Guide: How to become anonymous online: "
Online life is quickly eroding our usual feelings of personal anonymity. Services like Facebook mean that people are able to delve into our lives like never before.
Stalking, whistle blowing, even watching TV programmes broadcast in other countries; these and other online activities all rely on some form of online anonymity – or lack of it.
We humans don't generally like strangers knowing all about us, but we may be unwittingly providing people with details of our lives we'd rather were kept out of the public gaze. Keeping anonymous online is also a concern for a growing number of people in countries where speaking out has real consequences.
Luckily, there are several steps you can take to stay incognito online, and even some that can reduce the amount of spam email messages you receive.
Keep your email secret
Your email address is a big part of your online identity. It's also a valuable source of revenue for people whose business involves supplying spammers with live addresses.
If the sites you register with aren't secure, hackers can access the database containing all the user credentials, and the email addresses are sure to be sold on.
It's also an unpleasant fact of online life that some website owners lie when they say they'll never give your email address to anyone else. This is predominantly a problem for users of adult sites. Your email address may be sold on to sites with similar themes, which then spam you as well as selling your address on to others.
When an online business folds, the owner might also decide the list of registered users is an asset worth selling.
Luckily, you can use a throwaway address to avoid these problems. These exist for only a short period of time – just long enough to complete a registration process. GuerrillaMail runs one such service.
When you want to sign up for a website, go to GuerrillaMail and hit the 'Get temporary email' button to generate a random address. Copy and paste this address into the site's registration form.
When you return to GuerrillaMail, your temporary inbox will be displayed. If the site in question requires you to confirm your registration, the incoming mail will appear here. If there's a delay, simply click on the link marked 'Give me one full hour again' to reset the life of the address to 60 minutes.
Anonymous personal domains
If you have a family website containing your name and address, and you post that your family is off to visit Auntie Nellie in New Zealand on 30 August for three months, you may attract the attention of local housebreakers.
And even if you remove your address, there's another way they can easily find out where there's a nice, empty house to rob. The Whois record for a domain lists the registrar, the expiry date, the owner's details, the DNS servers and sometimes much more.
Go to an online Whois service such as whois.domaintools.com and enter a domain name (without the www) to see an example. The level of detail can be quite shocking.
When buying a domain, if it's unallocated – meaning that it's free to be sold by any domain registration company – it's a good idea to pick a registrar that will register it on your behalf. Their address will then appear in the domain's Whois record.
Simply search for the company offering the lowest price, then send an email asking whose name the registration will be in if the information isn't on the site. If a specific company or individual is selling the domain you want, they may simply transfer the Whois record to you, exposing your address to the world in the process.
You may be tempted to get round this problem by using a false address. However, the one that appears in the Whois record is usually the one you gave when you entered your credit card details to buy the domain. Because of this, it pays to ask if you can use a PO Box number to cover your tracks.
This service currently costs £63 per year (or £51 for six months) from Royal Mail. If you only need the address to register the domain, you can let the PO Box lapse afterwards.
Anonymous surfing
Web surfing encompasses the use of websites, online forums and chatrooms. As we mentioned in last issue's Uncover the darknet article, you can use the Tor network to hide your IP address completely.
Tor is an 'onion router'. This is a network of computers spread across the globe. When enabled in your browser, Tor redirects all your outgoing web traffic through this network. Each connection takes a random path and emerges at a random point.
When it reaches the destination site, it appears that you're moving around the planet minute by minute. Note that Tor only makes your IP address anonymous, and it only works when you're browsing the web. Other types of traffic will pass straight from your machine to its destination.
Tor is available as a plug-in for Firefox. To use it, download the Tor Bundle from the project website. With Firefox running, run the downloaded executable, select English as the installation language and accept the defaults.
Firefox will ask you to confirm that you want the Tor button extension to be installed. Press 'Install Now' and restart Firefox when asked to. At the bottom right of the Firefox window will be the words 'Tor disabled'. Clicking on this changes it to 'Tor Enabled'.
Now, surf to http://check.torproject.org. If Tor is enabled, the message 'Congratulations. You are using Tor' will be displayed. You should also see an IP address. This address will be different each time you visit the page.
Spoof your country
Rather than bouncing around the world at random, you can also appear to be surfing from a single foreign country. This can be handy for several things.
For example, some TV broadcasters deliberately block foreign fans from accessing online content. Sometimes shows from one country are never broadcast or sold on DVD in others, and yet their makers still block access to them from abroad.
Because the content is being made available online for free, the reasons for blocking access in certain territories often defy logic. If the makers plan to sell the TV programmes abroad, why put them online in the first place? Viewers who are allowed to see the content can easily download and mail them overseas, and content regularly appears in high quality on torrent sites.
To avoid the ire of your ISP for generating too much P2P traffic, one method of accessing territory-restricted content is to use a public proxy server in a country that is allowed access.
Websites such as www.publicproxyservers.com maintain lists of public proxy servers. Because many proxies cache content, they can sometimes even be faster than accessing the original site directly.
On the Public Proxy Servers website, click on the 'Sorted by Country' link at the top left. Find the country in which the broadcaster who's blocking your access resides. Select a sever with a high rating to ensure you get a fast connection.
Clicking a server's details will open the proxy site's web interface. Enter the URL of the content that has been blocked and hit [Enter]. The site should now relay the content between the target site and your browser.
Be careful, though. You must continue to enter any subsequent URLs into the proxy or your request may go straight to the target site and be blocked.
Thwart trackers
Some websites use the services of so-called tracking companies to monitor traffic. However, by installing a small piece of JavaScript on the site, people can monitor a lot more than just numbers of visitors.
The script is automatically downloaded and run when you open the page, and details such as your IP address, ISP, browser and even screen resolution can all be monitored. While this may help web designers to create better websites, it's also possible to trace IP addresses to a general geographic location without ever having to go near your ISP's logs.
To prevent other people discovering this information and possibly tracking your web usage, it's a good idea to use JavaScript blocking. Possibly the best utility for doing this is the Firefox plugin NoScript.
When it's installed, absolutely no JavaScript on a page will run unless you expressly unblock it. This also protects you from malicious JavaScript applets that may have been planted to infect your system in a so-called 'drive-by' attack.
NoScript also allows you to see the secondary domains used by big websites to supply adverts and other annoyances. Because NoScript blocks on a domain basis, it can block third-party ads, too.
To install NoScript, select 'Add-ons' from Firefox's Tools menu. This will pop up a window showing what's already installed on your system. Hit the 'Get Add-ons' button and then click the 'Browse All Add-ons' link. This will take you to Mozilla's add-ons site.
Enter NoScript in the search box and hit [Enter]. NoScript should be the first result returned. Click the button to add it. Press the 'Install Now' button on the pop-up and restart Firefox once installation is complete.
NoScript lives in the bottom right-hand corner of the Firefox window. When you surf to a site, if there are blocked scripts then the blue NoScript 'S' logo will display a red circle with a line through it. Click this and you'll see a list of all the domains with scripts being blocked. Click on the ones you trust (usually just the main domain), and click anywhere on the web page to continue.
One side effect of blocking scripts using NoScript is that sites with media will sometimes complain that you don't have Adobe Flash installed. If this happens, simply look through the list for the site that serves the media and unblock it.
This inconvenience is a small price to pay to stay safe and away from the prying eyes of online marketing people. By blocking scripts that may take time to load from overworked third-party servers, NoScript also helps to improve the speed of the sites you visit.
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(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)
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