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Do You Need to Surf Anonymously?
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Mar 13, 2007 11:01 AM
from the don't-forget-to-wear-sneakers dept.
from the don't-forget-to-wear-sneakers dept.
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.'"
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Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
An anonymous proxy may make you anonymous to the final site, but both your ISP and the proxy know where you've been and when.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:4, Insightful)
IMO, all software ought to proxy DNS requests automatically if it's being told to use a proxy that supports DNS resolution (SOCKS4a or SOCKS5); that Firefox and some other software leak requests even in the presence of a proxy that's capable of doing it, is a serious bug and security flaw.
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:5, Informative)
you are 1/2 way there. First use a OS that allows you to change your MAC address, BEFORE you ever go online and do things you dont want traced to you, CHANGE YOUR MAC ADDRESS. in fact I reccomend changing it every time you go online. That is what they are looking to trace because the data mining guys still think that it's a unique identifier. Second you need to use a browser that allows you to change it's identifier and allow you to destroy all cookies every session. Honestly changing your identifier on a regular basis a little bit and getting rid of cookies does help a LOT. last thing you need is having a doubleckick cookie ratting on you.
Do those and NEVER use a network that is tied to you. This is all really basic dont get caught hacker stuff guys.
Parent
Change MAC when renewing DHCP? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
foo@bar:~$ cat /usr/local/bin/changeMac.sh
foo@bar:~$ cron
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Am I off base here?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Think of it this way. your computer's MAC address is like your fingerprint. when you touch something you leave your fingerprint.
If I use a phone to make long distance threats, my fingerprints dont transfer to the other side, but they are there on the phone that I used which is easily found.
understand now?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:5, Informative)
1. You are correct, the MAC address doesn't get any farther than the first router. That is how routers operate, by swapping the mac address in the packet with their own and the next hop while leaving the network address the same so it can be 'routed' there.
2. If you own the whole network you can eventually trace a mac back to an originating port on a switch, but that involves owning quite a bit of gear, and its not like its a logged thing, switches eventually allow mac entries to expire or things would break if you moved ports on the switch.
3. In the instance of home networking you are behind a router before you even get to your ISPs router, they never see your mac (unless you are directly connected to the modem, but we are talking leeching wireless).
4. MAC address ARE NOT UNIQUE! They are nearly unique, but if you operate under the idea that mac addresses are unique then your life will be hell when you have to track down a duplicate MAC on a large enterprise network because you believe it cannot happen. It does, although infrequently, and it makes networking very very 'interesting' when it happens.
The best they can do is rush down and grab that wireless access points within a few minutes of the last packet you sent and try and get the MAC before it gets flushed. Then they would have to go after the manufacturer to try and associate that MAC to YOU purchasing it. Now given that the manufacturer has likely made more than one device with that same MAC under the correct assumption they will likely never exist on the same network, and also that a MAC is not a hard thing to spoof, that information is completely worthless. Saying they can track you down based on your MAC is like saying I can identify an individual based on him using 192.168.100.15. Ultimately the best they can really do is determine that the traffic came from the IP the ISP assigned, and there is no real way to verify with any accuracy the traffic came from any specific hardware.
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a law-abiding citizen, and I still demand my privacy rights. I don't want anyone monitoring the trail of web sites I visit daily, no more than I would like someone following me around in a car while I run run my daily errands.
Parent
right to Anonymousity (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
FalconParent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
And given what's happening to privacy and protest in some Western countries. soon the same reasons may apply there too.
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:4, Informative)
There are actually many good reasons for using an anonymous proxy.
1). You want to search for information regarding an embarrassing physical condition and don't want those URLs logged at your router.
2). You are worried about the site you are visiting trying to infect your machine. Most anonymous proxies will block most scripts (in addition to advertisements).
3). You are researching your competitions website and don't want to show up in their logs.
4). In the U.S. you have a right to privacy and you simply want to exercise that right.
5). You work in government and want to visit sites that might otherwise be logged or blocked. [webpronews.com]
There are many other legitimate uses for anonymous proxies.
As a disclaimer, my company does not keep any logs -- the logs are rotated nightly at which point a cron runs and deletes all of the previous days logs. Our URLs are obfuscated but not encrypted. A sysadmin on the clients end could log all of these connections at their router and be able to decipher the URLs someone is visiting.
We also offer an SSL encrypted (https://) version of the site. You do have to trust our certificate though
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:5, Interesting)
How about a battered wife looking for a way out of her marriage, and a husband who clams to be able to read whatever she writes? (for the record, this really happened to someone I know, but luckily she's free of him now)
There will always be cases where you don't want people to know what you're doing. Many of these cases are legitimate interests in preserving mere privacy, and some are because there really is avoiding oppression.
Parent
Pot, meet kettle; kettle, pot. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
Carlos mencia [wikipedia.org] said it better, if your going to the store to buy dog food, vaseline, and condoms, then you better pay cash. Otherwise why care who tracks your credit card purchases.
Just a credit card number is mostly useless, or just a password, or just a email address. Watch my surfing enough, I'll drop enough information to scam me good. If you can't tie my surfing to one person/business it's not so valuable. Tie all the web info from a company together you'll learn what paths their thinking of following, and you can take some of the profit for yourself for the idea.
Also sometimes you realize your actions may be legit, but may draw undo attention. Maybe you want to buy your wife flowers and choclates for a suprise, but she may assume your having a affair. Or maybe your writing a fiction story about someone who murders their wife, but it may never get finished. Or maybe your blowing the whistle on someone really powerfull...
Thier are lots of obvious times to not be tracked that are legit, writers/reporters are the most obvious, now everyone with internet access becomed a published writer in minutes.
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:4, Informative)
You never know who's monitoring you, especially on an open wifi network.
Also, if you're using Tor or JAP it's a good idea to also run Adblock+ (use easylist [adblockplus.org] and add the tracking filter), Flashblock, and Noscript to make sure you keep your anonymity.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Back to the proffit issue, if
Anonymousity (Score:4, Informative)
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.
FalconParent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:4, Insightful)
This is either Twain-level satire or the most self-defeating comment ever on Slashdot. And, heaven knows, there's some pretty stiff competition.
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice slant.
Let's slant it the other way:Does this apply too?
- If your married, and your wife doesn't want you looking at porn, then be happy with what you have (your wife) or shut up, or leave her.
- If your married, and your wife doesn't want you porking her sister/best friend/random woman, then be happy with what you have (your wife) or shut up, or leave her.
Why is the responsibility on her to stop you from looking at something she doesn't want you to look at?
Now let's try being neutral:
If your married, and your wife doesn't want you looking at porn, then talk to her about it and work out a mutually beneficial understanding.
Parent
Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
What if you're already behind a proxy server (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Starting at the desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Starting at the desktop (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Still, your employer probably keeps logs. If you really must visit sites that you don't want your employer to know about (ie, jobsearch), do it sparingly or just wait until you get home. You could also set up OpenVPN and run that over a proxy server and browse from your home network.
Re:Starting at the desktop (Score:4, Informative)
Ssh into your box at home and use freenx (or regular x-forwarding if your latency is low enough). Then just use it as if you were browsing at home.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't. It's even more fundamentally impossible as DRM, because you're de/encrypting it on the machine you're trying to hide it from. Certainly you can encrypt past a proxy, but if they see encrypted traffic coming from your machine, they have every right to capture it locally. Their computer, their network, their sensitive data on it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
if you are attempting to surf anonymously at work - outside the scope of your employment - then you are an idiot. your employer will assume - probably quite rightly - that whatever it is you are after, it is not good news.
You got proxy, kid (Score:4, Insightful)
It is illegal to ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It should also be illegal for your ISP to record your browsing history.
It's about privacy and freedom.
cite please (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Librarians learned in the 60s not to keep patron records like this. It turns us in to sleeper agents for a snooping government. Pre-9/11 this was the widespread sentiment [webjunction.org] too.
I guess that the 9/11 hijackers used library computers [firstmonday.org] doesn't help, nor do
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't sound right, but
Re:It is illegal to ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Private enterprises (an ISP) are free to impose any demands they like (as long as the government agrees)
Parent
Re:It is illegal to ... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
public proxies? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Useless for "normal" users (Score:3, Insightful)
That's it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Anonymity is somewhat overrated. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
MiM attack. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:honestly... I was thinking about this (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Anonymous != illegal behavior (Score:3, Informative)