Tor : Anonymity Online - Hide Your IP

isnt it true that java based scripts and flash and uncover your ip address, ive always disabled flash in the browser i use tor with just to be safe

What is Tor - Tor is better known as onion routing which was developed by the US navy Research Laboratory. It is free to download and use and it is considered secure, although you would have to consider that exit servers might be used as honey pots. When you use Tor, you are using an indirect route to the location that you are visiting, so eavesdropping and tracking your path is difficult and as it may cross many jurisdictions making it difficult to seize and use useful information.

There are other alternatives such as anonymous proxies, but once more they maybe simply honey pots. There are two main commercialised pieces of anonymity software that utilise encrypted VPN´s and proxies known as FINDNOT and ANONYMIZER. They are secure, but if illegally used you would forfeit your rights to anonyminity.

Security on the internet is determined by the nature of the activities that you pursue.

Talking of this,

I find it very very interesting and worrying indeed the attention posting on certain topics on ATS may bring to your PC.

Now I am not very computer literate at all, have no idea of "hacking" or code etc...

However I do have a friend of two who check my PC once in a while for me.

They picked something up on my network not long ago, repeated intrusion attempts by the following Ip's over quite a long time, they seem to try at least once a day:

168.87.107.7 port34595
A Certain Arabian Government Organisation

and

220.191.251.196 port34952
A certain Asian Government District.

Also from a certain "FORT" in mmm the America's that I wont post here, as enough already lol...

Now these both started AFTER I posted information on ATS let's say not
in concordance with their stated behaviour, or financial situation, or being outright against their current actions.

So yep I have obviously been tracked from my posts on ATS and have become of interest, and they know my ISP and therefore me an where I live etc.....but I have been careful there too so this might be a bit confusing for them lol....

These Ip's have followed me from a previous address a few months ago and seem after 1 month or so to have picked me up again...

When a certain friend saw this he actually said, and he knows these sort of things which I wish I did, "What The F### have you been saying?! you Nutter, "

This worried me as he used to hack years ago, and I suppose has a lot of experience on what is normal or not from such people.

So it does concern me a Tad and Byrd I would be very very interested in if you would look at those IP's for me and say if I should just put it down to nomral monitoring or maybe need to really try and jack up my security a little, and How I can do that?

In your from your post profound experience etc...

I know which posts I think created this interest.... would make a lot of sense... and can provide any info from my set up if you are interested...

Now what the point of this post is about rather than the above on its own is that Really, I think we should all be aware that if you make strong comments, and certainly if you publish opposing views or information to any governments National Security as they see it stance, you will get tracked unfortunately.

As Byrd said you will be tracked. And god knows what they are capable of in Menwith Hill that we have no idea about... probably looking at me type from my monitor now :-) and I don't have a cam lol

They I know though will be very very confused by my actual name, sex and age, and will certainly think from looking at it that I am a multiple personality with varying other demographics... or names to date lol, but not address etc... nuff said.

Kind Regards,

Elf

A very good point, TOR is great, but it still cannot defeat the ability of NSA (no such agency) to track your exploits if you are a target. No, they do not track everyone, the software identifies a person or computer first based on behavior, web sites visited, email destinations and any connection between ANY of this data and known "bad guy" behavior.

A federal criminal investigation can also defeat TOR (takes longer).........

reply to post by MischeviousElf


I would hope you both shut down your computer and your broadband modem (disconnect power) nightly.....Open a CMD window (dos) and type netstat (enter) and look at the connections. Honestly, if it is a GO (governmental organization), any connections will be from IP blocks that appear innocent.

If you don't know how to look up the ip address, U2U me, I will help...

What is Tor - Tor is better known as onion routing which was developed by the US navy Research Laboratory. It is free to download and use and it is considered secure, although you would have to consider that exit servers might be used as honey pots. When you use Tor, you are using an indirect route to the location that you are visiting, so eavesdropping and tracking your path is difficult and as it may cross many jurisdictions making it difficult to seize and use useful information.

There are other alternatives such as anonymous proxies, but once more they maybe simply honey pots. There are two main commercialised pieces of anonymity software that utilise encrypted VPN´s and proxies known as FINDNOT and ANONYMIZER. They are secure, but if illegally used you would forfeit your rights to anonyminity.

Security and privacy on the internet is determined by the nature of the activities that you pursue.

"There are two security risks. The first is that the Torified application may
embed your IP addess in the body of its message -- browsers in particular are bad for this, so TOR often has to be used with another application, like Privoxy, to get true anonymity."

...doest it mean that using https mail like Gmail through Tor is a bad idea?

There is a TOR application that I use that does the TOR for you it's called TORPark and its a browser based on Firefox and you can run it from a Thumb Drive.

Publisher's description of Torpark 2.0.0.3 From XeroBank: Torpark is a portable browser originally forked from Portable Firefox Web browser with access Tor built into it. Torpark is also upgradable to high speed anonymity services offered by Torrify. Torpark is designed for use on portable media such as a USB flash drive but it can also be used on any hard disk drive. As such, a secure and encrypted connection to any of the Tor routers can be created from any computer, and the browser clears all data that was created on the portable drive upon exit or on demand.

TORpark download

Yes, its an old thread, but here is an interesting update about TOR.

WikiLeaks Was Launched With Documents Intercepted From Tor

The activist siphoned more than a million documents as they traveled across the internet through Tor,



Under Tor’s architecture, administrators at the entry point can identify the user’s IP address, but can’t read the content of the user’s correspondence or know its final destination. Each node in the network thereafter only knows the node from which it received the traffic, and it peels off a layer of encryption to reveal the next node to which it must forward the connection.

By necessity, however, the last node through which traffic passes has to decrypt the communication before delivering it to its final destination. Someone operating that exit node can therefore read the traffic passing through this server.

According to The New Yorker, “millions of secret transmissions passed through” the node the WikiLeaks activist operated — believed to be an exit node. The data included sensitive information of foreign governments.

The activist believed the data was being siphoned from computers around the world by hackers who appeared to be in China and who were using the Tor network to transmit the stolen data. The activist began recording the data as it passed through his node, and this became the basis for the trove of data WikiLeaks said it had “received.”

[edit on 6/2/10 by makeitso]

Tor is pretty old now and of course exit nodes can be compromised but that's obvious as those requests have to be unencrypted for the sites to understand them. Pretty slow as well and there's a lot of people ruin it for others by trying to run things like torrents through it.

Tor is a good start but projects like i2p and freenet are more promising and I expect that the number of these will multiply rapidly with the way governments are attempting to lock down the net.

I really think darknets will be the next big thing and I think governments will ultimately regret their attempts to control the internet at least now they can keep an eye on things when darknets take off they will be completely out of the loop and wishing things were as they are now.

A few posters on here have explained the issues with TOR extremely well so I will not bother reiterating their points.

The fact is the average computer user should not rely on TOR. If you really know what you are doing then it offers reasonable protection when used in conjunction with other programs.

Is anyone successfully using Tor with Safari on a Mac? Torbutton on Firefox does not work for me for some reason. I get the same error message on every single site: "The proxy server is refusing connections." Unless I disable torbutton...and then what's the point?

Anyone know how to point Safari to a specific port? I don't see the option for ports anywhere in my mac's network settings. I have latest versions of Vidalia and Polipo installed.

It is just another NSA (Not Secure Anywhere) product.

cryptome.org...