Catch Me If You Can — The Art of Remaining Anonymous

First of all, don't even bother to think about committing some kind of a major internet-crime. You'll get caught. If you're reading this article, well, you can assume that there's no really secure way to hide yourself. ISPs log everything. Well, there are certain things you can do, but if you have the knowledge to perfectly cloak your IP, then why bother reading on?

Actually, why even bother trying to surf the web anonymously? Well, there are certain sites that simply won't let you in, if you're, say, from India. Or, you can get banned from a site. Or, you can simply be paranoid.

First, you might want to get rid of your (browser's) cookies. If you're using Firefox, you better create a new profile, so you don't need to delete your cookies. Then, if you want to hide your browser's identity, you can do it manually, or you can install the User Agent Switcher add-on.

So, you got rid of cookies and have a nice fake User-Agent header in your request. Now you need a new IP. How do you get one, depends on what would you like to do with it. If you just want to access a website, the easiest way is to Google for a list of web based proxies. They're easy to use, but can't handle some pages, especially the ones with complex forms or lots of JavaScript effects.

So, the next thing you can do is Google for a list of (anonymous) proxies. You might want to look for SOCKS proxies, the HTTP ones are really easy to detect. Eventually you might find some that work and aren't too slow — but better yet, you can install some software to make things easier. There are a lot of commercial programs that can do this for you, but you can also try the free ones (or better yet, the open source ones). Why spend money for something that you don't even know how works?

I suggest you to use tor (The Onion Router). It will provide you a high level of anonymity, it is free, and runs on both Linux and Windows. Alternately, you might want to try Your Freedom. There's a 64 kb/s limit to the free accounts, but most of the sites that block the traffic from the tor network don't block these IPs. I use Your Freedom to play the Mabinogi online game, which blocks IPs from outside the US.

When you find a proxy server (or install one), you can set the browser to use it, but that's not enough in some cases. Some sites use hidden Java applets or Flash elements to see if the applet connects from the same IP as the browser. This can get you busted. The prevent it, you can either set your entire system to use the proxy, or configure the programs selectively. On Linux, this can be done with (somewhat) simple settings, but on Windows, you might want to install a software that will force the connections to tunnel through the proxy. Programs like Proxifier, ProxyCap, etc. You can set up which programs you want to tunnel through the proxy, or, if you want to be 100% sure that nothing is leaking, you can 'proxify' all the traffic (except the proxy server, of course). Note that Your Freedom is a Java application, so if you want to set it up to connect directly (i bet you want), the executable is something like 'c:\windows\system32\javaw.exe'.

So, now that you've (somewhat) anonymous, you might want to check it, just to be sure. I like to use aruljohn.com, it shows some additional (and very helpful) info.

Try it out.

You might want to Google up some random ID generators, there are a few really good ones out there. Just in case you need a name, address, phone number, credit card number, SSN, etc. Also, to be sure that nothing is leaking, you can check it with Wireshark.

I hope this cleared the things up a bit. If you have any problems, can't play online games, can't access sites, or anything related to this, fell free to leave a comment, I'll do my best to answer it.