"DeadRinger" Portable Network Appliance

As digital technologies continue to evolve and cement their increasingly prominent role in modern human society, they become more and more attractive and facile as vectors of infiltration into our personal lives. The use of electronic devices as implements of covert surveillance is unique in that it is practiced as extensively by criminals as it is by government entities and legitimate corporations; furthermore, at least in highly-developed countries like the United States, the average individual has become largely complacent with regards to the fact that their own possessions are spying upon them. Invasions of privacy are so deeply intertwined with the concept of computers in the modern age that many assume the two to be entirely inseparable. DeadRinger is a project which seeks to upend this resigned attitude by passing control over personal data back into the hands of the user, and it does so by standing between the consumer and the medium through which almost all of their data is extracted: the Internet. Using a set of open-source software and hardware components, the DeadRinger device provides privacy-oriented routing, firewall, DNS server, VPN client, and packet inspection functionality in a simple, portable, and relatively inexpensive package which aims to facilitate user-friendly control over personal digital devices and the information they transmit.