Windows XP Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 39 Surf Anonymously Without a Trace

Feel like someone is watching you? On the Web,
they probably are. Protect your privacy by using anonymous proxy
servers.

Whenever you surf the Web, you leave
yourself open to being snooped upon by web sites.
They can track your
online travels, know what operating system and browser
you're running, find out your machine name, peer
into your clipboard, uncover the last sites you've
visited, examine your history list, delve into your cache, examine
your IP address and use that to learn basic information about you
such as your geographic location, and more. To a great extent, your
Internet life is an open book when you visit.

Don't believe me? Head to http://www.anonymizer.com/snoop/test_ip.shtml.
This page, run by the Anonymizer.com web service, tells you
what your IP address and machine name are. And
that's just a start. Click on the links on the left
side, such as "Exposed Clipboard"
and "Geographical Location."
You'll see just a small sampling of what web sites
can learn about you. Figure 4-10 shows a web site
reporting on my geographic location. It's close
enough; I live in Cambridge rather than Boston, and we generally
require that people turn over their passports at the border.

Figure 4-10. The Anonymizer.com web service, exposing my current geographic location

Much of the reason why web sites can find out this information about
you is due to the trusting nature of the Internet's
infrastructure and is inherent in the open client/server relationship
between your web browser and the servers on the sites you visit. But
a lot of it also has to do with the ability to match up information
from your PC to information in publicly available databasesfor
example, databases that have information about IP addresses.

The best way to make sure web sites can't gather
personal
information about you and your computer is to surf anonymously; use
an anonymous proxy server to sit between you and the web sites you
visit. When you use an anonymous proxy server, your browser
doesn't contact a web site directly. Instead, it
tells a proxy server which web site you want to visit. The proxy
server then contacts the web site, and when you get the web
site's page you don't get it
directly from the site. Instead, it's delivered to
you by the proxy server. In that way, your browser never directly
contacts the web server whose site you want to view. The web site
sees the IP address of the proxy server, not your
PC's IP address. It can't read your
cookies, see your history list, or examine your clipboard and cache,
because your PC is never in direct contact with it.
You're able to surf anonymously, without a trace.

There are two primary ways to use anonymous proxy servers. You can
run client software on your PC, which does the work of contacting the
server for you, or you can instead visit a web site, which then does
the work of contacting the server.

4.8.1 Web-Based Anonymizer

If you don't want
to go to the hassle of installing a clientand if you
don't want to pay for softwareto surf
anonymously, go to Anonymizer.com (http://www.anonymizer.com). In the box near
the top of the page, type the name of the site to which you want to
surf, and you'll head there anonymously. The proxy
server will grab the page for you, and you'll get
the page from the proxy server. You can also download a free version
that runs as a toolbar in Internet Explorer. Surf as you would
normally, and you'll visit those web sites directly.
When you want to visit a site anonymously, click on a button and the
anonymous proxy server will do the work for you.

A fuller version of the program is available on a subscription basis
for $29.95 per year or $9.95 for three months. It blocks banner ads,
stops pop ups, encrypts the URLs you type so that they
can't be read by your ISP or network administrator,
and adds a few other features as well. I don't find
the extra features worth the money, but if these kinds of things are
important to you, go ahead and spend the money. (To learn how to
block pop-ups, turn to [Hack #33].)

When you use this site, some sites will appear broken, with text and graphics displaying oddly. But it's a small price to pay for your privacy.

4.8.2 Get Software for Anonymous Surfing

If you prefer to install software, get
Steganos Internet Anonym 5 (http://www.steganos.com/en/sia). In addition
to anonymous proxy serving, it kills pop ups and manages cookies. You
can try it for free, but if you want to keep it
you'll have to pay $29.95.

4.8.3 See Also

[Hack #34]

[Hack #46]

[Hack #48]

Go to http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailerl
to send email anonymously so that it can't be traced
to you as the sender. Whistle-blowers might want to use this feature,
but others should make sure not to abuse it.

For shareware that cleans out your cached files, destroys your
history trail, and uses a variety of other methods to clean all
traces of where you've surfed, try SurfSecret
Privacy Protector (http://ww.surfsecret.com).