[Ariticle] Anonymity Within The Net

[risker]

Anonymity

I can see you hiding in the shadows over there and i can also see and record all those websites, FTP servers and other hiding places and crevices that you see on the web. The type of information collected by these records and is available to the webmasters of the sites you visit include the address of the previous site you visited, your IP address, your computer’s, your physical location and the name of your ISP along with less personal details such as the operating system and the screen resolution. If someone snooping through your dustbin to gather information on consumer trends or following your every move to see where you go everyday you wouldn't be too happy would you? Well the web is no different to the real world, it’s still a violation of privacy and a threat to security and you don’t have to tolerate it.
Hell it’s even a law!
Amendments 4 and 5 of The United States Bill Of Rights protect the right to be free of unwarranted and unwanted government intrusion into one's personal and private affairs, papers, and possessions. Article 12 of The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."


Proxy servers

Each time you visit a Website, detailed information about your system is automatically provided to the webmasters. This knowledge can be adapted by hackers to take advantage of your computer system or you can be sent to the market science departments of consumer corporations who by following your Internet surfing will be better equipped to lead a more relevant spam towards you. Your best protection against what is known is known as a proxy server to hide the revealing information that is shown by the websites you’ve visited, allowing you to surf the web anonymously. They work by altering the way in which their browser retrieves web pages or connect to remote servers. With a provision of the proxy server, whether you “ask” IE or Firefox to show a website, the request is first sent through an external server which is completely independent of your ISP server’s. The server then makes the third request in your name so that it appears that the request came from, this means that you and your actual IP address and knowledge is never disclosed by the websites you visit. Nothing is transferred at all to the websites and the entire process takes less than a minute.

There are two different ways of utilising proxy's to assist you and both methods have their benefits and disadvantages. The first method is to use an online proxy server. What involves visiting an online website proxy server’s home page every time you want to browse a websites anonymously. The core component of such a system is the dialog box where you write in the address of the website you desire to visit. Each time you enter the URL of the site you want to browse through the proxy, your personal information, IP address and so on is first encrypted before being sent to the site allowing you to maintain your anonymity. Two of the best demonstrations of this kind of web service are:

http://www.proxy.org
http://www.anonymizer.com

Obviously one big disadvantage of using an Internet service like Anonymizer or Proxy, is that you have to visit the proxy’s homepage every time you want to surf websites anonymously. You could make one of these proxies as your default home page in your browser. The second disadvantage annoyance is that proxy websites often put ads on the pages of their proxies and the websites you visit through their website. They are inserted on pages automatically for money, They have to pay their webhosting bills in some way or form. Solutions, more sophisticated and more convenient are also on offer with all come with a price.

The second method you can use to defend your privacy via a proxy server involves modifying the settings of your browser so you can surf anonymously without having to visit a proxy’s homepage and loading it that way. To do this you first need to know the name of your proxy server and the access number used. This data can be accumulated from a list of public proxy servers or a private proxy subscription founded service. Once you have the name of the proxy server you desire to use, choose Internet options of the tools menu of your browser. Now select 'Connections' followed by 'Settings' and tick the 'use a proxy server' check box. To complete the job all you have to do now is type in the name of the server in the 'address' box, the port which it uses in the 'port' box and go forth and surf anonymously.

Free, proxies such as this advertised on anonymity sites, are likely to be highly overused, and consequently the speed at which websites can slow down epically. In this case you can go in search of a public proxy server lists. To find such a list you can search through sites such as.

http://www.proxys4all.com/

However, this method isn't problem free either, so before you get ahead of yourself and run around the net with proxies there are a few things you need to be aware of. It's very easy to use proxies to protect your privacy, but often the disadvantages of utilizing them far outweigh the benefits. The big disadvantage is that the proxy servers are provided free and public proxies are nearly all over used and it will mean the proxies may be epically slow when browsing the net. Finding good connection reliable proxies is a challenge all on its own and will be something you will be glad to learn how to do easily. You could find a list of public proxies and then test with each one, one by one until you find one that runs at a decent speed, but this usually can be very easily time consuming and annoying. Instead, your search for good proxies would be much more time saving if you got a program to do this annoying and time burning task. There are virtually hundreds of proxy searching programs around the net which can do that task of searching for you, and almost all of them are free to download and use. What these programs tend to do is search the internet for proxies. These servers are then tested for speed and anonymity (not all of them are truly anonymous, even if they claim to be!) and once you find one which suits your requirements you can select it as your default proxy with the click of a button.

One of the most fundamental benefits of utilizing an automated tool to search the net for proxy servers is that you do not have to keep editing your proxy settings manually each time you wish to try out a new one if the last one failed or was to slow. Instead, what you do is enter 'localhost' or '127.0.0.1' into the 'address' box and '8088' into the 'port' box of your browser's proxy settings menu and then forget about it. All future proxy switching is then orchestrated from within your proxy seeking software, which subsequently relays the data to your browser or whatever type of application you are attempting to make anonymous. For those of you who are curious 'localhost' and the IP address ‘127.0.0.1’ is the name by which every computer on the internet refers to itself.
Here's a good assortment of links, which should help you to get started

  http://www.a4proxy.com/Anonymity4Proxy
  http://www.helgasoft.com/hiproxy/HiProxy
  http://www.proxy-verifier.com/ProxyVerifier
  http://www.photono-software.de/Stealther.

You shall probably find when utilising these programs you have will have trouble finding good fast proxies. It is because of this that many people choose only to "create" or "host" proxy servers temporarily while doing something which may be illegal and get them in trouble with their ISP, or even possibly, the law. One of the most obvious example of a situation in which you would want to cover your tracks is when scanning for public FTP servers and secretly uploading to them and possibly downloading private information from them. Most other internet activities are unlikely to incur serious consequences so under these circumstances you can safely surf the web without a proxy. If you're really serious about defending your privacy, however, your best bet is likely to invest in a dedicated, stable proxy for example the ones offered at
http://www.ultimate-anonymity.com/UltimateAnonymity

These are almost never free, but will usually be worth the money if you aren't enthusiastic on relentlessly swapping proxy servers.

Before splashing out though it may be worth checking if your present ISP has a proxy server of its own which you can use. These aren't there to help you to commit cyber crimes and get away with it, they actually have a legitimate purpose as well - otherwise they wouldn't exist. You see, proxy servers were originally designed to help speed up web page loading times. Proxy servers contain a cache of all the web pages which have been requested via the browsers of the people using the proxy. When somebody surfs the internet using proxies, the proxies first check is to see if it already has a copy of the website stored in it's cache archive. If their version of the website in the cache is up-to-date, it is then sent to your computer and is projected in your browser. If the page found in the cache of the proxy server is older than the one stored on the server hosting the page, a new request to the websites server is made and the page is updated in the cache archive of the proxy before being sent to you. Because these servers use very fast internet connections so they can retrieve websites at much greater speeds than you can via your home computer. If these servers are located physically nearer to your home than the web host servers you desire to retrieve web pages from, the speed at which you browse the web will be accelerated
.

Anonymity - Cookies
One last significant issue you need to be aware of before leaping into the net with both feet is that different programs have to be setup in different ways before being able to make external connections via a proxy server. For demonstration, you can surf the web anonymously by modifying the settings in Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator as explained earlier in this tutorial, but this will only affect your browser. If you then utilized Flash FXP to copy a batch of 0-day releases from one FTP server to another, this isn't going to defend you at all. What you have to do is enter the name of the proxy server into each application you wish to make anonymous before making any external connections. This can usually be done by browsing through the preferences of your program to see if there is a 'use proxy server' option available. If the option is available make sure you use it.

Cookies
You have little to word from the edible kind, but the digital ones can be a foremost risk to your security and privacy. A cookie is a little text file, a cookie is no bigger then 1kb. Cookies are created and stored on your hard drive whenever you visit a dynamic (or an interactive if you like) website. These are used to log your personal details so that you can access members only areas of web sites without having to type in a password every time, or to retain your customised settings so that they are available the next time you visit. If you're using a shared computer, anyone who visits the same site that you have previously logged in to can access your accounts. This is particularly worrying if you have entered your credit card details into a form on an website such as paypal or ebay. If your browsers settings are set to automatically fill in these details whenever you return to a previously visited websites, this information could be clearly visible to anyone reading that. We all know where that could end us if left unattended for too long.
I could blab on and on about how to do it the manual way but why do it manually when you've got programs to do it for you. These 'cookie crunching' programs allow you to be more selective when editing, viewing and deleting cookies from your system, and some of them will even prevent cookies from being created in the first place. Yea, you want these links right now so here they are:

http://www.rbaworld.com/Programs/CookieCruncher
http://www.thelimitsoft.com/CookieCrusher
http://www.angove.com/CookieKiller
http://www.kburra.com/CookiePal
http://www.cookiecentral.com/CookieWebKit

[Serverman]

Wow! Thanks for this ^^ You wrote this yourself?

[risker]

Yea, i got bored

[dog_keeper]

thanks! xD You are bored aren't you

[risker]

Originally Posted by dog_keeper

thanks! xD You are bored aren't you

I tend to get bored from time to time.. lol