How to Keep Anonymity in the Internet

Speaking about network security it would be good to destroy the steadiest myth of Internet anonymity. The statement ‘I do not do something harmful, so I do not need anonymity. Let hackers worry about that…’ is in fact wrong. Just imagine that all pedestrians in the street know your home address, follow you and try to penetrate into your house. Nobody would like that. So, why so few Internet users pay attention to such important problem as anonymity? Today, more and more web resources offer users different information (it depends on their living place). For example, major informational business projects of USA do not show most important data to users that come from other countries. Isn’t that unfair? Yes, it is. In this article you will learn how to fix this unfairness.

Let’s start with the theory of networks and the Internet in particular. To be more specific, with describing the principal of addressing forwarded data packets. When you type any address in the browser line, first of all the inquiry is sent to DNS server which transforms the symbols line into a set of 32 ‘zeros’ and ‘ones’ – IP-address – which is used for routing. If a criminal knows this address he can learn a lot about the person who uses it. For example, his real location. It is done with the help of service ‘whois’ which can easily define user’s provider by his IP-address. Here the question rises: “How can users be protected?”

One of possible ways of protection is “hiding” with the help of proxy-server which is a kind of intermediary between a user’s PC and Network servers. We have already found out that the main “betrayer” is IP-address to get rid of which is impossible as it is needed for data routing. Proxy-server sends inquires to web-servers as if on behalf of itself. And proxy-server itself receives all the replied data. So, it may seem that using a proxy-server guarantees anonymity. But it is not that simple. It turns out that vast majority of proxy-servers send IP-address of the end user in their inquiries in a special field (x-forwarded-for). However, there are anonymity services but it is difficult to find them. By the way, you can check any proxy-server for anonymity on the website http://www.samair.ru/proxy/socks.htm

Another option of keeping anonymity in the Internet is using anonymizers. Anonymizers are just anonym proxy-servers that have their own web interface. Working with them is very easy. All you need is to visit the site and type address of the server you need in a special field. The inquired web page downloads and you can be sure of your anonymity. However, there are some weak points here. First, the speed of pages download can be much lower, and second, today it is practically impossible to find an anoymizer for free. Of course when these services just appeared nobody could even think of taking money for that. All that owners could afford was placing a couple of advertising banners. Nowadays users have to pay for the ‘luxury’ to stay invisible. Lately, more and more people are for considering anonymizers illegal. This is nonsense. The authority will also have to forbid selling wigs because some criminals would buy them to change their appearance.

So, now you know how to hide your IP-address. However, there are other, more active ways to track users. The most popular technology of tracking users is cookies. Cookie is a symbol line up to 4KB in size which is recorded in a special file on user’s PC by the web-server. This technology was developed to make using the Network easier. For example, an online-shop wants to “remember” a user and offer him some new goods, depending on the user’s preferences. In order to save data confidentiality a restriction was taken: only that server can read the information from cookies which had recoded it. Unfortunately, this is very easy to avoid. Banners and clicks counters can be seen on every page (most of these elements are loaded from their own servers). So we see that data can be recorded to and read from cookies by the clicks counter script. As a result, the system can follow all your web-route and learn all your preferences.

One more way of keeping anonymity in the Internet, and the most reliable one, is socks-protocols. The operation principle of this technology is alike with proxy-server’s work. Socks-server receives data from user’s PC, sends it to the web-servers and then forwards back reply data. However, they have some differences. First, user’s PC and socks-server “communicate” not in accordance with common rules, but by means of special protocols (socks4, socks5, etc.). As a result this makes sending user’s IP address impossible. Besides, socks-server itself transforms data from the user to inquiries for common protocols. It means that no server can “guess” that it sends data to an intermediary, not to the final user. Socks technology is very easy to use. All a user needs is to download a special utility SocksCap, install and launch it, choose the software for which he needs to get anonym connection (for example, Internet Explorer), type socks-server’s address and port. When launching browser from SocksCap he has nothing to worry about.

These are probably the most reliable means of making sure that you are invisible and anonymous in the Global network nowadays. Of course, the situation constantly changes and new technologies appear every day, so if you really want to stay completely anonymous during your Internet surfing – try to follow the latest news, especially Arovax News, as Arovax Company is hardly working on creating of Anonymizer software, that will solve all your problems and worries about anonymous use of Internet resources.