Without scanning the whole of the threads (a search was sort of fruitless) I was looking to see if there was a good thread on general security related to home pc's on a typical network (cable) connection. And it's not that I'm engaged in anything particularly shady, it's just that the thought that every email, every IP I bounce off, is tracked. Seems to me there ought to be simple steps one can take to be a little more anonymous, etc. If there's threads or comments to pass along, I'm all ears. :sunny:
I know that with the Firefox browser, which I am currently using, if you click on the Options, then go to the Privacy tab, you can click the Tell websites I do not want to be tracked option. I think you are perhaps looking for something more, and if that is the case there are plenty of privacy/security extensions for the Firefox browser. I do not use them personally, because they tend to slow the browser down significantly.
Using TOR is completely anonymous , and very slow! Lol it reroutes your IP to many times to count. The military came up with this "deep web" in order to send top secret intelligences. Once you're successful, you will get your first glimpse of the hidden wiki, which includes, almost everything. Heard of Silk Road right?
As for FREE anti virus. Avira is the best, then for paid its kapersky. Both of which hackers use. Avira has an unbelievable detection rate. It's updated almost daily.
Thanks guys. I'm good with AV, and I've read about tor and thought that might be a way to go. Is it that slow? And does that really make you more anonymous to your isp? I'm not interested in SR
Tor is very slow, but it works. I used to visit here for a while but it won't prevent your ISP from tracking your online activities considering that even if using something like Tor, all the traffic is still going to/from the specific IP # that the ISP has assigned you. Tor only works in blocking people who are on the outside trying to track you, but your ISP is on "your side of the wall" so to speak. I don't really think there is a way to block your ISP from checking what type of data is being transferred through your connection, as they are the ones providing that connection. But, most ISP's don't really give a shit and only take any action when forced to by some other entity; government, studios, etc. in order to cover their own asses. Why do you feel the need to maintain anonymity with your internet provider???
It depends on the level of anonymity you're after. If you're concerned about tracking bots and data mining, something such as tor is generally sufficient, provided one follows tors advice and doesn't think simply using the browser as sufficient. If one were to peruse certain proclivities off a certain road and expect tor to suffice, then one would be mistaken. All traffic from Tor can be viewed both from your ISP and from a exit node. The good news is that Tor makes it very difficult to snoop to see who sent and recived whatever. Many people set up as exit nodes just to watch the traffic. If one were needing to remain completely anonymous, one would not use their own internet (Neighbors network... still slightly dangerous or public wi-fi) use a live boot OS, spoof you MAC address, chain proxies, and don't visit anything with any connection to you in session. (email, facebook, hipforums)
Hey thx ! Thing is, I'm not trying to hide nor is this asking for tips on being 'anonyomous' online for nefarious purposes. I do my banking online, limit financial information as much as i can, but no matter what you're always vulnerable. Just switched over to Chrome. It seems very configurable for privacy so I'm going to start with that. It's not that Google is "private" it's more that it's harder for some random kid to hack an account. I'm not sure that I want to go to the work of learning Tor, or if I really need to but that does seem like a next step. But I really don't want to bog down a 10 yr old P-4 machine. Thanks again!
BTW, I'm not sure I made this clear from my last post. Tor as anonymity software is very effective. But as it is easy to see the unencrypted traffic as an exit node, and easy to set up your own network as an exit node, you should absolutely not use tor to do financial transactions, nor log into your personal email, facebook, or anything else identifying.
For anonymity on the web when you don't need to expose your identity and whereabouts, I recommend a service such as hidemyass.com -- it's not free, but it's cheap enough and your ISP cannot snoop on your traffic because it's via VPN. They can see that you're using the service, and how much data is going back and forth, but that's as deep as they can go. There's no way for them to discover which IP addresses and ports you're connecting to via the VPN proxy. Add to that some browser plugins that prevent the browser from sending referrer data, block trackers, and so on, and you'll stay out of the big marketer's databases. Be sure to use a service such as spamgourmet to generate site-specific email addresses that can't be tied back to you by the web sites themselves, and use a web based freemail (e.g. GMX) account to collect your mail from spamgourmet, too. The browser plugins that I use in Firefox are HTTPS Everywhere, Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, No Script, Cookie Monster, and Better Privacy. As a rule, never trust your ISP. They'll sell you out in an instant. Many of them give up customer data to the government just for the asking, without so much as a national security letter. That old line, "If you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" is really just a myth -- circumstantial evidence lands innocent people in prison all the time. That's another topic entirely... For sending/receiving mail that you don't want tied to your identity, use safe-mail.net or something similar. Reserve the other (e.g. GMX) account for infrequent one-way (inbound, to you) communications, such as web site password retrieval, newsletters, and such, and use the safe-mail account for two-way and more frequent contacts who don't really need to know who and where you are. Use something like Password Safe to store your passwords -- don't let your web browser have that job. Use the password generation facility that it provides, as it'll give you strong passwords that you don't have to remember because it makes them easy to get at and will put them into your copy/paste buffer for you with just a double-click. If you're using Drop Box, drop it now and use something more secure like Wuala or SpiderOak. The key here is to use a service whose provider can't get at your data even if they want to because all they ever see is the encrypted form of it and don't have the decryption key. Drop Box doesn't operate that way, nor does Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, Ubuntu One, et al. The "Do Not Track" HTTP header is pretty much a joke. Use it if it makes you feel better (I do) but don't expect it to mean anything. It's still up to the web site administrators and programmers to decide whether or not to honor that header, and Google itself doesn't. Or at any rate didn't last time I looked into it. I write internet applications software for a living and not one of my clients has ever said "Hey, I want to honor the do-not-track headers". A few have gone so far as asking me how they might monetize their customer lists -- I tell them that I find that behavior so objectionable I won't participate in it and won't even edit the custom software I've written to make it easier for them to do so. I don't suppose it slowed them down much, but I sleep better at night knowing that I've had no hand in it. Something I recommend we should all be doing is encrypting every email message we possibly can, no matter how mundane the content. (It doesn't make sense to only encrypt the sensitive information, because doing that tells the bad guys which relationships and time periods to focus on.) If someone like the NSA targets you specifically they're going to get at your message content anyway, but if we all encrypted everything it'd slow down their data mining and force them to be selective about what they read. For the rest, encryption with something like OpenPGP is enough to keep them out. For now.
Hey bro, thanks ! That helps alot. I'm familiar with some of the things you mentioned but, you pretty much hit the nail on the head as far as pointing out the majority of what I want to avoid. Again, not cause I want to sell drugs online around the world. It's more about wanting to go to places like Hip or BL, and not have my ISP taking notes about my travels every fucking time. Something about that just bugs me, I don't care who knows I smoke weed and ride motorcycles too fast, I care about my ISP (or someone that can push an ISP around like the govt) having a blueprint to every single thing I see and do online. I'm quite happy with it just being, fuzzy, thats all. And ya then theres the harmless but annoying marketing industry. That, I just don't like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo"]Bill Hicks on Marketing - YouTube
Every now and then I get lucky. Glad I could help! I'm not convinced that they are harmless. I don't have any specific information indicating that they're not, but the way I figure it that big data they collect is eventually going to end up in the hands of parties hostile to my interests. It could be that I'm paranoid enough.
