Slashdot Mirror
Do You Need to Surf Anonymously?
An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld has up an article entitled 'How to Surf Anonymously without a Trace'. It purports to offer tips on how to avoid detection by anyone attempting to monitor your internet access. 'If you don't like the limitations imposed on you by [proxy] sites like the Cloak or would simply prefer to configure anonymous surfing yourself, you can easily set up your browser to use an anonymous proxy server to sit between you and the sites you visit. To use an anonymous proxy server with your browser, first find an anonymous proxy server. Hundreds of free, public proxy servers are available, but many frequently go offline or are very slow. Many sites compile lists of these proxy servers, including Public Proxy Servers and the Atom InterSoft proxy server list.'"
should be titled: information that everyone already knew...
next topic: how to send email
Do you know who owns it? Do you know what kind of logs they keep? Do you know who else reads their logs? Seems to me like a terribly good way to fish for undesireables would be to setup an "anonymous" proxy and wait for people to start using it. I mean, its not like police go out and pretend to be hookers to catch 'johns', or pretend to be dealers to catch users, or even pretend to be young children to catch pedophiles. If you don't own it, you can't trust it, and if you do own it then its not terribly anonymous. Even the whole onion router business has come into question as of late.
Not a whole lot of anonymous anything left on the internet these days with all the data mining that goes on. The best you can do is leech wireless and pretend to be someone else.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
That doesn't allow you to see ComputerWorld sites?
What I need is a meta-surfer, a free port 80 VPN with a built in browser on the client side....maybe one day I'll build one myself.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
yes, yes i do. and don't ask why.
The question is, how does one surf anonymously at work when you're forced to use your employer's proxy to get through the firewall. Tried configuring Tor to encrypt and hide my queries before the ISA proxy ever saw them, but never could figure out how to get FireFox to work with it, nor find any Tor help sites or discussion groups for what should be a simple enough question.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Surf? No. Steal? Yes!
Now I now how to block your porn surfing
-Your Employers Sysadmin
Seems to me like proxy servers just replace Big Brother knowing everything you do with some tiny "anonymous browsing" site. And you are willfully giving them all this information to boot, so if they decide to turn over all their logs there isn't a thing you could do.
It is illegal for a library to keep a record of the books you have checked out after they're returned.
It should also be illegal for your ISP to record your browsing history.
It's about privacy and freedom.
Meh. There are enough good alternatives: TOR, I2P Freenet (if they ever make a useful thing out of it, because after more then 5 years development, they fall kinda short. Maybe things will get better with their Openet, though - but when will that happen?).
Anyway, public proxies are only haphazard and temporary solutions, and not very good ones at that. First of all, they're often unreachable, unusable or slow. Secondly, you never know WHICH proxy you actually use; I mean; who owns the damn thing? What does he log?
Ofcourse, with enough proxies to choose from, and trying out at randomn, it may be a small chance that you end up with someone that actually makes your privacy more in danger, but still... The systems mentionned above (include JAP to that) are much safer for anonymous browsing.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
To post on slashdot anonymously (by cycling proxies).
....yes.
Any other time, the answer would be "not really".
Anyone who has ever needed this capability already knew how to do it. The article will undoubtedly lead to many "normal" users trying it out and inevitably deciding it is a waste of time. The majority of proxy servers are as slow as molasses since the adult site crackers are running all their scripts through them. You have to be pretty dedicated to actually use these servers on a regular basis.
That's it? Use a proxy? Who here didn't already know that?
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
It's tough to find good anonymizing proxies, especially all-purpose socks proxies. However, for your browsing needs, there is a decent list of webproxies at this website as well as some lists of socks but I can't really vouch for those.
I personally have used anonymouse. It has an annoying popup and can be fairly slow and has sketchy cookies support (which can be a drag for messageboard use) but it's reliable enough for the occasional session.
It doesn't take too much paranoia to realize that some percentage of the public proxies are undoubtably controlled by spooks running some carnivore type software. The only surefire way to access the internet anonymously is through open WiFi APs.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Yes, defending your own brand of craziness from the craziness of others is sometimes important, and for that reason and many others, anonymity can be very important in a civilized society. But I think it is somewhat overused on the internet.
The other half of the anonymity consideration though is that when everyone gets used to only having 'full' freedom when cloaked from the sight of others, they begin to accept a greater lack of freedom in their 'real' lives. That's why I don't choose anonymity whenever I can - I want my mistakes to be my own, and when I discuss, for instance, digital freedoms, I don't want to hide behind the ubiquitous pseudonyms we've all grown so used to while doing so.
I don't want to 'get away' with looking into for 'bad things' - I want REAL people to be free to do what they want. Of course, I, like everyone else, have some things I'm not going to disclose, and would like to have anonymity available - but I'd much rather push for less need to hide things, rather than disappear behind a fake name most of my online life.
Ryan Fenton
It's the Muslim terrorists who want to destroy the infidel west. Anonymously.
I hate printers.
http://tor.eff.org/>
A tool specially designed for privacy.
you claim It is illegal for a library to keep a record of the books you have checked out after they're returned
r ecords
I say, you should be right, but you are completely wrong.
try this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fbi+library+
so, if you have a citation to back up your assertion, please, supply the citation.
I say, you are flat out wrong.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Why would anyone need to access the web anonymously?
You mispelled "Now I can safely brute force my porn websites"
surely the security agencies will be monitoring traffic directed at them. Maybe I'm missing something here, but if the proxy server is 'published' on the net, its not really anonymous, since security agencies, police etc. can monitor who is surfing through them.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
and the only time the average user would need to surf anonymous is when he/she knows he is doing something wrong. I mean, i'm not trying to start anything here, but rather understand WHY you would need to do this. Obviously we have 'pr0n viewing' at work, and stalking ex's and whathave you...
So... what legitamate uses can it have? And if you say "I just want to do it so that I can be tracked by flashing ads, you better have epilepsy.
OK, use a laptop. Connect to an open AP. Then log on to someone else's server with open telnet port. From there use a script with elinks/lynx/wget so that all requests for web content are made to Google's cache. I think this is reasonably safe.
Seems like a great front for a Man in The Middle attack, except that rather then setting up tons of fake ARP packets you get people to come to your site. Brilliant! Why not just use the coffee shop in the town next to you, and reprogram your MAC address to.
I remember when trying to download drivers from Adaptec I was barred from their FTP site. (Something about export of encription tecnology). Their server detected my IP address from Canada and threw me out. A proxy server did the trick. (And Canada *does* have a special agreement with U.S.A for this purpose, so throwing me out was just nasty anyway). P.S. The last time I tried it did work ok.
Why do people do things anonymously that they wouldn't do if their name was stamped on it? I think the world would be a lot better place if everyone took responsibility for what they said and what they did.
/. to act very strangely for the last few minutes.)
Ironic, particularly since you're writing under a pseudonym. Or is "TheRecklessWanderer" what it says on your birth certificate? I didn't think so.
Anonymous systems are needed to combat the ease with which modern technology would allow someone to compile a dossier on another person's entire life and activities -- an ability which was never present in the past.
In the pre-computer (or at least, pre-networked-computers) era, it was fairly safe to use your real name everywhere, because it would take an immense amount of effort for someone else to go around and link together all the various activities you were doing under that name. If the fellow behind the counter at the grocery store knew your name, and you also used your name when you were at your local religious group's meeting, it didn't matter, because there was no connection between the two. Short of following you around town and then asking everyone, using your real name didn't mean giving anything up.
However, today, using your real name everywhere creates a near-unique primary key that someone else could easily use to search, and find out everything about you. To continue the example from above, they could simply run a search on your name, and with far less effort than following you around, find out everything they wanted to know about you, because virtually everything is online, and the indexes are only getting more and more complete.
Online anonymity systems aren't borne out of a desire to have more anonymity than we used to have, they're -- for many people, anyway -- an attempt to recapture the way things were, before it was possible to assemble a dossier about anyone else, just by Googling their name.
I don't think there's any reason why the people reading what I write on Slashdot, need to know who I am in real life. Likewise, I wouldn't go around advertising where I go to church to everyone in the grocery store. It's just not relevant to my interaction with them. They don't need to know. If they do, they could ask, and I could tell them, but that's none of their business, frankly. Anonymity and pseudonymity are simply attempts to not allow the traditional compartmentalization of our lives to be completely undone via massive searchable indexes and databases.
(Apologies if this got posted twice -- something has been causing
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Do you think that when the busybodies with control agendas get their hands on a database of records of web visits, they are only going to just look for terrorists and child molesters? People have been sold a bill of goods to surrender their right out of fear. You think that hard core law enforcement types will have restraint when they get their hands on large amounts of private email, for example? The answers to that quiz are both no.
I wrote up a very simple set of step-by-step instructions entitled "How to be Anonymous on the World Wide Web Using Windows"
Seems to me like proxy servers just replace Big Brother knowing everything you do with some tiny "anonymous browsing" site. And you are willfully giving them all this information to boot, so if they decide to turn over all their logs there isn't a thing you could do.
Hence why the folks behind Tor developed onion routing systems in the first place. They're not foolproof, but they don't place all your trust on the administrator of one server. They spread the trust out among a bunch of servers, such that your enemy would need to compromise a large number of them in order to monitor what you're doing.
When you're just using a single proxy, you're probably making it easier for someone to track you, because you're purposely pushing all your traffic through one choke-point. All your adversaries need to do is apply the correct combination of subpoenas, bags of cash, or hot pokers to that proxy's operator, and they've got you.
Single-relay proxies aren't suitable for anything except schoolkids trying to get around the local MySpace block. To be honest, I'm not even sure Tor is really ready for prime-time, either, but it's probably the best thing going.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
1st: Throughout history, there have been wonderfull governments, but also some horrible governments. And even the Wonderfull Governments often keep records, that get passed on to their replacement, horrible governments when the evil SOB's have revolution. Governments have in the past killed people for: Being Jewish. Being Gay. Belonging to a political party that objected to that government. Asking if the government had killed other people. Being a family member of any of the above people. Looking at Pornography. While I trust (just barely) the current government, I do not trust the unknown government that will take power in 4 years, because I don't know who they are yet.
2nd: If you have nothing to hide, then that quite literally means you are willing to let me photograph you naked? And I get full rights to that photograph - so I can show it to your neighbors?
Because THAT is what you are saying. You DO have things you do not want people to see. So do I. Yours might be your pretty body. Mine might be the fact that I am gay. And a member of the legalize marijuana political action group. And a member of the "Send the Africans back to Africa" Charity. Also, I routinely travel 56 mph in a 55 mph zone. And get drunk 1/month in my closet. And I once masturbated while looking at pictures of dead dogs. And I collect my own snot and eat it. I still wet my bed. I won't do business with those dirty, thieving Jews. And I am a card carrying member of the ACLU. And I despise children. All of these things are legal (or at least not serious crimes worthy of being investigated). Now, assuming I was not being sarcastic, do you think I would have a job tomorrow if my boss knew them?
3rd consider this: I have a right to privacy, not because I have things to hide, but because trust is a two way street. Think about a parent. What would you think of a father that says "My honor student has never done anything wrong. But just to be 'sure', I hired a private investigator to follow them around all the time, sneak into his bedroom at night and check his computer, diary, underwear draw" It takes WAY too much effort and cost for the government to actually fairly investigate everyone. So we tell them that if they want to investigate people, they must prove it to a judge that they are worth investigating. If the cop can't do that, then THE COPS ARE THE SICKO PERVERTS. Just like the dad/mom that treated their honor student like a gangbanger, if the government does the same to us, THEY demonstrate that they are A) poor government, B) can't be trusted themselves and C) have serious emotional problems.
4th: The last, best argument is simple. Every test has a false positive rate as well as a false negative rate. If you test too many people, you end up convicting the innocent more than the guilty. I.E. if you have a test that 5% of the time falsely says "drug user" even if they are not, and use it on a population where only 1% of the people use drugs, than you arrest, charge and try 5 innocent people for every 1 guilty. Those innocent had nothing to hide. Hackers break into your computer, zombifie it and use it to store child porn. You don't know about this, till the police track down your computer as the server for a child porn ring, break down your door and arrest you. (Several cases like this exist).
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I use a SOCKS proxy using my computer at home and putty. It involves leaving your computer on at all time, which I normally do anyways. But if I am behind a restrictive firewall I connect using putty, which dynamically forward port 1080 to my linux box and then set firefox to use a SOCKS proxy at 127.0.0.1:1080 . It's just encrypted data after that and the firewalls cannot see the traffic.
:wq
I wonder if anyone has a script that would automatically change your reported MAC address to a random (but valid) value, every 24 hours or so, or when the DHCP releases and renews.
Doesn't seem like it would really be all that hard on a Linux/BSD system, no idea what it requires on Windows to script that sort of thing.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
However, more fundamentally, the answer is: it does not matter. I am innocent until proven guilty.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Why do people do things anonymously that they wouldn't do if their name was stamped on it? I think the world would be a lot better place if everyone took responsibility for what they said and what they did.
I don't know about you but I don't want any government tracking me or monitoring what I say or where I go, online or offline. If a person is concerned about who's taking note of what they say then they won't exercise political speech freely.
FalconShould there be a Law?
the only time the average user would need to surf anonymous is when he/she knows he is doing something wrong.
What about someone doing a search about a medical problem or depression?
What about political dissent?
What about searching for a new job?
What about a whistleblower going to a Gov website to report abuse of gov contracts?
etc...
Only if you are a coward.
What is considered "wrong" in some countries is not the same as others. You might be surprised.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
It's all shades of grey, though. Ok, so you bring up "'pr0n viewing' at work", but what about "'pr0n viewing' at home"? I think this distinction is where the question begins: let's say you sometimes downloaded porn that wasn't illegal or even particularly awful (relative to... you know, porn in general), but you just didn't want some guy having a full record of every dirty movie and every dirty picture you'd downloaded.
Honestly, I don't see a great need for ways to bypass at-work web filtering, and I don't do anything online from home that I'm particularly ashamed of, but it's also just sort of creepy to think there are records of everything I do online. With every site I visit and every e-mail I send, there are growing logs that document all of it, and it's not clear to me who has access to those or what use someone might invent for that information. If nothing else, it's just unsettling. There are random people out there with random access to random pieces of my personal information, and I can't even know when that information has been accessed.
Ok, so that's not a huge problem, but it's a valid concern. And it doesn't even begin to get into people who are in a position to be compromised for voicing a political viewpoint. In every country, no matter how free, there are dangers inherent in voicing highly-upopular viewpoints. Sometimes those viewpoints still need to be voiced, but will only be under anonymous circumstances.
Telling people "anonymous proxies" are useful to protect themselves is dangerously misleading. It'll prevent the destination website from finding out what your IP address is (maybe -- if you're not leaking that information some other way), but it'll do absolutely nothing to undermine the extensive network-level snooping going on nowadays. Your packets are still in the clear, readable, and sniffable at any point on the network; they're just taking a little detour through someone else's server so the destination site sees their IP instead of yours. If you're worried about the AT&T/NSA thing, or that your connection is being monitored directly, this is completely useless.
I'd also not trust any of these companies like Anonymizer, the Cloak, &c.; who knows what they're doing with all the requests being forwarded through their servers?
Liberty in your lifetime
In TFA it says, "BrowserSpy delves even deeper into your system and even reports on whether you have certain software on your system, such as RealPlayer and Adobe Acrobat, including version information." Yet when I followed the link to this BrowserSpy thing, I found that much of the information it attempted to gather didn't work. It's all based on Javascript. While turning Javascript on and off all the time is a huge hassle, the NoScript extension for FireFox makes it much, MUCH easier. Since it also works based on the source of the Javascript, not the source of the web page you're viewing, sites which display web pages pulling data from elsewhere (e.g., a web store that pulls in Javascript code from a DoubleClick server) can still work, even if the undesired code is still disabled.
I had an argument with a friend of mine about this. He claimed "the web is Javascript." I disagree; most things seem to work just fine with Javascript selectively enabled instead of universally enabled. A few broken web sites is a low enough cost for the increased safety margin.
the only time the average user would need to surf anonymous is when he/she knows he is doing something wrong. I mean, i'm not trying to start anything here, but rather understand WHY you would need to do this. Obviously we have 'pr0n viewing' at work, and stalking ex's and whathave you...
I can think of a few...Maybe the Fedex clerk wants to work for UPS. Or maybe you want to read up about Democrats at your mostly Republican company. Or maybe you or your girlfriend are up the duft and want to find out more about Plan Parenthood without fear that someday some Attorney General is going to make those records public. Or maybe some militia group is wanting to hold a meeting and some Attorney General is interested in the members of that militia (wants to track all those IPs.)
etc...etc..etc...
There are plenty of activities that are not illegal that a person could be interested in, but don't want to be dragged through the courts over for political reasons....
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I wonder how long it will be untill visiting this site (Wikipedia:Muslim) will land you on the "watch list."
If thats not true already... crap
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
I tried calling up an anonymous proxy server to ask for their address, but they refused to tell me. Then I asked for the name of the manager to make a complaint, but they hung up.
Unfortunately, you don't have any rights to privacy in the US. This is a common misconception.
You're quite wrong I'm glad to say. As early as the early 1800s the US Supreme Court ruled anonymousity was an important part of the First Amendment's Freedom of Speech. The ruling said that if a person could not remain anonymous then they could not enjoy freed political speech, that if they had to watch their words then they wouldn't speak out. Denying anonymousity is a powerful tool for authoritarian regimes.
FalconShould there be a Law?
So you don't want your ISP knowing that you are posting on an 'odd' forum or something to the effect that you are eating your snot?
I completely understand the right to privacy, however, if you are talking about being 'private' so that your ISP does not give your searching behaviors to the government, then that is a completely different story.
And forgive my misunderstanding of your 4th example, but I fail to see how it pertains to browsing the internet anonymously.
Or how about this site: Stormfront.org
I would get the correct URL to make a link, but it would risk ringing the alarm of the monitoring system, getting me fired and losing me any support from labour rights groups for a claim. Crap.
Oh yeah, and you guys better hurry up. I finished my two books while typing this list.
p.s. I expect full reports on my desk by Friday at 9am.
In Soviet Russia, anonymty surfs YOU...
Proxies I learned about oh... 1995? Today if you want anonymous surfing, use Torpark or setup your own Tor+Privoxy+Firefox with a tiiiny amount more effort. Solved problem.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
WHY you would need to do this. Obviously we have 'pr0n viewing' at work, and stalking ex's and whathave you...
You answered it yourself.
It sounds like you were suggesting that people shouldnt be anonymously viewing porn at work, or anonymously stalking their ex girlfriend...
Lets use your stalking ex girlfriends example.
Why should a stalker be allowed to anonymously harass his ex girlfriend? Flip that, and look at the reverse. Shouldnt the girl have the ability to surf the web anonymously without fear of her ex boyfriend stalking and harassing her?
She doesnt want posts from this guy on her myspace account saying "yeah remember when i fucked you in your ass at your mothers home lisa smith!" or "Remember you said how much you hate jews Lisa Smith" or... "God remember that time we beat up that nigger... gawd that was rofl fun!"
Some girl doesnt need to be harassed with false statements aimed to character assasinate her out of anger due to a broken heart. Lets say an employer googles her name... What will they find? They'll find comments like the above examples...
OR
Lets say she found a new boyfriend.... and she says so on her myspace... ok she's posting through "LA-baby0231" and that is anonymous, but her ex bf knows of that account already... so he goes and reads it and finds out that she's now dating Gary Jones who works at so and so company...
Ok.. Now her Ex Bf who is a stalker... goes down to where he works and beats the shit out of him.
Granted the EX knew the gf's myspace account already, so she wasnt really anonymous in our example... BUT she has the ability to make a new myspace, a new email address, a new blog, or a new webpage etc. That is privacy we already have. It's not perfect but dont take for granted the privacy we already have, and use on a daily basis. WE DO expect to be private indivudals, often we take it for granted not realizing the freedoms we already use...
Now our privacy rights are being erroted so fast. And as a poster said, with all of the new weapons out there that easily create an entire laundry list of everything you do and say online, we need STRICTER privacy laws that protect our privacy to the fullest. There are publically available services if you just pay a few bucks, where you can find out a whole bunch of stuff on people on the internet. Why should someone make a dollar of that if you cant actively protect yourself against it? Someone is profiting off your willingness to give up all of your information.... ok so maybe you're not going to post your name and address on slashdot.org right now.... But why not? What do yuo have to hide?
See its not about having somethign to hide... (well it is) But its about protecting yourself from harasment, unfair judgement, embarrasment and a personal choice to not have you know everything about me if i do not want you to do so. That is a very basic and powerful thing that we are losing.
People do not need to know my political views... or my religious views... (which is one of the very reasons why we have a right to privacy btw). But then again i'm sharing my political views online right? Well theres a little difference between personal interaction and reading something scribbled on a wall.
If i wrote "hey fuck all you of fags" on a wall... and you were to read it... What would you think?
You might think i'm commiting a hate crime against homosexuals. But the reality is... it may have been a light hearted silly personal message to my friends who went to the movies and didnt wait for me to show up cause i was 5 minutes late. And you still wouldnt know if my friends were gay or not...
So this is why privacy is important. You may think you know everything by just by looking from the outside in... but you dont. We never do. There is nuance to everything. If were all at dinner at a table, and my friends said "dumby over here, showed up to the movies late last night so we left without him" and i scream "yeah well fuck
I should probably mention that many of these supposed 'free open proxies' for web browsing are usually proxy servers not properly secured by their owners, and 'disappear' when they are secured. Sometimes, they are even comprimised hosts running trojan software.
Dubious legality using them. The AHBL parses and adds the hosts from many of these sites on a daily basis for this reason.
Brielle
"Having something to hide" is NOT the same thing as "doing something wrong."
Nor is it the same thing as "wanting to avoid responsibility."
For example, perhaps I don't like my job, so when I am at home I browse job listings. It is legally and morally correct, and I have a very good reason to keep that hidden from my current employer.
The president should not be allowed to find out how much time I spend on ACLU.com or Amnesty International, etc.
Perhaps I have an embarrassing medical condition, and I want to find out information about it without the whole world knowing.
The list of perfectly legal and morally correct activities that I have a very good reason to hide goes on and on.
So, yes, I have things to hide. And I *should* be allowed to hide them.
Well... as long as you don't go denying Global Warming...
inter: "To bury or put a dead body into a grave".
net: "a trap made of netting to catch fish or birds or insects".
I'm starting to think the "internet" wasn't really designed to bring people together to play poker.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I dont think i can elect you for president through the slashdot modding system, but i'll sit here all day until i figure out how :)
Bravo. Well said.
and the only time the average user would need to surf anonymous is when he/she knows he is doing something wrong. I mean, i'm not trying to start anything here, but rather understand WHY you would need to do this.
BS! Something does not need to be bad to a reason to remain anonymous. Politics and political speech are very good reasons to be anonymous. If someone can't remain anonymous then they can't enjoy free political speech.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Assume I am gay. I go to my non-gay friends house. I ask him if I can check my email, while he is in the bathroom. I open up my yahoo account, and open an email from my gay lover. 1/2 down, embedded in the email is a link to a Nambla site, done as a joke. I even have to click on it a couple of times to get rid of pop-ups. My totally straight friend's ISP now has incriminating evidence that he likes to screw little boys.
Now assume, I have anonymous internet browsing, and always use it, even when checking my email.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The word you're looking for is "anonymity".
You can write your own Proxy Auto-Config file (in JavaScript), which would make your browser use a randomly-picked proxy from the list you code in for each request.
With a large enough list you can make the job of the people after you very difficult (they would need to contact and persuade a lot more people), and you will not even attract your ISP's attention as much as when your only destination seems to be one (proxy-running) site... Even if some of the proxies you pick are run by police themselves, they are likely to be different (competing) departments and agencies, and they are still unlikely to have complete picture of even a single one of your web-sessions.
They can still force your ISP to cooperate, but that means, they already know, who you are, so it is too late for "anonymity".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sorry, but you make an excellent case for why there shouldn't be such privacy.
People are affected by what you write on the wall or post online. Making your posting anonymous (a) removes credibility and (b) allows you to pretend that there are no consequences to your actions. There are consequences.
Yes, if someone comes by and sees you writing "hey fuck all of you fags" on a wall they might beat the crap out of you. That would be some consequences, wouldn't it? Actions, big or small, have consequences - they just appear not to on the Internet.
This means that if you relentlessly stalk someone through message boards and forums to the point where they commit suicide perhaps the stalker should be convicted of murder.
There are some justifications for anonymous actions, but not many. Most of the time it is just as you point out in your post that you want to escape the consequences. Sorry. Free ride time is over.
Why not just get PHProxy (http://whitefyre.com/poxy/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/poxy/) and run your own proxy server on your own site? Password protect the directory, and nobody else gets to use it (unless you give them the login). Only you see the logs. All traffic looks like it's coming to/from your site. Not completely anonymous (as others here have noted, traffic is still cleartext and can be traced) but it is a surefire way around most corporate firewalls, as long as you don't mind a few frustrations (like incomplete support for flash, etc.). I've been very happy with it, and it's saved me quite a bit of frustration. I'm sure there are other similar products that would work just as well, but I like the open source nature of this one.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Hello Man In The Middle
1. Surf the internet wearing a mask.
2. Always use a different font.
3. Set an email forward from your Gmail to your Yahoo mail, from Yahoo to your Hotmail email, and finally from Hotmail to your cell phone as a MMS.
4. Clean your keyboard and mouse with rubbing alcohol after each use.
5. Use wireless headphones to listen to your illegal MP3s during your web surfing.
6. Attach your computer to the Clapper [The quickest way to hide the evidence!]
7. Paper shred your hard drive and starting using a tape drive.
Bonus: Virus Proof Your Surfing!
8. Inject antibiotics into your liquid cooling system!
If all else fails... Blame your grandma!
-x3lite
O.k. But remember, you only have exactly 60 seconds before the Feds can trace you, as shown by the bouncing pinging signals on their huge flat screen monitors in their secret control room.
I might not be "average" here, but I'm one of the Wikipedia admins that Daniel Brandt is stalking. Right now, all he's got on me is my Wikipedia username and some disinformation I fed him using a throwaway email address, but I check his website on a regular basis to make sure he hasn't found anything else. I use an anonymizing proxy for this because there's no way I'm giving him my IP address.
Good advice man! I would've never found out who you are if I didn't see you on TV.
"How to Surf Anonymously without a Trace"
As opposed to how to surf anonymously while being traceable?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
On comment to you naysayers ("MAC addresses don't make it past your router!"): IPv6 autoconfiguration builds the local part of your address from your MAC. Now, the percentage of people using IPv6, and autoconfig on top of that, is currently very small. Still, that's a non-hypothetical leak of your hardware identifier to the Internet at large.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Don't worry about the government... http://www.google.com/psearch
...you try to post comments on Slashdot and other sites which routinely block public proxies in order to cut down on various trolling- and spamming-related activities.
Mainly because I don't think anyone would want to wiretap someone who views goatse on average once every 5 minutes.
If you are interested in anonymized safe browsing, check out the Fearless Browser. It is a totally secure browsing environment that runs inside a stripped down Gentoo virtual machine. It includes Firefox 2.0, Tor for anonymous browsing, OpenDNS for phishing protection and fast DNS lookups, encrypted IM with GAIM, and MPlayer with video plugin for all your "favorite" sites. It has become my browser of choice. I carry it on a USB stick and can use it anywhere.
For illustration, imagine yourself going through life with your name, address, and phone number, along with a map to your home with careful directions as to how to get there, printed on a t-shirt you must wear for all to see. And to top it off, anyone who looks at the shirt can access records about where you've been, what you've read, who you talk to, along with careful timestamps on all these items.
Would you be confortable with that? Are you so free of enemies or sure of the people who watch you that you'd wear that shirt? Or would you rather just walk around without that highly informative piece of clothing, as free men have always done?
To avoid industrial espionage. If you start Googling for particular parts suppliers, your competition can get some idea of what new products you might be developing.
Have gnu, will travel.
What he said. My ISP actually had you type in the cable modems mac address while you were sandboxed to associate the modem with your account during the first-time signup. This was quite some time ago and I'd expect this to now be done using the DHCP option (or similar) that the parent mentioned. Once the modem is live your first network card's mac address goes out on the wire for the DHCP address. This is why you can change card or mac address to get a new IP if the address pool is dynamic.
Any mac addresses beyond that on your network (including the green interface itself) do not go out on the wire. Your own router would need to expose this for no reason at all however there's no reason why some form of tagging/encapsulation could not be done to ID the actual browser PC itself if the router was also supplied by the ISP. I doubt anyone does this as there's not much point, but I only mention it to suggest that it's possible.
I'm not arguing that it should necessarily be impossible for authorities, duly authorized, to monitor someone's communications; there is a legitimate, although very limited, need for that. However, nowhere is it written that we ought to make that terrifically easy, which is what abolishing anonymity and pseudonymity online would amount to.
Here in the U.S. anyway, we have a strong (and historically, well-justified) distrust of government. They have a job to do, but they have to conform and find ways to do their job, within the greater framework of civil society: civil society doesn't, and shouldn't, bend itself around backwards to make it easy for the authorities to do their job. After all, it would probably make life a whole lot easier for the police if we all had identification numbers tattooed on our foreheads, but I don't think anyone thinks that's a great idea.
When the cops have a reason to search your house, they come to your door (after getting a warrant and all other necessary authorizations), and -- if you're not there -- they break the door down with a battering ram. They don't mandate that everyone has to have locks made out of balsa wood, so they the doors are easy to kick down; they use a big iron pipe filled with cement. If you have a safe that they need to get inside, they hire safecrackers to open it up -- they don't ban safes. This necessarily implies that there is, at times, a bit of an 'arms race' between criminals and the police, but this is not always a bad thing. There would be obvious negative consequences of simply mandating things in order to make the authorities' lives easier (e.g. balsa wood locks or plywood safes).
However, this understanding seems to have gotten lost somewhere around the introduction of computers. Now, rather than providing legitimate authorities with the time and equipment necessary to do their jobs correctly within a technologically advanced society, certain politicians and civil authorities have seen fit to try and re-jigger society in order to make it easier on them. Let there be no doubt: this is a destructive shortcut, and it's no better than saying that everyone has to have balsa-wood locks, or drop off a copy of their keys at the local precinct house, in case the police ever need to get in and have a look around. We don't do that, because it would be a vast invitation to abuse, and giving them the ability to tap a few keys and find out everything about what you do online would be no better.
There are reasons why the authorities have certain extraordinary powers, but also reasons why those powers are limited in scope, and are not supposed to be trivially easy to exercise.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Random MAC address generator and changer for Linux
r .py
This is very simple random MAC address generator and changer for Linux.
Its useful when you want to be anonymous in Wi-Fi network.
ust add this script into starting scripts, or run it when you want change
your MAC address.
http://arbornet.org/~kgb/soft/mac_random_generato
Open proxies are well know for being used by spammers and other lowlife. Hence a fair few site will restrict access to known open proxie IP's. That's one of the reason why the lists of proxies are held. Wikipedia tends to block open proxies on sight as they are a well know route for persistent vandals.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
DHCP servers will keep a record of the mac address to IP address correlation. If you are sneaking thru somebody elses wireless connection, then the odds are vanishingly small that mac address is being tracked.
On a corporate network changing the mac makes it very hard to trace back to the end user as , at best, the mac is captured and related to a specific switch port maybe once an hour depending on how on thier game the NOC is.
If we are talking about the mac address facing the ISP then it is indeed tracked, and likely trackable to the end home router no matter how many times the ip/mac is changed.
Changing the external mac on a home router is a good way to get a new ip quickly, but not so good for anonymity as every broadband system that I know tracks the handoff of IPs to the end user to a degree.
No.
Personally, I am entirely comfortable having anyone and everyone know my identity whenever I am online. Anonymity is only necessary for those who have something to hide.
I can only take people who think others should have nothing to hide seriously if they post a link to their history.dat file (i assume they use IE) here.
I, for one, thank you in advance on behalf of our future datamining overlords.
Yes, that is what I thought I read...
Hello actually checking the site server certificate.
"I am gay. And a member of the legalize marijuana political action group. And a member of the "Send the Africans back to Africa" Charity. Also, I routinely travel 56 mph in a 55 mph zone. And get drunk 1/month in my closet. And I once masturbated while looking at pictures of dead dogs. And I collect my own snot and eat it. I still wet my bed. I won't do business with those dirty, thieving Jews. And I am a card carrying member of the ACLU. And I despise children."
Welcome to Slashdot. You'll fit in well here. But don't tell people that you only do 56 in 55 mph zones - they'll blame you for holding up the traffic.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Fucking asshole slow drivers cause more accidents. Especially ones that don't know how to get over. Keeping my eye out on you. Step on the fucking gas man. If you can't afford to drive fast, get a smaller car.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Often, when browsing from work, you don't need 100% anonyminity. Its not like you are logging onto your bank accounts from work, but you often want to visit a site that you don't want your employer to know about. For this reason, I use two fast anonymous web proxies. The First offers quick anonymous browsing (good enough for work) without any additional software to install. The Second has a simpler/cleaner interface.
They will just get to know that I am a ./er. Is that an offence? - redundant.
That is quite scary.
You're right... writing "fuck all fags" on a wall does have consequences, but what you failed to see is my point, which was it can have unintended consequences.
Committing a crime is not exclusive to people that request privacy. That is a very scary thought you have there. That basically throws out the entire idea of innocent until proven guilty. You're assuming people are guilty for wanting to keep their political beleifs anonymous and private? Someone may want to talk openly about being gay online... but their boss is a strict homophobe. They may talk to people about it online anonymously because they fear being fired for being gay. They may not be bashing their boss, but may be asking things like "how do i deal with this personally? or I cant beleive how closed minded my boss is, i'm so affraid to act like myself in front of him because i know it would cost my job" I mean people could be having very serious problems that they want to talk to other people, in a private anonymous setting online.
Thats not criminal.
I dont want to live in a society where we automatically assume all people to be guilty.
Its wrong. The more we treat people like criminals, the more they will resort to criminal activity to escape the governments laws.
I'm not sure a relentless stalker could follow someone to the point of that person commiting suicide, if that person has the ability to be anonymous and hidden. They could escape the harrasment by privacy alone.
Their is no perfect solution, but privacy needs to be protected. It is fundamentally important to the way our society functions and feels secure with being themselves.
Situation:
:D
;)
I am proud subscriber of the services of a small, independent ISP (offering even UUCP and such*g*).
I want to avoid them and any local network administrator whose network I might use away from home from seeing my www surfing habits.
I have root access level control on a linux server.
How I deal with it:
I run http://www.privoxy.org/ on that server. It listens in 127.0.0.1:8118 only. Privoxy is a cool "filtering proxy server" that I also use to rewrite webpages to my liking.
I then connect to that server with a ssh tunnel:
ssh -L 8118:localhost:8118 user@remote.server.tld -t screen -RD
The screen -RD opens my irssi etc. screen session.
(The part "localhost" refers to the machine I use to surf, it is not the 127.0.0.1 from the privoxy configuration! See man ssh for details.)
Now all I need to do is to configure my browser to use localhost:8118 as proxy, and ssh forwards all traffic encrypted.
Result:
Websites I surf to see the IP of my "root server", including a reverse resolving DNS entry and therefore my registration address.
But neither my provider nor a local admin sees my www traffic. This is a situation I very much prefer over a a direct connection, although it requires a ssh session open all the time. But I am a screen-guy anyways!
"I like!"
Thanks for the tip, AC.
Why that's not set to "true" by default in Firefox just boggles the mind. If someone's using a proxy, it seems reasonable to assume that they probably want all of their web-browsing-related traffic proxied. A situation where someone wanted only the HTTP content proxied, but not the DNS resolves, seems like an exception to the rule, where the person could go twiddle preferences -- why they would make the default configuration something that's insecure and potentially dangerous, makes no sense to me.
I'd also note for the record, that at least according to the EFF documentation, Firefox's socks_remote_dns setting may not be trustworthy.
http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/To
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I actually wrote up a blog entry recently on this very topic that others might find helpful:
s urf-and-screen-scrape-anonymously/
http://blog.screen-scraper.com/2007/03/01/how-to-
My biggest recommendation would be to consider commercial VPN solutions, such as:
https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng
http://www.strongvpn.com/
Might want to catch up. Its 2007 and your government now doesnt give a shit about privacy. ;)
This is right and wrong. It's true the US admin cares nothing about privacy, but it isn't my government. If it were my government, one I supported, today Michael Badnarik would be occupying the White House. He was the Libertarian candidate in the 2004 campaign.
FalconShould there be a Law?
How do you afford to run a proxy service like this for free? Bandwidth isn't free. Your credibility would go up a notch or two if you explained this.