What options are there and how successful are they?

E

Hang out for a short while near to someone's house who failed to secure their wireless???? But really there is no true anonymity on the internet. If the data can get to you at all, there is a path leading strait to you. No electronic communication is private.

That dumbass kid that got into Palin's yahoo account and posted in on some site supposedly used one of these anonymous sites that reroute your "packets" or whatever, and it is anonymous .... until the FBI shows up at the companies doorstep with a subpoena. I think if you do some kind of search on google, you will come up with multiple options.

I have a friend who has been using a service for years. I'll ask him which it is and report back. I want to say it is Secure Tunnel, but I'm not sure.

Tor is probably the best bet.

http://www.torproject.org/

Please note it is not 100% though. There are some holes to be aware of. Like flash. Be sure to read the notes. And be sure you setup your app (like the browser) to route through the TOR proxy. Also, please note this network is quite SLOW.

Please also note TOR is not encrypted unless your channel of communication is encrypted. So someone on the exit node could be monitoring everything you do.

But if you want the person at the destination to not know what IP address you are coming from, TOR should do the trick.

(Message edited by xenono on October 01, 2008)

Any proxy will at least keep your IP address from hitting the web server. You have a connection to the proxy, the proxy communicates with the server. Two totally separate sets of connections. But, then you have to worry about the logs on the proxy. When I'm in Brasil I'll create a VPN on a box at my house, turn split-tunnel off and route all of my IP traffic home, which then is proxied out to wherever. I do this primarily for email purposes - so I can use my ISP's SMTP server and not have to dig around for an open relay somewhere on the net - and so I don't get Brasilian Yahoo and Google and everything. Plus I can still check out any sites I need to that may have content blocked from within Brasil.

But, the connection logs are kept on most types of gateways/proxies, so it's easy enough to put the pieces together. I would be hesitant to use any of the "anonymizer" services since they could be/are easily monitoring all of your Internet activity. You're putting a lot of trust on a third party in that case. If it's something like a VPN service, then all traffic off of your computer is running through that service. POP/SMTP, IM services, Skype/VOIP, anything and everything.