When you do anything on the net, you have to reveal your unique IP address of your computer, so that the other party you are communicating can send the information right to where your computer is. A lot of other computers, and hence people, on the way can home in to your address as well as the content you are sending or receiving. After all, the net was original designed for universities to share information. Now there are some easy ways to remain largely untraceable on the net. If more people support them, these .coms are less likely to fold.

Say when you post something to ClubHombre, most server and server application can log the IP address and associate it with your account. So what you post can be traced back to where your computer is. If the log exists, it may be subpoena by the courts. The law of the land where the server resides helps to make it difficult. But I don’t think the logs will stay for long even if they are kept. Without logs, big brother can still monitor in real-time the traffic of ClubHombre, intercept the content and trace your account back to your computer. If you are already identified, big brother just needs to target you and monitor the traffic out of your computer.

You may have a static IP address that never changes, but normally you have to pay good money for it. Most dial-up ISPs give you a dynamic IP address that changes every time, or not. Cable and DSL ISP gave everybody a static IP in the early days, but they are moving to dynamic IPs as the number of user increases. Even if you have a dynamic IP, it may be traced back to a server close to where your computer is. Say in your cable neighborhood, there may be only a few subscribers.

A simple way out is to use safeweb.com, it’s free. Safeweb stands between you and the other party. The other party only knows they are talking to safeweb without knowing who you are. You are talking to safeweb as if you are talking to the other party directly. The contents are encrypted using the strongest standard technology available, which is used by everybody for online shopping, banking and brokerage. Only safeweb knows, but they don’t log the information, and even if you know someone in safeweb, I doubt if the IP address will be retrievable in any easy way. If big brother is targeting you, they have to crack the code. If they don’t know you, they have to crack the code and trace back to you while you are connected to safeweb. Pretty difficult things to you. Unless you did some international big deals, I doubt if you need to worry about revealing your identity when using safeweb. After all, you may just be telling a story.

Safeweb is good to defeat workplace monitoring. The only practical monitoring is the website names that you visit. Safeweb encrypted the website domain names as well as the whole contents. You can download anything you want. At most your company will find that you talk to safeweb a lot. The time spend on a websites are not reliable, I think. Of course, if your company targets you, they can intercept the content, but they are encrypted. If someone can decode the content, they had better go to decode the bank transactions. The only thing they can do is to capture your screen and monitor your keystrokes. If they go through all these trouble to target you, you probably deserve it. Most likely, parents can use these tactics to monitor their kids.

Safeweb is not much different from using the browser directly. Most flashy contents can be displayed without distortion while keeping everything secret from anyone else, say, most escort malls and escort homepages. The traffic didn’t seem to slow down significantly, unlikely the earlier free anonymizer. You just need to tolerate some banner advertisement occasionally.

Every email is suppose to contain the IP address of the computer you are using. And the message contents are fairly open for the public to see – anyone can intercept your message in one of the routing computers and post your email in public. Open an email account at hushmail.com, more info in hush.com. When you compose or read your email, the message contents are encrypted using the secure standard that everybody uses including safeweb. At the email servers, the contents are encrypted using the standard PGP. These are probably the strongest encryption technology available. So in theory, no one can intercept and decode the content except the intended recipient. Hushmail don’t attach the IP address of your computer to the email. So no one will know where you sent the email. I used to listen closely to the medical advice of a guy that sends me emails from a hospital. Most email systems attach the IP address of your computer that you are using, including yahoo and hotmail. Say in hotmail, if you opt to look at the full format of the email, you can find the IP address number at the header. Type that into some reverse lookup service on the net, then you know which domain or company the email came from. According to hushmail, they have more lawyers than programmers on their payroll, and their servers are located in selected places in the world. Even if LE manage to subpoena an account via something like interpo, even hushmail cannot decode the message contents themselves.

Even if big brother somehow crack all codes, it’s still hard to link an hushmail account to the real identity of the sender and recipient. You probably don’t need a valid email address for verification before opening an hushmail account. Even if you need one, find some email system that don’t need to, or close the email account afterwards. It would be hard to monitor the traffic to hushmail and find out who and from where a person is connecting to a particular account. Hushmail by definition will not cooperate anyway. The only likely case that big brother will be successful is that they can target at a particular person with known identity, and follow him around, and monitor all his net traffic. The difficulties are the same as safeweb above. Infiltration and uncover always work, but you just don’t tell the other guys who you really are.

Hushmail is easy to setup and use, a bit slower at start up because they are loading some java programs (even though some programs are installed in your computer in the new version). The amount of work is the same for hushmail and hotmail. Attachments are also encrypted. It is less easy to maintain an address book, no auto html translation, and in the last version you need to cut and paste using the keyboard. These are non-issues for the intended account holders.

On the more conventional front, I am fairly convinced that *67 can be unblocked, typically by, let say, secretive Asian escort agencies. Also with your telephone number, fixed or cell, I think someone can trace you account and hence your identity. I hope someone can tell me more. I think we have to use the public telephone if needed. However, ureachme.com give you an 888 number, which you can redirect to your own phone. I think the usual tracing and unblocking technique are made more difficult by the indirection. In the good old days, the service is free and you have a direct line. Now you only have an extension if you don’t pay.

I guess a P.O box is pretty hard to trace if you are not LE. By law the local postmaster must keep your real address. I doubt if you can get the records if you don’t know anyone in the local post office. I doubt if they ever check your real address, and I doubt if they have a formal centralized database that you can easily find the information.

I've been told that anyone can get PO Box info, but I've never checked it out.

Your IP address is not unique to you. If you log on to different dial-up ISPs, you will have different IP addresses for each one.

Your MAC address is unique (supposedly, and nearly true - like cabbage patch dolls, when they run out, they might reuse it once) to your NIC card in your computer.

Tracing your phone # - blocking does not work with ANIs which are (like 911) area codes 800, 900, etc. THEY GOT YOUR NUMBER !

Pauncho

Anyone can get the PO box info you give the PO box people. Of course if this information is false, as mine is, that does the snoopers no good. A good way to provide false info in San Ysidro, where lots of TIJ residents keep PO boxes is to go to a Mexican stationary store and buy a pack of generic rent receipts or rental contracts. Then just make up a contract up in your name at some imaginary address in Mexico and presto....

Great info, Loser8 - thanks!

So unique is not the right word. I mean no two computers can have the same IP address in the internet at any one instant.

I don't know what is MAC, but I guess that's a static address unique in one subnet, say your neighborhood within your ISP.

More than once, guys reported that the 'agency' called them back even though they blocked their number, ordinary personal numbers.

Loser8 - MAC (don't remember what it stands for) is a completely unique serial number that's stamped on every modem and network card. It is what identifies your individual computer even before you get an IP address. So it "sticks" to your computer more than an IP address. I don't know if/how ISPs etc keep track of them, but I'm sure you can find out by trolling search engines and newsgroups.

MAC = Media Access Control
It's also electronically "stamped" in your NIC (Network Interface Card). Just about the only way you can change your MAC address is to change out your NIC card (available at Fry's). But they still can trace your phone number.
Note my post above about using internet cafes in foreign countries.

Pauncho

Routers and network hubs use two protocols known as ARP and RARP to map between a TCP/IP address and a MAC address. When data is flowing through the Internet toward a destination it does so via the IP address. When it reaches the last router on the same subnet as the destination, the communication over the last hop is done using the MAC addresses. Routers keep this mapping in something called an ARP Table. Entries find their way into the table when they are mapped and usually "age" out after some specified time.
ECJuan

If we talk about tracing back, I think it's suffice to say that IP address is the higher level, network level, address, it's used to identify anyone in the net, i.e., the world. The MAC address, is the lowest level, the physical level, address that is hardwired into your modem (but can be changed by dip switches, links or reprogram the ROM). A unique MAC address for any modem set by all factories will make life easier when adding your computer to your ISP. But I think your MAC only need to be unique for your ISP, or just the subnet in your neighbourhood.

Without shielding using safeweb, the IP address can be traced back to your computer. For dynamic IP address, there must be data in the ISP that link the address to your account, even without MAC.

I am fairly sure that something like the MAC info will not be attached to the data packets once outside your ISP. Otherwise, if you gave webmasters MAC, they would have log it.

For safeweb, they replace your IP address with their IP address, so the server your are browsing do not know who your are. If the MAC were there, they would have replace that as well.

I have some confident in something like safeweb and hushmail because the company have a single mission, they are high profile and welcome, and invite, security experts to review their systems.

Actually foreign internet cafe can give you a false sense of security. As I mentioned before, the most likely scenerio that big brother can track you down is by a real-time trace when you are connected. It doesn't matter too much if you are in your own home or in some other remote offshore islands. They will be prepared wherever you are. Even if you finished your java and gone, they can track where the computer was and when it was used for the crime. They just need to prove that you were there. There are plenty of witness in the cafe, with nothing much else to do but to watch people when not playing with their computers. I am sure someone was caught this way, I don't remember what he did; it was from MSN investigates some time ago.

I don't do that badboy stuff, but, If I was, I would; Do all my work at home (or another internet cafe) and save to disk, then use (VERY briefly) an internet cafe (different one each time ? - different city at times - USA public libraries at times - whatever), and send it as an e-mail attachment from disk - maybe wear a disguise....
Pauncho

I think the FBI have some software called Canivore that they had ever authorized to use about 10 times. The guy who get caught in the MSN story was a very simple case.

I remember the MSN story is something like the murderer sent an email from some phoney account to the victim at an internet cafe to set up the last date at the place where the murder occured. They got the suspect. The email header tells everybody where the internet cafe and the computer was. The only thing to prove beyond reasonable doubt is that the guy is near the cafe that day. Plenty of witness. Instead, if the email is sent at home using hushmail, he would have got away.

The same thing goes if someone send child porn to somebody from a cafe, if the somebody get caught, the someone can easily be proven guilty.

By the way, if I am a terrorist, I will bomb the cafe flat after I used it. No trace and no witness. Think about it, internet cafe is probably a very dangerous place where witness are eliminated :-)

Send it all from an internet cafe on Halloween, wearing a Zorro mask.

Farewell to safeweb

Thank you for giving me so many happy cucible hours surfing. I thought I couldn't live without you. The equivalent from anonymizer cost a lot.

Now before I surf from my cucible, I unplug from my LAN, so nobody could possibly (?) monitor me from the network. Then I fire my modem which caused me a few bucks. The tricky part is that the modem has to be compatible with the telephone system, which is not easy to find. Then I use free ISP Netzero and Juno. They won't possibly keep any records.

Actually, without the safeweb protective cover, the pages load faster at times, and there are much less compatibility problems with some fancy adult sites.

I thought of this before I found safeweb. But I thought the cheap ISP software do not silence the modem when I connect, therefore announcing to everybody that I am going surfing. But that has more to do with my telephone system.

A Trojan Tale ... and why Norton Antivirus sucks donkey balls

I am posting this because I've recommended Norton Antivirus in the past ...

Despite having the most absolute, up-to-date computer protection (Norton AV 2003, ZoneAlarm Pro, AdAware 6, Spybot S&d), I have still been infected with two Trojan Horse programs in the last couple of days ...

Norton AV 2003 eventually caught the first one, albeit after it let the stupid thing install on my computer ... ZoneAlarm alerted me to "IExplorer.exe" attempting to access the net, and that sounded suspicious to me since Internet Explorer is actually "IExplore.exe" ... sure enough, a Google search revealed it to be a Trojan. Moments after my Google search, Norton suddently informed me I had a virus. Good job, you piece of shit software. Norton then had a bitch of a time removing the thing, requiring me to manually edit the registry and do two restarts. But finally it was gone ... seemingly.

Ok, so now to the second one ... this one came in an email titled "young couple wants to meet." The message says something about a 3some and some pics ... and there is an attachment called "pictures.zip" ... What the hell, I'll look at some pics. I scanned the attachment with Yahoo's online version of Norton and it said no infection. I then downloaded the file, which my version of Norton AV 2003 scanned while downloading. No problems. I then manually scanned the zip file. All clean. Still not convinced, I then manually scanned the unzipped file, "first_3sum.wri". Norton said all was clear.

Great, so I open the file, and inside there are two pics and a Real Media movie. I opened the first pic, and it was a chick sucking cock. Not bad. So then I open the second pic. Same chick riding a cock. Cool. Now to the movie ... Realplayer gives an error that it can't play, and then ZoneAlarm alterts me that "ms spool32.exe" was trying to access the internet. That did not sound right, so I blocked the program from accessing the internet and shut off the service in question.

I Googled for "ms spool32.exe," and sure enough, it is a backdoor Trojan program. Great. I then scanned my system with both AdAware 6 and Spybot S&D, and neither detected it. Finally, I ran McAfee's Free online scanner, and it found the Trojan. Not only that, but it also found a piece of the first Trojan that Norton AV had supposedly removed! ... Norton's site says the .dll in question is not removed because it is not a virus in itself! Shit, if it's installed by or with a Trojan, I want it removed ....

This was all enough to convince me to dump Norton and download McAfee 7.0 ... never again will a Symantec product be present on my system.

The bottom line is you can never have enough security ... if not for ZoneAlarm Pro, I may never have known these Trojans were recording my keystrokes and trying to send all my passwords to some unknown hacker ... Neither Trojan did any damage, thanks to ZoneAlarm, but the fact that Norton let them both through annoys me to no end.

The email that infected my computer is apparently going around ... I have gotten the same one in three seperate email accounts ...

-Superman-