Basic Internet Anonymity

Yasholomew Yashinski

yashy@mail.yashy.com.

January 4, 2005

Why anonymity?

Website tracking (logs, cookies)

Email tracking (logs)

TCP/IP (logs)

Logs can be saved, stored, sold and stolen

Personal protection

Personal choice

Areas of concern

Identity

TCP/IP

Email specific

Web specific

Anonymizing your identity

You must choose a pseudonym you wish to use in order to conceal your identity. You may wish to choose an obvious pseudonym, such as Yasholomew Yashinski or more likely you want to choose one that is more likely to blend in such as Rob Mitchell. You will also want to prepare the profile of this identity, based on criteria you will be requested. For example, if you will be using this identity for online forms, do they also ask for complete address? birthdate, sex, and/or employment? It is perhaps easist if you document this in an encrypted textfile in an appropriate location.

You will have to force yourself to seperate your real identity with your new pseudonym. For example in online chat, if the discussion is favourite hobbies or musicians, you may not want your pseudonym to have the same as yourself, as then it may be possible to correlate the two .

Any information you do give that is not generic and potentially may come up again, you should document in your encrypted profile.

tcp/ip

tor is an “anonymous internet communication system” based on the onion routing concept. It allows all of your TCP traffic to be anonymous through proxying. The question to ask is how trusted is your list of proxy hosts.

download at: http://tor.eff.org./

Anonymous Remailers

You can find the current list of public, free, anonymous remailers and the lastest statistics at http://remailer.autistici.org/stats/

By using an anonymous remailer, all of the email headers (traceability) is removed. The simplest form of remailer, cypherpunk, is used by sending an email to the remailer email address, and by adding a header “Request-Remailing-To:” with the intended recipient as the variable following the header. There are many more options such as mixmaster remailers that introduce encryption, as well as chaining remailers for further insurance of anonymity.

Anoymous web proxies

There are a large list of anonymous proxies online. From software proxies you install yourself, to commercial services such as anonymizer.com. which also offers a free service.

2005-01-04T17:03:53