X-traf. Privacy protection in the internet for dummies.

How to hide the IP. Tor, Torbutton, Privoxy, Vidalia.

If you do not use web-proxies to hide the IP address, you should look for a proxy by yourself. Searching proxy servers manually is not an option. Proxies need to be found, then checked for efficiency and anonymity, set in your browser. Free proxy lists are mostly outdated. Servers listed on it are dead or overloaded. Your time could be spent more efficiently by using a special designed program. But it’s not so easy as desired. There is enormous amount of programs designed to hide IP addresses that can be found on the Internet, and describing them all is not possible. But under different prettiness of such programs often hides a weak functionality and poor quality. I tested not less then two dozen of programs pledged to hide IP, and I can summarize follows for most of them:

• Less then a half of them really can conceal the IP address. (Some services could determine my real IP);
• low perfomance;
• price. (Most of them are not free. They want from tens to hundreds of bucks per year.)

After a couple of weeks of testing them personally, I chose a part of those programs to review. Some of them are free, such as Tor, JAP, SOSKSCap. Other are commercial - SocksChain, HideIP, etc. Look closer at Tor.

TOR

Tor is a network of virtual tunnels. Instead of taking a direct route from a source to destination, data packets on the Tor network takes a random pathway through several servers that hides your IP so that no observer at any single point can tell how or where the data is. In addition, data on the network is encrypted. If interesting you can read details about the technology on their site. Install package version 0.2.0.22-rc for Windows weights less than 8 megabytes. There are also availiable versions for Linux and MacOS. It will be necessary to set your browser to work with Tor (to install Torbutton plugin), but if you have read the manual, it is relatively easy to use.

Pro-s:

• Tor is completely free of charge;
• Tor encrypts all traffic between his nodes;
• If properly configured (but it’s not as easy as “one click”) - virtually unbeatable. No one can reveal who and where you are;

Contra-s:

• Tor’s perfomance is unpredictable. It may be fast, may be - not. Depends on routes between the Tor network nodes. Some of nodes have fast connection, some don’t;
• Not suitable for p2p applications such as torrent and eMule.
• Tor doesn’t magically hide all your traffic just because you are installed it. It only protects applications that are configured to work through Tor. Not any application can be configured to work with Tor;
• Browser plugins such as Java, Flash, ActiveX, RealPlayer, QT, and others can be forced into revealing your IP address. You should uninstall your plugins, or get a closer look at NoScript, FlashBlosk and QuickJava plugins for Firefox. (Have I previously said that InternetExplorer is completely not an option for anonymous&secure browsing ? No ? I’ll do it in the next article ;
• As written on Tor’s Downloading page: “While Tor blocks attackers on your local network from discovering or influencing your destination, it opens new risks: malicious or misconfigured Tor exit nodes can send you the wrong page, or even send you embedded Java applets disguised as domains you trust.” (In most theoretically i think.)

Anonymous distributed encrypted network based on users computers designed by volunteers is best idea I ever seen. But IMHO too complicated to implement without understanding internet protocols. Not for dummies.

Next time I will look at JAP. To be continued.