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.'"

Public Proxy != Anonymous

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.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

This is what Privoxy and certain Firefox extensions are for; they catch the outgoing DNS requests and make sure that they're relayed (in encrypted form) to the proxy as well, so that you're not giving away the addresses of the pages you're requesting by leaking DNS requests.

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.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

Or hack into somebody's wide-open box (usually Windows) and run your proxy daemon. It seems to keep the spammers safe.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

The best you can do is leech wireless and pretend to be someone else.

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.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

Only when you and the investigator are both active on the network at the same time in which case changing your MAC really makes no real difference. As I mentioned, the MAC goes away within minutes on the network, its not transmitted past the first hop router, and its not unique beyond the 1st hop router. Given that that end of forensics is part of my job I am pretty sure I know how it works. I don't care what your friends tell you, the cops, feds, and investigators are not using MAC addresses as 'fingerprints' of hardware. It just simply cannot be used like that with even a shred of reliability. The only place your MAC address even is used in ANY part of the connection is between your computer and your default gateway with any switches (not hubs) in between keeping that record for a few minutes.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

Your other replyer "Lumpy" doesn't know what he is talking about.

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.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

You probably don't mind the government illegally tapping your phone either. I mean, if you're not doing anything wrong, why does it matter?

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.

right to Anonymousity

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.

Falcon

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

So if you are doing something that you don't want people to know you are doing, my question is, what the hell is wrong with you?

I'm in China and I'm researching about local groups who campaign for democracy, you insensitive clod!

And given what's happening to privacy and protest in some Western countries. soon the same reasons may apply there too.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

My company hosts an anonymous proxy (see my sig). While there is a fair amount of pr0n and the like, there is a *lot* of traffic from China and other countries with restrictive laws about what you can and cannot research. This only amounts to about 15-30% of our traffic though. Most of our traffic is to sites like myspace, facebook, photobucket etc.

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 :) Logs are rotated nightly and dumped, same as on the "insecure" version of the site.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

Bingo! Advertisers want to know how many pageviews you get.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

Have you considered that there might be political reasons? Let's say I work for a rabid Bush supporter, do I want him to know that I'm a regular on the Daily Kos even though it's not forbidden to go there on my lunch break? Do I want my ISP to know what sort of games I like to play at home? Do I want you to see all of my browsing habits so that you can harass me based on what you know?

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.

Pot, meet kettle; kettle, pot.

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.

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 /. to act very strangely for the last few minutes.)

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

So if you are doing something that you don't want people to know you are doing, my question is, what the hell is wrong with you?

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.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

I don't know why people need to surf anonymously.

At home I rarely surf anonymously. However, when I'm at a hotel, coffee shop, on campus, etc I always browse anonymously. If I'm doing casual browsing I'm using either JAP [tu-dresden.de] or Tor+Privoxy. If I'm logging in to, say, Gmail or Slashdot I OpenVPN into my home network and browse from there.

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.

So if you are doing something that you don't want people to know you are doing, my question is, what the hell is wrong with you?

Please post your full name, address, pictures of yourself and your family, and a full log of everything you've done in the last month. Don't want to? What are you trying to hide?

Anonymousity

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.

Falcon

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

...Says an "Anonymous Coward".
This is either Twain-level satire or the most self-defeating comment ever on Slashdot. And, heaven knows, there's some pretty stiff competition.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

If your married, and your wife doesn't want you looking at porn, then she should offer alternatives or shut up.

Nice slant.
Does this apply too?

If your married, and your wife doesn't want you porking her sister/best friend/random woman, then she should offer alternatives or shut up.

Let's slant it the other way:
- 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.

Re:Public Proxy != Anonymous

If my married what?

What if you're already behind a proxy server

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.

Starting at the desktop

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.

Re:Starting at the desktop

Here's how: google for 'nph-proxy.cgi' and then find one that uses https. Your employer will only see an ssl connection being made to the same server over and over.

Re:Starting at the desktop

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.

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.

You got proxy, kid

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 to ...

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.

Re:It is illegal to ...

Most libraries in the US make it a point to get rid of any data linking a book to a patron once the book's returned, especially since the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act (which requires them to turn over such data to the government if they're asked for it, but doesn't require them to actually keep the data in the first place). However, I'm not aware of any state that actually makes it illegal to keep such data. I've got tens of thousands of old books with cards listing everyone who checked them out within a certain time period, before there were computers to track such things, and it's certainly not illegal to have these. The law in my state does make it illegal to turn over these records to anyone who doesn't have a court order to see them, but just keeping them isn't illegal. In fact, I'd say the Justice Department would probably like it very much if it was actually required to keep the records forever. Or, you know, turn them over to be put in a federal database every time a book is checked out, so they could do some datamining to find potential terrorists.

cite please

you claim It is illegal for a library to keep a record of the books you have checked out after they're returned

I say, you should be right, but you are completely wrong.
try this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fbi+library+r ecords [google.com]

so, if you have a citation to back up your assertion, please, supply the citation.
I say, you are flat out wrong.

Re:It is illegal to ...

Libraries are run by the government, which you are in a relationship with by fiat.

Private enterprises (an ISP) are free to impose any demands they like (as long as the government agrees)

public proxies?

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.

Just because you asked....

....yes.

Any other time, the answer would be "not really".

Useless for "normal" users

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?

That's it? Use a proxy? Who here didn't already know that?

A good resource for anonymizers

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 [freeproxy.ru] 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.

Carnivore lives

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.

Anonymity is somewhat overrated.

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

Why not use tor

http://tor.eff.org/>
A tool specially designed for privacy.

Don't need anonymity...

Why would anyone need to access the web anonymously?

If there are lists ...

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.

Do it with Google

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.

MiM attack.

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.

Why? Some U.S. web sites disallow foreign access.

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.

A Guide For Windows

I wrote up a very simple set of step-by-step instructions entitled "How to be Anonymous on the World Wide Web Using Windows" [fourmajor.com]

SOCKS Proxy

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.

It's not anonymous unless it's encrypted...

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 [slashdot.org] thing, or that your connection is being monitored directly [wikipedia.org], 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?

How difficult is this...

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.

Insecure hosts

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.