Setting up a Tor relay

We often watch historic events unfold without being able to participate in them.  The crisis in Iran is different.  Due to a media and partial Internet black out, Iranian protesters are having a difficult time getting their message out.  You — yes YOU — can actively help them, by providing an anonymous proxy service, so they can securely reach web sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, which are instrumental to getting the truth out.  Instructions on how to set up a Squid proxy are available elsewhere (Windows and Mac), so in this space, I will describe how to set up a Tor proxy.  It’s a lot easier than you think.

First, download and install the Vidalia bundle for Windows or Mac from the Tor Project web site.  If you’re on Linux like me, you can grab Debian/Ubuntu packages or the source code by following these instructions.  More detailed installation instructions are available on the Tor Project site for Windows and Mac, but since I use neither, I’ll defer to them.

Once you have it installed, fire it up.  You should see a Control Panel like this:

It will automatically attempt to connect to the Tor network.  As you can see, mine is already connected.  That’s fine if you want to use Tor for your own anonymity, but we want to set up a relay so that others can connect to the internet through us.  We want to be a node on the network.  So click “Setup Relaying” and you’ll be presented with a configuration screen similar to this:

First click “Relay traffic for the Tor network.”  Then choose a nickname by which your node will be known.  As you can see, I chose FreeIran314.  You can optionally enter an email address for contact info.  Leave the Relay Port as 9001 (note: if you use a firewall, you’ll have to allow incoming connections to port 9001).  Then click the next tab, “Bandwidth Limits”:

What you set as your bandwidth limits depends on how fast your Internet connection is.  Mine is 10 Mb/s, or 1.25 MB/s, or 1250 KB/s, so I chose an average bandwidth limit that was about 10% of my total connection limit, in this case 100 KB/s, with an maximum rate of twice that.  That’s a typical way to configure it.  That way, if somebody is sending traffic through my node, they won’t eat up all my bandwidth and slow down my own Internet use.  If you don’t know how fast your Internet connection is, you can check here.  Note, your connection speed is measured in megaBITS, which you have to divide by 8 to get megaBYTES.  Multiply that number by 1000 to get it in KILObytes (as I did above). Then choose a limit that’s 10-20% of that.  Finally, click on the tab that says “Exit Policies”:

The Tor network is designed so that everyone is sent through three nodes, and the last one is called the exit node.  You can choose to be an exit node or not.  If you don’t want to be an exit node (so that your IP address is never revealed to the destination web sites), just unclick all options.  Alternatively, you can choose what kinds of services you will be an exit node for (this is a simple matter of allowing traffic through certain ports).  As you can see, I allowed encrypted and unencrypted connections to web sites.

That’s it!  Click OK and you’re done.  You may have to restart the Vidalia bundle.  You can check to see if everything is working by looking at the Message Log, which is accessed from the Control Panel:

You should look for a few important messages.  I’ve highlighted them above (click the image for a larger version).  First you should see “Opening OR listener on 0.0.0.0:9001″.  Then you should see “Now checking whether ORPort [YourIPaddress]:9001 is reachable”.  Generally that step will fail if you have a firewall and didn’t open the port as per my suggestion above.  Finally you should see “Self-testing indicates your ORPort is reachable from the outside.  Excellent.  Publishing server descriptor.”

If you got that message, congratulations, you are a Tor relay.  The Tor network needs many more of them, so your help is greatly appreciated.

P.S.  The Tor Project site has official instructions on setting up a Tor relay here, but without the illustrations.

Vaccines: framing the debate

George Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at Berkeley who wrote a book titled Don’t Think Like an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, where he explored the success of the Republican Party (at the time) in “framing the debate” during political discourse.  The “estate tax” was rebranded the “death tax,” because estates are what rich people have, but death? That could happen to anyone.  The abortion debate is often framed as anti-choice or pro-life by different sides.  Tax issues can likewise be framed as “tax burden” vs. “civic responsibility.”  Etc, etc.

I see the same thing happening in the debate between advocates of concensus science and mainstream medical care, and advocates of “complementary” and alternative medicine.  The CAM folks have started calling their position “health freedom,” as if mainstream medicine and society represent health authoritarianism and want to strip people of the ability to explore unvalidated alternatives.  No, consenting adults are free to do that, and you may even find a private insurer to capitalize your adventure, but not if the executives and managers  are rationally interested in the preservation of their company.

The one place where there’s little debate about mainstream society intervening (by way of government, regulation, social workers, etc.) is when superstitious people decide to reject proven, evidence-based medical care for their children.  Here they scream health and often religious freedom, but even religion is not a license to abuse your children.

The debate these days has focused on whether parents can be compelled to vaccinate their children.  We know that herd immunity benefits us all.  Vaccines are not always complete in their effectiveness.  In many cases, vaccines reduce the incidence and severity of disease, which, when combined with herd immunity rates, keeps diseases at bay.  When a significant fraction of the population forgoes immunization, even immunized people are put at risk.

So I wish to frame the debate as one of self-defense.  We wouldn’t think twice about quarantining someone with SARS or avian flu, even though they might protest about their freedom being stripped away.  We would do it in the interest of public health and self-defense.  It is on these principles that we have a compelling interest to ensure that children are immunized.  The charlatans of alternative medicine are not just endangering themselves, they are endangering everyone.  Children have weak immune systems, and combined with their poor hygiene and close proximity in schools, they are prolific vectors of disease.  Many parents will tell you that they got sick more often when their children started school.  It’s bad enough as it is.  The last thing we need is for people to stop immunizing their children to an appreciable degree.

In defense of an Internet public library

This decade has seen a decline in the use of public libraries in favor of personal libraries created by buying cheap books from online retailers.  That’s fine if you read popular books, which cost $10 or $20 (and often less from online used book retailers), but textbooks and specialist books are cost prohibitive, often in the $80 – $120 range.  I wanted to read the book Statistical Genomics by Ben Hui Liu, so I reflexively looked for a copy to purchase online.  It just cost way too much considering my need for the book.  I checked the university library and found a copy, so now I am in possession of a “free” copy, at least for 90 days.

But it got me thinking.  Why not create an Internet public library that would provide books for free to the masses?  Naturally, the books couldn’t be downloaded as simple PDFs since this would violate copyrights and destroy the central business model of book publishing.  But what if the books were provided in a proprietary format that expired after 3 weeks or 3 months or however long?  Sure, a few people might figure out how to break the format, but that already happens with software, and some books are already available on bittorrent sites.  That hasn’t destroyed the software or publishing industries any more than file sharing of music and movies has destroyed the entertainment industry.

A typical brick and mortar library has one copy of a book, but it only serves a few tens of thousands of people.  An Internet public library would serve millions, so perhaps there could be a limit of 10 or 100 or 1000 copies simultaneously “checked out,” and those copies would expire after the alotted time.  Then other people could check out those books for a period of time.  It would work just like brick and mortar libraries have worked for decades.

The incentive here is the same incentive that drove the popularity of brick and mortar libraries: the spread of knowledge in the interest of the public good.  It could be funded by philanthropists (I hear Bill Gates has some spare change) or national governments, or some combination of the two.  What do you think?

Hallucinogenic fish! An investigation

A recent link on Digg led me to a (UK) Telegraph article about a fish called sarpa salpa, normally found in the Mediterranean, that was recently caught off the coast of England.  The article explains:

Sarpa salpa are a popular dish in many Mediterranean restaurants.

But according to marine experts, certain species of plankton-eating fish, like the sarpa salpa, can give off hallucinogenic fish poisoning if the heads or other body parts are consumed.

The effects include vivid hallucinations within minutes of eating it which can last for days.

In 2006 two men, one aged 90, were hospitalised in the south of France after eating sarpa salpa.

The elderly man suffered from auditory hallucinations a couple of hours after eating the fish followed by a series of nightmares over the next two nights.

The younger man, aged 40, endured similar effects which took 36 hours to disappear.

I’ve had an interest in hallucinogens for a long time.  I thought I knew them all.  Tryptamines, phenethylamines, the Colorado River Toad, from which the urban legend about “toad licking” probably originated.  Unfortunately, the Colorado River Toad contains 5-MeO-DMT and 5-HO-DMT, both of which are metabolized by monoamine oxidase in the GI tract, so they are not orally active.  You can’t get high by licking the toad.  However, the milky secretion that contains these drugs can be squeezed out of two glands at the corners of the toad’s mouth (those glands are the evolutionary ortholog to our parotid gland).  The secretions can then be dried and smoked.

But I’ve never heard of this fish, so I investigated further.  First, I’m surprised how little information exists about sarpa salpa.  Maybe I shouldn’t be.  Maybe that’s why I’ve never heard of it.  PubMed brings back only seven results from scientific journals, and only three of them appear to be about the fish.  Two are case reports of poisoning.  There is no Wikipedia article, although Sarpa salpa is mentioned in one article with a long taxonomic list of species.

A Google search brings back a page on the Practical Fishkeeping web site which describes sarpa salpa like this:

Two men have suffered terrifying visual and auditory hallucinations after eating a popular local seafish in Mediterranean restaurants.

According to a clinical study on the patients, which is due to be published in the journal Clinical Toxicology [more on this later], the men started seeing and hearing things after contracting a rare form of hallucinogenic poisoning from the Salema fish they were dining on…

The effects of eating ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes, such as certain mullet, goatfish, tangs, damsels and rabbitfish, are believed to be similar to LSD, and may include vivid and terrifying auditory and visual hallucinations. This has given rise to the collective common name for ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes of “dream fish”….

[T]he men had both eaten a fish called Sarpa salpa, and subsequently suffered from CNS disturbances including terrifying hallucinations and nightmares.

One of the men, a 40-year old, was admitted to hospital suffering from a digestive problem and frightening visual and auditory hallucinations, which took 36 hours to disappear. The second man, a 90-year old, suffered from auditory hallucinations a couple of hours after eating the same species of fish, followed by a series of nightmares over the next two nights.

The poisoning can start to cause vivid hallucinations within minutes of eating a poisonous fish and may last for days, often with no other effects. There is no antidote.

Indoles [from which tryptamines are derived], with similar chemical effects to LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) are believed to be responsible and may be consumed when the fish eat algae or phytoplankton containing the chemicals.

Others have claimed that different species of ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes, such as Kyphosus fuseus, contain much more potent hallucinogens, such as dimethyltryptamine or DMT, which is considered to be one of the world’s most mind-bending hallucinogenic chemicals.

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s a fascinating report, but I have some problems with it.  First, remember when I said 5-MeO-DMT and 5-HO-DMT can’t be consumed orally?  The same holds true for DMT.  Recreational drug users smoke it, although all these drugs can be taken orally with an MAO inhibitor.  Assuming there’s no natural MAO inhibitor present in the fish, and assuming these men didn’t happen to be taking MAO inhibitors for medical reasons (they were replaced by better antidepressants long ago), it is unlikely that the active hallucinogen is DMT.  The only potent tryptamines that can be consumed orally are 4-substituted tryptamines, like 4-HO-DMT (psilocin) and its phosphate ester (psilocybin), the active hallucinogens in magic mushrooms.  Does this fish contain psilocin?

Well, there’s another problem.  The profile of the “poisoning” doesn’t sound anything like “trip reports” of psychedelic tryptamines.  Onset within minutes, can last for days, apparently people can sleep in that state, but they experience vivid nightmares. That just doesn’t sound like the popular tryptamines.

While reading that article, I got the distinct impression that the drug must be something else.  But what is it?

I mentioned earlier that two of the seven articles listed on PubMed were case reports of poisoning.  The Practical Fishkeeping article mentions a report due to be published in Clinical Toxicology.  That’s one of the articles listed on PubMed, from 2006.  The other is from 1988 and doesn’t exist online, but the 2006 article does.  So I retrieved it.

First, the paper, published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, avoids hearsay and admits that the cause is unknown.  Then it describes the two cases:

CASE 1

April 1994

A previously healthy 40-year-old executive began feeling weak and tired within 2 h after eating freshly caught baked sea bream (Sarpa salpa) for dinner while on vacation in Cannes on the French Riviera. Nausea and vomiting developed quickly during the night. The next day symptoms persisted and were accompanied by marked muscle weakness. He decided to shorten his vacation and drive home. At that point, he began toexperience blurring of vision and hallucinations involving aggressive and screaming animals. Agitation and disorientation led him to seek medical assistance (he was not able to drive anymore as he was seeing giant arthropods around his car). Physical examination upon arrival at the hospital emergency room demonstrated no notable abnormalities: no fever, no sign of focalization or sensory-motor deficit, and normal hemodynamic status except for sinusal tachycardia linked directly to the mental disturbances. During hospitalization, the patient recovered rapidly with complete resolution of symptoms within 36 h post ingestion. He was unable to recall the hallucinatory period.

CASE 2

March 2002

A previously healthy 90-year-old retiree began experiencing auditory hallucinations 2 h after ingesting a sea bream (Sarpa salpa) that he had purchased from a professional fisherman in Saint Tropez on the French Riviera. He was used to eating this kind of fish, and had cleaned the fish after he had purchased it. Hallucinations were of a particularly terrifying nature (human screams and bird squealing), and he had numerous nightmares for the next two nights. Fearing that these symptoms might signal the beginning of a major mental illness, he did not tell his friends or attending physician. The manifestations abated three days after he had eaten the fish. Later, he recalled a warning that he had heard at the fish market concerning the hallucinogenic potential of sea bream and decided to contact the Poison Control Center in Marseille.

Crazy shit. One thing you’ll notice is that the Telegraph article got it wrong.  The case reports were published in 2006, but neither man was poisoned that year (these are definitely the same men mentioned in the Telegraph article.  What are the odds that two other men, one aged 40 and the other 90, were poisoned?) The paper continues:

DISCUSSION

Clinical symptoms of ichthyoallyeinotoxism occur within a few minutes to 2 h after ingestion of toxic fish. The first symptoms resemble inebriety with loss of balance and coordination and generalized malaise (1–3). Sore throat and heartburn have also been reported in the initial phase. Within a few hours, specific signs of poisoning occur including delirium, visual and/or auditory hallucinations (often involving animals), depression, feelings of impending death with reactive tachycardia and hyperventilation, and disturbed behavior. If they are able to sleep, patients classically report terrifying nightmares (3). Gastrointestinal symptoms including nausea, abdominal pain, and diarrhea have been described in a few cases, but are usually low-grade (3). No specific treatment or antidote treatment is available. Appropriate management of transient behavioral disturbances (e.g., using benzodiazepine or neuroleptics), is important to prevent self-inflicted or other injury. Symptomatictreatment for gastrointestinal manifestation can enhance patient comfort. Symptoms generally abate within 24 to 36 h, but weakness may persist for several days (1–3).

Ichthyoallyeinotoxism is widespread in tropical and temperate areas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well as in the Mediterranean Sea. Toxic fish species belong to the 8 families detailed in Table 1. Most are herbivores or scavengers living in coastal areas. It should be noted that toxicity in all species varies according to fishing location, season, and way of preparing the fish (3). In the Mediterranean, most poisonings  involving Sarpa salpa (eaten in Tunisia, France and Israel but considered as inedible in Italy and Spain), have been reported in spring and summer (4–7). A classically reported exacerbating factor is consumption of fish cooked without removing the head, and/or not immediately gutted after being caught (8). Although the toxic agents are still unknown, some authors have implicated toxic macroalgaes (caulerpaceae family) that are ingested and contaminate the flesh of fish (3,4). These toxins are probably heat stable since case reports have been described after ingestion of fried, boiled, steamed or raw fish (3,7)

Now we have a lead.  Caulerpaceae microalgae.  Perhaps it’s not the fish that produces the toxin after all.  That might explain why cases of poisoning are rare despite sarpa salpa being a common menu item around the Mediterranian Sea and Indian Ocean.  Only fish infected by caulerpaceae algae cause hallucinations.

What do we know about the toxins in these organisms?  A search for “caulerpaceae hallucinogen” brings back nothing.  However, “caulerpaceae toxin” reveals a class of toxins that include caulerpenyne, caulerpenin, caulerpicin, and caulerpin, which appear to be neurotoxins that act on ion channels and have some effects “similar to serotonin”.  The last point is interesting, because classical psychedelics, the phenethylamines and tryptamines, are known to act via the 5-HT2A receptor (serotonin receptor subtype 2A).

So what are the known effects of caulerpaceae toxins in humans?  I couldn’t find anything. I searched for hours.  I thought the trail had gone cold. But then I found this:

The molecular structure of caulerpin.  My jaw almost dropped when I saw it.  What’s so special about it?

It has two indoles:

Not only that, but caulerpin’s multi-ring structure lends itself to a rigid planar stereochemistry, much like LSD (which some have argued potentiates LSD’s effects).  It also lacks the amine of classical tryptamines, which is one place that monoamine oxidases attack to metabolize tryptamines via the oral route (the nitrogen would be at the position where the methyl esters bond to the central ring).  In fact, other than the conspicuous lack of that nitrogen, caulerpin looks like two tryptamines fused together. This may very well be the culprit.

However, many questions remain.  What is the action of caulerpin in the human CNS?  How does it avoid metabolism in the GI tract without the 4-substitution on its indoles?  If this is the hallucinogen, why do its effects last so much longer than other tryptamines? This is not the end of my investigation, but the beginning.