Anonymity is your best defense on the Internet.
Anonymity is your best defense on the Internet. You'll want to be able to surf the Internet, send / receive email and post to news groups as anonymously as possible.
(1) Surfing the net:
Go through a proxy server or a series of proxy servers as I do. The first step is to go to
http://www.antiproxy.com/proxysearch.php
and search for available proxies that work from a port your browser can access. You may want to search for proxies on port 3128, which many firewalls allow to pass because they recognize the port as the one used by the popular SQUID proxy/firewall. The web site has the ability to test and ensure that the proxy is accepting connections.
Armed with a list of proxy servers, begin testing them on your browser. Look for a menu that will let you add or change a proxy / port. You may want to test several to see which proxy is the fastest. You should also change proxy servers several times a week, in fact, you'll find that quite a few are taken down after a few days because they were mistakenly left open by an inexperienced system administrator or home user.
The next step is to use one of the following proxy servers that are accessed by appending your destination URL to their URL. These proxies are slow because everyone around the world uses them regularly. To access the smirkingchimp, just use one of the following URLs:
https://proxy.magusnet.com/-_-http://www.smirkingchimp.com
or http://anonymouse.ws/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://www.smirkingchimp.com
The first proxy is located in Arizona, and will establish a secure connection between your browser and the proxy. Everything you type will be encrypted on the way to the proxy server, which will forward your info unencrypted to your destination URL.
The second proxy is located in Germany, and doesn't handle cookies.
If you're in a hurry, or don't care to chain proxy servers, you can just use one of the two proxies listed above, or just use the first proxy you set by changing your browser settings.
(2) Email & news group posting:
PGP is a popular encryption program freely available on the Internet, and you should use it when sending email to your friends. Also use the largest key length available, which I think is about 8K.
Now that your email messages are encrypted, you need to install Mixmaster client software to send both email messages & post to news groups anonymously.
Volunteers around the world have set up these servers to successfully thwart attempts at tracing the source of email messages. As a user, you must assume that half of them are run by governmental agencies or servers that have been hacked. This isn't a problem as you normally route your email messages through a series of them - I usually route my messages through 11 servers, and send 3 copies to help ensure the messages reache their final destination. Sometimes it takes 24 hours for a message to reach its recipient, but that's partially what makes messages virtually impossible to track.
The software takes your message, and either breaks it up into 27K sized messages, or pads characters to make it 27K in size. Then it encrypts your message with the keys of every email server you route your message through, so only the final Mixmaster server ever gets to see your actual email and recipient. Since every email is virtually the same size, encrypted, held for different lengths of time along with other waiting messages by each mixmaster server in the chain before it is remailed - out of sequence with its arrival time - it is impossible to perform "traffic analysis" to follow the email message from its origin to its destination.
Since few use the software, installing it may be a bit difficult. I've installed both the Mac & Linux versions with little difficulty, but have used the Linux version exclusively for over a year.
The same software is used to post to news groups anonymously.
Windows users may want to try Quicksilver:
http://quicksilver.skuz.net/
Mac users have to use:
http://www.geocities.com:80/SiliconValley/Byte/6176/macmixmaster.html
Linux and *nix users can get the goods at:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=37891
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=241996
