he and his daughter began what they call the daily "One Minute Hug". The father simply sits his daughter on the counter, sets the oven timer for one minute, and holds her for the entire minute.  He blocks out the cares of the world and this tells his daughter that for one full minute she is the most important thing in his life - no distractions. We may think just one minute sounds insignificant, but I wonder how many of us don't set aside any amount of undistracted, uninterrupted time to focus on our child. My challenge is that the one minute, once it becomes a habit, grows into two minutes, then three minutes and so on.  When this man's daughter is grown, this daughter can have these special one-minute memories.  Reading this father's article challenged me - have I had my one minute hug with my girls today? Have I taken the time to block out the world and focus wholehearted on each girl and their preciousness? Have I stopped to thank God for his wonderful gift of these children, and for this new day he has given me?  Taking this a step further, have I allowed God to embrace me in his powerful and strong hug today? We are, after all, his children. What an honor that the God of the universe desires to hold us in his embrace! Please don't be so busy that you miss all the really important things in your life. Stop the busyness, and intentionally slow down enough to bask in the wonder of Jesus and the family he has blessed you with today.

  

"Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth." Psalm 46:10

Don't be a Petraeus...

Thought this article was interesting considering the way some of us perceive our government and its handling of our freedoms. 

How does this fit into your christian worldview? Feel free to comment below.

Don't be a Petraeus: A Tutorial on Anonymous Email Accounts

Contributed By: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Article by  Erik Bauman, Eva Galperin, Kurt Opsahl and Peter Eckersley
As the Senate Judiciary Committee considers reforming the decades-old federal email privacy law, the personal Inboxes and love lives of senior military and intelligence figures may be on that august body's mind.  When the FBI poured through the personal lives of CIA Director David Petraeus, Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelly and General John Allen, citizens across the land began to wonder how the FBI could get that kind of information, both legally and technically.
So, just how do you exchange messages with someone, without leaving discoverable records with your web-mail provider? This is an important practical skill, whether you need to use it to keep your love life private, to talk confidentially with a journalist, or because you're engaged in politics in a country where the authorities use law enforcement and surveillance methods against you.
The current state of anonymous communication tools is not perfect, but there here are some steps that, if followed rigorously, might have protected the Director of the CIA, the Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan, and their friends against such effortless intrusion into their private affairs.
Pseudonymous web-mail with Tor
According to press reports, Broadwell and Petraeus used pseudonymous web-mail accounts to talk to each other. That was a prudent first step, but it was ineffectual once the government examined Google's logs to find the IP address that Broadwell was using to log into her pseudonymous account, and then checked to see what other, non-pseudonymous, accounts had been used from the same IP address. Under current US law, much of this information receives inadequate protection, and could be obtained from a web-mail provider by the FBI without even requiring a warrant.
Because webmail providers like Google choose to keep extremely extensive logs1, protecting your pseudonymous webmail against this kind of de-anonymization attack requires forethought and discipline.
You should use the Tor Browser Bundle when setting up and accessing your web-mail account. You must always use Tor. If you mess up just once and log into the pseudonymous account from your real IP address, chances are that your web-mail provider will keep linkable records about you forever. You will also need to ensure that you do not give your web-mail provider any information that is linked to your real world identity. For instance, if prompted for an email account, do not use another real account during signup; use a throwaway address instead.
Download the Tor Browser Bundle
To use Tor, start by downloading the Tor Browser Bundle by going to Tor Download page: https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en, shown in the screenshot below, and click on the Download button for the  appropriate browser bundle for your operating system. The screenshot below shows the Tor Browser Bundle for Windows.

The Tor Browser Bundle is a zip self-extracting archive. Click "extract" to extract the files from the archive.

To start the Tor Browser in Windows, go to Local Disk-->Program Files-->Tor Browser and double click on "Start Tor Browser," shown in the screenshot below:

When the Tor Browser launches, it will automatically test itself to see if Tor is working correctly. If Tor is correctly anonymizing your traffic, it will display a message saying, "Congratulations. Your browser is configured to use Tor." It will also display the IP address that your traffic appears to be coming from. This is the IP address your web-mail provider will see when you go to set up your web-mail account. 

Set Up A Web-mail Account
Now that you have your Tor Browser up and running, use it to set up a new web-mail account, ideally with a provider that you do not otherwise use. Using a separate web-mail provider will help you to distinguish between your anonymous account and your regular email account. Hushmail allows users to set up new web-mail accounts while using Tor to protect their anonymity, which is why we are using it in this tutorial. Note that Hushmail has a checkered history, but it is the only web-mail service we are aware of that allows the use of Tor in this way--something we'd like to see changed.  Google tries to prevent people from signing up for Gmail accounts pseudonymously, and alternatives like Yahoo! Mail are missing HTTPS protection. Without both HTTPS and Tor at the time of creation and use, your account is not truly anonymous.  As an added precaution, you may want to use public wifi at an Internet cafe or a library whenever you connect.
To set up your Hushmail account, go to https://www.hushmail.com/start, shown in the screenshot below, and click the "Try Hushmail" button, which will allow you to set up a free Hushmail account.

Fill in the form shown in the screenshot below. Remember to choose a strong password. You must also check a box acknowledging that Hushmail will cooperate fully with authorities pursuing evidence via valid legal channels. This means that, given a proper court order, Hushmail may give up metadata about your messages--the IP addresses you've been logging in from (luckily you use Tor every single time), the times you've logged into your web-mail, and the email addresses of the people with whom you've been corresponding. Hushmail may even give up the contents of your messages to law enforcement, and has in the past as we note above, which is why you want to make sure that your messages never contain any information that may give your identity away if you wish to remain anonymous. If you are concerned about law enforcement obtaining the contents of your emails from Hushmail, you should encrypt your email correspondence using OpenPGP.

When you send messages via Hushmail, beware the "Ecrypt" checkbox, shown in the screenshot below. This is not end-to-end encryption like PGP. Hushmail will still have access to the plaintext of your email messages. This means that you are not safe from de-anonymization via the clues you type into your pseudonymous emails.

Using End-to-End Encryption With Your Pseudonymous Email Account
Setting up pseudonymous PGP/GPG in Hushmail is an complicated task that lies outside the scope of this tutorial. You are unlikely to do it safely unless you are quite technically sophisticated, and any mistakes could break the pseudonymity of your account. If you do want to attempt to do this, here are some considerations to bear in mind:

• You will need to make a new key just for your pseudonymous account and the other pseudonymous people you want to talk to will need to do the same
• You will need to figure out a way to exchange public key fingerprints with them. Your Hushmail accounts are probably good enough for this.
• You will need to make sure that all of the software you use to handle the key (intentionally or unintentionally) is always Torified
• If you use PGP normally for non-pseudonymous purposes, you will need to make sure that no PGP software uses or produces evidence of one key in the context of your other identity.

Conclusion
Anonymous online communication is a valuable tool for journalists, whistle-blowers, dissidents, and Directors of the CIA. As you can see, it is still quite hard to do and do well, and few people will have the discipline necessary to ensure that their web-mail provider can never disclose their IP address or inter-account linkages, because the provider will never see the identifying information in the first place.  Technologists all over the world are hard at work, improving the usability of all sorts of anonymous online communications tools, and we look forward to the day when all people who need to exercise their freedom of expression can do so safely, simply, and anonymously.

1. Google keeps logs of IP addresses for 18 months, after which they keep logs of three-quarters of the IP address. Three-quarters of an IP address may be still enough to breach your pseudonymity in the case of an FBI investigation.

Cross-posted from Electronic Frontier Foundation

First post...

Where do we begin?  How about a brief history, a testimonial, of J. Scott A.?  I grew up in South - South Texas (further South than San Antonio) in a home that was not consistently religious until I was about 11 or 12 years old. I walked the aisle at 7 and was baptized but believe I had no True understanding of what it was I was doing.  for the longest time my father was not the spiritual leader of our home and that made for conflicting ideas of what it meant to be a man.  
I was a "good boy" out of fear and ultimately legalism in a southern baptist church during high school but once away from that control went toward my nature.  I was able to stay at Texas A&M for four years while participating in the Corps of Cadets and all that goes with that.  I failed at my initial goal to become a Navy pilot and ultimately left before they could kick me out after a horrid final semester. The summer after leaving A&M I started serving on active duty for two years as an enlisted member of the US Naval Reserves stationed in Pensacola, Fl..  At that time I pursued the flesh and through drunkenness and sexual sin found a woman I married.  I moved back to North Texas because UNT was the only school that would accept me in my current GPA state.  My marriage lasted another two years and ended in divorce. 
I was at my lowest in terms of distance from the Lord I knew of but had no trust in.  It was during this time that the Lord put people in my life that opened my eyes to the one thing I had wanted to discredit.  Faith was the furthest thing from reality to me.  I wanted nothing more than to prove that I was OK in my sin because I didn't have anything that resembled this trust.  the Lord kept pushing at my arguments of validity and purpose of the written Word.  I was invited by Pete Buckwald to attend Denton Bible and hear truth.  He brought me books to substantiate his position, but the thing that really got me was his trust in the Lord that all things worked for His good.  There was faith right in front of me.  I still did not get it though, but instead of wanting to validate my position I wanted it. Things started to change, a couple things changed that I can only attribute to the Lord opening my eyes to who he is.  the first is how he removed weed & alcohol from my life.  It literally was like a switch was turned off.  I poured everything down the drain one day and have not taken a smoke or drink since.  Though the interest in alcohol is there I no longer have the overwhelming desire to go to drink or drugs for escape or comfort.  the other thing he did was give me a desire to know Him.  I wanted to hear the truth again.  I wanted to go to church and hear teaching.  This desire was not overwhelming but it was present where there had been none before.  In this new found life I started my final semester at UNT and had plans to go back home to South Texas to complete my student teaching.  instead the Lord brought a wonderful woman into my life and at the same time gave me opportunity to go to work as a coach and teacher at a small North Texas school (Callisburg).   I had met her in April, dated and eventually asked for the hand of Amanda Perry in December of 1995.  We were married July 20th 1996 and have been growing together ever since.  We were blessed with our first child in August of 2000 when Henry was born 3 months premature.  It was here that the Lord showed me what the gift of Faith really is.  We were able to bring Henry home just after Thanksgiving and have been blessed with two other biological boys and in the last two years a daughter and son through foster care and adoption.  I am blessed to labor with a church staff (The Village Church) that is biblically sound and have done so for almost 4 years now.  This has provided so many unexpected blessings.  I get to spend an extra 500 hours a year with my children that I was losing to a long commute to my previous employer.  there are too many things to list here. We are blessed with so many things that we realize we have taken for granted in the past. We hope this would somehow help bring you closer to understanding and relying on the Lord but ultimately he is the only one who can do that. Praise Him, Praise Him, Praise Him!