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The Drawbacks of Anonymous Surfing
BlueCup writes to tell us that one reporter decided to give anonymous web surfing a shot, and found it to be much more trouble than it was worth. Many users take advantage of Tor and other anonymous web browsing tools, but is the amount of hassle worth the effort it takes to remain anonymous?
If you have a few seconds, download Torpark and try it out. It shouldn't take more than half a minute and is Firefox based and pretty much automated.
And if you're worried about having to put Torpark on every machine you use, just put it on a very small USB thumbdrive on your keychain. Plug it into whatever computer you're using and browse the thumbdrive. Double click and go -- no need to worry about leaving personal information on your friend's computer. The application itself is very tiny so it would fit on even very cheap USB drives and there's a Thunderbird extension for it. I was at a conference once and got a free 512MB thumbdrive. I sharpied it as Torpark and now I can serf anonymously if I need to.
The only hassles I can find is that I have it set to not cache anything at all which means sites don't load as fast when I revisit them normally on my desktop. Also, the Tor servers can sometimes be slow to forward packets or the German ranged IP address it masks me with will cause a page to render in German. Oh gut, das ist wert es wohl.
My work here is dung.
on what you're surfing for, and who will be looking at your records in the future. Anon surfing might be a good idea for anyone who ever expects to go into politics, for example.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This 'reporter' didn't know that he had to sacrifice a bit of convenience in order to maintain web anonymity?
What a useless article. You mask your IP and use proxies if you want to become *untraceable*. And this guy's crying about how he has to remember his passwords for every site. Bloody lout.
After reading the article and digestig what the reporter wrote, he wasn't being very anonymous even with his efforts. Sure, he deleted his cookies when he was done (I do too) but he never removed all his cache files which could be used to track you. Yes, this will increase the time it takes for a page to load but since apparently everyone but me uses a high-speed connection, waiting that extra half second doesn't seem to be that much of a hassle.
Also, since he had to relogin when he went to Amazon or other sites, he was giving up his anonymity because now the site can track when he last visited, what he went to and so forth.
As far as sites balking that he didn't have a cookie, um, so what? That is the whole point of trying to be anonymous, right?
Had the author simply stuck with sufing around and not registering with sites he would have a better case for his article. As it stands, not so much. He needs to look up the word anonymous and see why he wasn't.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Not if you erase history."
you're kidding right?
Even if you erase history your machine is littered with footprints of where you've been, nevermind un-erase utilities.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
- Surfing anonymously is hard, and therefore not worth it.
- Oh noes! My Amazon purchase list is broken! This is stupid!
- Evil criminals can use it!
An excellent thing for a reporter to be saying to his readers. I'd sure love to be one of this guy's sources.I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
This reporter is dumb. He declares that he is a fan of convenience and doesn't care much about anonymity. As he found out that anonymity slows things down, he concluded that it's not worth it.
For him, he should add. If all you need anonymity for is so websites can't point personalised ads at you, guess what: you don't want military-grade anonymity through Tor, you want Adblock or Privoxy. While he continues his convenient existance, more and more people rely on Tor for their democratic right to free unpopular speech. Tor may slow you surfing down, but it sure beats political imprisonment or being outed for being whatever is unpopular where you live.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
That "Post Anonymously" checkbox ought to be enough for anybody.
You're not supposed to tunnel BitTorrent over Tor. That slows the network down for everybody, including those who have a need for anonymity for legitimate than getting the latest movie flick.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I just encrypt my entire /home partition. Its another way to help.
The "hassles" he talks about are mostly the lost convienences of cookies and the occassional site that doesn't work w/out cookies.
Seriously.
That about sums up his complaints.
I'm not terribly impressed by the issues he discovered while using an anonymizing service.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Tor's not a real hassle to use, but it is slow (just like FreeNet is), and always will be.
To use Tor, simply install it, then tell your browser (or privoxy proxy) to use the socks proxy on port 9050 (or wherever). Nothing much can be done about the sluggish latency and low bandwidth, though, because for true anonymity to work you just HAVE to relay through a certain random number of random nodes of various quality. So instead of taking 15 fast intra-country hops to reach Google, it might take 100+ hops all over the globe and back, with each hop being another weak link in the chain.
Speed is the #1 reason I don't use Tor much... except for the rare occasion when I need to upload beheading videos^W^W^W send ransom notes^W^W^W troll IRC^W^W hide p2p downloads^W^W^W research something privately.
Power to the Peaceful
Not your browser history, he meant you actually go back and *ERASE HISTORY*. Cool huh?
what forensic traces are left on YOUR machine.
It's about what trace you leave across the Internet/Googlesphere/SkyNet.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I've been using FoxyProxy/Privoxy/Tor for a few months now. It wasn't nearly as difficult to set up as I'd imagined (I'm running Ubuntu), and it didn't degrade or slow down my web experience as much as I feared, either. It caused me an unexpected problem last week, though. I ordered some hardware from NewEgg. The process went exactly as usual and I got the confirmation e-mails as usual. The next day, however, I got another form e-mail that said my order had been cancelled because my bank was outside the United States. WTF, I thought - this is clearly not the case. I called NewEgg's support line and was told that it was actually *my* IP that appeared to be outside the US. I explained that I was using anonymizing software to protect my privacy online, but that I'd used my NewEgg account and completed the VerifiedByVISA process, and that I was shipping to a verified address, etc. The support guy said he couldn't un-cancel my order; I'd just have to re-order using "my real IP" this time. Fine, I grumbled. I went through the process again; when I supplied NewEgg's cart app with my account credentials this time, I was told that my account was suspended! I called NewEgg again; apparently my account was suspended because of the "suspicious transaction" referenced above. It took me a half hour to get my account reinstated.
You can make Tor very easy to use with any application (on Windows or other VMWare/OpenVPN supported OS) with JanusVM:
http://januswifi.dyndns.org:85/
When you start the Windows VPN connection to the VMWare virtual machine that PPTP network becomes you default route. All DNS lookups, http requests, and other TCP traffic is now transparently routed through Tor. Simply disconnect the VPN to terminate anonymous onion routing...
Also see the user documentation: http://januswifi.dyndns.org:85/Instructions.htm
Transparent proxy avoids many common problems with explicit SOCKS configuration and DNS leaks. Worth a look...
That's OK, provided you don't live in a country governed by a facist regime. In the UK, failure to disclose encryption keys to the police upon request can land you in prison, regardless of whether or not you've committed any other crimes.