On: Show HN: My new app, Cloak for OSX

[maqr]

I've seen so many of these VPN-for-rent services that this is becoming an obligatory reply. But I don't see anyone saying "ssh" on the comments yet, so:

Here's how to tunnel on OSX via ssh:

    ssh -fnNMD 8080 -S ~/.tmp-ssh-socket you@server.you.own && sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy Airport localhost 8080

Then when you're done:

  ssh -S ~/.tmp-ssh-socket -O exit localhost && sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate Airport off

That will set your ssh server as the system-wide socks proxy.

Granted I don't have the time to wrap a pretty UI around it, but those commands work, and I trust my own servers more than any service.

If anyone does have time to wrap a pretty UI around it... OpenCloak could exist mere hours after the commercial project went into beta :)

[kelnos → maqr]

Except it wouldn't be OpenCloak... it'd be OpenCloakForPeopleWhoHaveShellAccountsOnServersSomewhere, which is much less useful to your average -- but security-conscious -- user.

[semanticist → kelnos]

You could feed it your Amazon authentication details and let it bring up an EC2 instance automatically.

That would make it functionally equivalent to Cloak.

[kelnos → semanticist]

Don't you need to specifically sign up for AWS as well for that?

[urbanjunkie → maqr]

Sidestep is a pretty-ish (OS X only) UI for SSH tunnelling - it can be set to auto-activate whenever it detects you're on an unsecured wifi network - like your local coffee shop.

http://chetansurpur.com/projects/sidestep/