Having a general-purpose PC for a media center machine gives you great flexibility -- well beyond just watching TV. When I decided last week that I wanted to add to the Tor anonymity network, my MythTV box's spare processing power fit the bill perfectly.

I downloaded the Tor source, installed and configured as a server. Before the Janacek Quartet had finished playing Smetana, the "peppercorn" node was online, helping to onion route anonymized communications around the Internet. That helps journalists researching hostile sources and soldiers stationed abroad to use the 'Net without revealing their locations or identities.

The Tor network is now set up to take advantage of connections of all speeds, so my DSL connection doesn't bottleneck other, faster pipelines. There's far more demand for anonymity than supply, as I saw when my box shot up to 170+ open connections (and my browsing speed slowed to a trickle, until I added some rate limiting to Tor, which is also easy to configure). Every extra server helps. Download yours today!

All that, and I can still watch, record, and pause live HDTV.