is that prog called 'surf secret' ?

I don't know how much people have been thinking along these lines but here is a point worth noting......

Who would benefit the greatest from activists signing up to 'secret-squirrel' web nav. and coms. tools? Who is MOST likely to jump first and create a web communication system where their users locations can be logged, their comments ( which are likely to be much more liberal under the illusion that they are with friends ) can be logged, and all that they communicate with and where can be logged........?

Don'tmean to worry you guy's but any offer of a secure 'closed' system which could cover your tracks needs to be eyed with great suspicion....key seems to be either get your mates to set one up or do it yourself - just please be very careful people. To me, this seems the next logical step in logging activist activities.

I mean no offence to current secret mail operators - but you set your own up so you know what I mean!

Good luck people

Love to you all............

If you want to find the most secure method of encryption that is most easily availible, then just look at the legislation.

Pretty Good Privacy is a very useful tool. But at the end of they day you can face serious criminal charges for refusing to hand over decryption keys and even warning anyone that you have been busted or that they are being monitored.

As for masking IP. Forget it! The ISPs that sell anonymity are not going to protect you from the law, but just other users knwoing more than you choose to tell them. IP stands for Internet Protocol, which states that you cannot access the Internet without IP. IP is a system that relies on unique addresses ( i.e. in a normal scenario easy to trace ) to function over network that isn't too difficult to intercept data.

So, I would always operate online assuming that someone may be watching or logging.

You could become an elite hacker and make it very *difficult* for anyone to track you, but never impossible.

Encryption is your best defence, but again use it with caution and the knowledge that if you are faced with a question of whether what you are encrypting is important enough to enough to go to jail for if you are asked for the decryption keys ( assuming the police haven't been able to retrieve it from your computer because you have been thorough enough to destroy all trace of it ).

So the genral rule would be use decryption for anything you wish to HINDER anyone seeing.

In terms of removing things from you computer itself there are a few useful tools for truly blanking deleted files from your hard drive. However these programs are *very* slow and certainly only keeping a blast furnace near your PC would *quickly* stop police recovering any data. Simple file deletion does not remove data but simply allows the operating system to overwrite that data at some point when the space is needed.

There are also methods of hiding data within various types of files.

So as we see, there is no Internet privacy; encryption can be at best used as an inconvience; your hard drive is a liability.

Solutions: obviously bearing in mind those points, using a system that does not rely solely on the methods of privacy technology and relies information that has not been electronically archived, or has no obvious link can create a bigger barrier to intrusion than simply encyption alone.

I.e. if privacy and encryption means are used merely as part of the privacy and laws designed to yield information can only gain access to the electronic part of the information, you can happily give up decryption keys, happily be monitored and logged and safe in the knowledge that that information alone is not enough to intrude.

DON'T PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET. You brain is still the best tool you have got.

You will find this place an interseting place for further resaerch:

 http://astalavista.box.sk/

:-)

That being said, I would still recommend at least one firewall ( hinders unauthorised access ) and antivirus for EVERYONE!

 http://www.zonealarm.com/
 http://www.cnet.com/software/0-806183-7-2342112.html

 http://www.avp.ch/
 http://www.mcaffee.com/

:-)

hehehe ... use 'dodgy' connections to access the net,they DON'T give out your home I.P someone elses instead (the victim where the connection details were stolen from = usually some fucking business firm that has been hacked)these numbers and pass/logins are freely available,just get into the 'undernet'side of things a bit more huh?)
; )

Is IS possible to completely hide your tracks online, but you won't get it for free because there are several layers of identification/authentication added to any data you pass accross the network. Internet traffic is meant to be transparent and machine-machine transactions are accountable for all sorts of administrative/Quality of Service reasons. (It is a myth that the internet was designed for robustness to survive a nuclear attack, that is just the best practice network design, it was designed to save money on duplication of equipment and experimentation time by allowing firs military and then educational institutions to freely share data and system resources (granted in the US there is a fine line between the two institutions). To remain anonymous you must, in turn, circumvent or spoof each of these identification/authentication mechanisms.

There just aren't enough IP v4 addresses (the ones that go xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) to go around, so most "anonymous proxies" on the web are just "Network Address Translation" and "Caching" services being used by ISP's to give themselves more IP addresses and speed up access times on their internal network (ie for their dial-up customers) and they ALL KEEP LOGS for legal and administrative reasons and can be forced to turn this info over to the laws. There will even be material in the packet encapsulation which may be used to trace you (eg the MAC (media access control) address of your network card which is unique amongst all network devices) or the NetBIOS name of your PC (which you set up yourself when you instlled Window$.

One plus in this is that since ISP hand out IP addresses dynamically, several (thousand?) people may be issued the same IP address in the course of a day, making tracing the user just a teensy bit trickier, ie. you have to know at what time the user was accessing network services using a particular IP address.

Their are some genuinely "free" and "anonymising" proxies which do not keep logs (they usually have a name which suggests secrecy), best to email the administrator to make sure if you think you have found one (administrators email addresses are available by running a "whois" on the IP address or domain name (if you have one you can easily discover the other by using the DNS (Domain Name System) servers which are all over the network. there are DNS lookups and reverse DNS lookups, one to match IP's to a domain name and the other to list a domain names hosted on a computer with a particular IP address.

For REAL online security, find a reputable anonymiser service like anonymiser.com, they use port forwarding to mask the nature of your online activities, this avoids the "well known ports" used for attaching to web, email services, etc. In addition to port forwarding they use "secure shell" encryption which makes all the packets you are transfering illegible to anyone without the decryption key (ie everyone on the net except the anonymiser server). That takes care of the data transfer between them and you but to finish it off they re-originate the packets of data from their proxy server and keep NO LOGS, there is NO WAY ON EARTH to discover what someone is doing online using these techniques because you only communicate with the proxy server (it then requests web pages for you) and all the traffic is encrypted and since you only attach to one port on the proxy server no-one can tell if you are watching porn, reading a web page, collecting your email, transfering files, organising a coup or whatever.

Subscriptions are around $30 per quarter.

Hope that clears things up a little for folk.