 PC Advice
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Anonymous Surfing |
You've been on a business trip or vacation, and return home to find a credit card statement in the mail. Opening it, you see a listing of each expenditure made using that card, from restaurants to hotels and airline tickets. Effectively such statements are the history of your trip, and can be useful when trying to remember which city you visited on which date. The contents of such statements are known only to yourself and your credit company, unless you've attracted the attention of the authorities for some reason.
It's a bit different on the Internet.
Most sites track user activity, and log the originating system (usually by IP address or host name) whenever you visit a Web site, download mail, or FTP to a software repository. Web sites maintain such information in order to generate statistics regarding site activity; by doing so they can further refine their appearance in an attempt to attract more visitors. FTP repositories may do so for regulatory reasons, especially if they offer copyrighted software. From a darker viewpoint, hackers and spammers may set up bogus sites in order to attract visitors whose IP addresses they can record for later use in hacking or penetration testing activities.
Conversely, your own PC retains a record of every site you visit within a certain period of time. Web browsers all maintain a cache of recently visited sites, which helps minimize Web traffic by removing the need to reload pages every time a user returns to a previously viewed URL. This cache expires after a certain size or file age is reached. Additionally, your PC maintains a short term cache of recently visited IP addresses in its DNS cache, as well as any tracking or other cookies set during your session.
Two basic approaches are required if you want to surf anonymously, leaving few (if any) tracks behind for others to locate. The first involves the PC you're using, and requires the following steps:
- Clear the browser's cache when you finish a session. Not only does this make it harder for someone to reconstruct your movements on the Internet, but it cleans up a small amount of disk space. Remember though, deleted files aren't erased until the space is re-used by other data. An add-in product that overwrites empty space is a worthwhile investment.
- In a DOS window, run the "ipconfig /flushdns" command to clear the machine's in-memory DNS cache.
- Empty the trash can and clear all cookies. Again this won't actually erase the files; see the caveat above.
- You can also buy devices (often a key-ring USB drive) that take over management of the browser cache, cookies, and other session-specific files. StealthSurfer sells one such product; these can be excellent when computers at Internet cafes or other public locations are involved.
The second approach involves changing the IP address from which your requests appear. You can't do this yourself - if you change your machine manually, it'll probably lose contact with the network altogether. However, several companies provide anonymous surfing services, usually through the use of a proxy IP address that masks your own. Such companies include Anonymizer and Kaxy, and most require a subscription. Obviously, investigate any such company before doing business with them; they have the ability to see any data passing through their sites, so you need to ensure they aren't archiving or misusing it in any way.
You have a right to privacy, but managing it is up to you.
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Surf the web anonymously so that know one knows your true IP address. Visit sites as if you lived in the US and other areas around the globe.
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