Re: anonymous proxy or tor onion routing for privacy

["Jeffrey F. Bloss" <jbloss () tampabay rr com>]

Tsu  eloquently indited:

> There is no true anonymous browsing... even if you pay for a third
> party service they still have your records which could be subject to
> subpeona, and your ISP has records as well,

Pay-for, indeed any single proxy of any type can't be truly anonymous.
They're the least anonymous of all the choices for obvious reasons, but
for some reason people believe that if you pay someone it's more secure
than other, more secure methods.  

You can achieve anonymity of considerable strength by wrapping all your
traffic in layers of encryption and routing it through networks of
servers who strip away those layers in turn, so that no single network
node can ever know all three key pieces to the puzzle... who originated
the traffic, where it's going, and its contents. If you can remove only
one of those things at each node and do it properly, you will be truly
anonymous at the other end of the network. This is how onion routing
and anonymous remailers achieve true anonymity.

That's the theory anyway. :) In practice there's a whole lot of
"gotchas" that might make your anonymity fail. But they're almost all
centered around something other than the anonymous mechanism itself,
like users or or their flaky software leaking personal information. 

-- 
Hand crafted on 9 November, 2006 at 12:27:02 EST using
only the finest domestic and imported ASCII.

Of all the people I know, you're one of them.


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