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Anonymous Web Surfing
How safe are your online browsing habits from prying eyes? Most IT security professionals will
agree that using the Internet has serious security and privacy deficits. Just ask google who
last year was served with a subpoena by the US Government to turn over ALL Internet searches
in a broad request to 'determine if people are searching for pornography'. You know your IP address
is tracked by google for every search you do, and logged - and now in the possession of the US
Government. No need for panic, right?
To place a www.viewtheip.com information box on your Web site, copy the following code to any Web page.
If you point your web browser to a website or use any Internet
related-program, such as eMail, FTP, Music Download Services, web
searches - a server at the other end uses your IP address in order to send you
the information you requested. You can't be anonymous, by blocking
or hiding your IP address (sort of like blocking caller ID on a telephone
call) because then the servers on the Internet you are trying to communicate
with you could not communicate back without knowing your IP address. All
Internet servers and services run some sort of logging, identifying your IP
address, the exact access time and your complete surf history at their site.
Google goes one step further, and tracks what topics you search for most,
and what web sites you visit most - to target specific advertisements to
you. Companies use these log files for statistical, marketing, technical or legal
purposes . While accessing the Internet at work, your company can and
will most likely log and trace everything you do.
It's not a stretch to realize that our privacy is in serious jeopardy today
when using the Internet. Today's latest geolocation technology
allows web sites and anyone monitoring traffic to pinpoint your IP address
to you (within miles and close enough so with just a phone call to your ISP they could
learn your true identity). The music industry has been quietly monitoring
IP addresses of music file sharers, the government is now monitoring search
requests for 'questionable' content under the guise of protecting children
from pornography. Do you really want big brother knowing your political
views simply by monitoring the log files and tracking the IP address of
certain web sites?
There are a number of solutions to help improve your privacy.
But before you go out and download tons of privacy software packages,
consider at least four things:
- No matter how much technical knowledge you may have, there is always someone out there who is smarter than you, so do not become careless.
- Think of the high value of the Human Right to Privacy. Do not abuse it for unethical purposes.
- Running privacy tools on your computer at work without approval of the IT department is against the rules and can get you fired.
- Is it really worth the money and effort? Added security comes at a price: the more software you install, the more problems will arise; some sites may need time consuming tweaking and some solutions are really slow...
Techniques to hide your web traffic from suspicious eyes:
When web surfing, your web browser utilizes an insecure (un-encrypted)
transmission protocol called HTTP. HTTP connections offer no protection,
in fact it was designed with the freedom and open-sharing of information
when the protocol was created. The secure and encrypted version of
web surfing is done via the HTTPS (or Secure Socket Layer, SSL for short)
protocol. To access the SSL version of a web site try replacing
http://websitename.com with https://websitename.com.
All modern web browsers support SSL encryption out of the box but many web
servers have disabled this protocol because the encryption process would mean additional
processing burden for their equipment and added licensing costs.
Using SSL browser encryption by itself only secures web traffic while
traveling through the Internet, but your identity is still traceable since
your IP address is still tracked in the remote web server's logs. For instance,
if you want to visit a political web page - using SSL will prevent someone
from knowing that you read a specific message in the forums, but since your IP
address is still logged someone could associate you with having visited that
web site.
Web Proxies, or Anonymous Web Proxies allow you to hide your
IP address from the destination server, in essence you can hide your identity.
With these anonymizers, you are not contacting a destination website directly, but
rather use one or more proxy severs located between your computer
and the final destination web server. Anonymizing proxies remove your IP Address
(and possibly additional information) from each and every TCP/IP packet and
substitutes it with the proxy's information, on the
fly. This way, a website visited through an
anonymizing proxy has no way of knowing where you are located, because all
requests look like originating from the proxy server's IP address.
There can be risks even with anonymous web proxies:
- You start to get careless thinking you can get away with anything - but remember there is always someone out there smarter and faster than you.
- If your anonymizer does not block or spoof cookies and you have visited a specific website before without an anonymizer, this site may still be able to identify you.
- Companies offering anonymizing services are promising not to disclose their log files to anyone. But can you really trust them? Law enforcing agencies do have access to these logs, and in these days of terrorist threat, it would be quite unrealistic to assume that secret service agencies would confine themselves from using this excellent surveillance instrument.
- Your employer may notice that you are using anonymizing services, he might even see the websites you are visiting embedded in the URL sent to the proxy or from DNS queries and may cause you to be monitored on a watch list.
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