Entries Tagged "anonymity"

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Torpark

Torpark is a free anonymous web browser. It sounds good:

A group of computer hackers and human rights workers have launched a specially-crafted version of Firefox that claims to give users complete anonymity when they surf the Web.

Dubbed “Torpark” and based on a portable version of Firefox 1.5.0.7, the browser will run from a USB drive, so it leaves no installation tracks on the PC. It protects the user’s privacy by encrypting all in- and outbound data, and also anonymizes the connection by passing all data through the TOR network, which masks the true IP address of the machine.

From the website:

Torpark is a program which allows you to surf the internet anonymously. Download Torpark and put it on a USB Flash keychain. Plug it into any internet terminal whether at home, school, work, or in public. Torpark will launch a Tor circuit connection, which creates an encrypted tunnel from your computer indirectly to a Tor exit computer, allowing you to surf the internet anonymously.

More details here.

Posted on September 28, 2006 at 6:51 AM • View Comments

New Anonymous Browser

According to Computerworld and InfoWorld, there’s a new Web browser specifically designed not to retain information.

Browzar automatically deletes Internet caches, histories, cookies and auto-complete forms. Auto-complete is the feature that anticipates the search term or Web address a user might enter by relying on information previously entered into the browser.

I know nothing else about this. If you want, download it here.

EDITED TO ADD (9/1): This browser seems to be both fake and full of adware.

Posted on September 1, 2006 at 8:23 AM • View Comments

Skype Call Traced

Kobi Alexander fled the United States ten days ago. He was tracked down in Sri Lanka via a Skype call:

According to the report, Alexander was located after making a one-minute call via the online telephone Skype service. The call, made from the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, alerted intelligence agencies to his presence in the country.

Ars Technica explains:

The fugitive former CEO may have been convinced that using Skype made him safe from tracking, but he—and everyone else that believes VoIP is inherently more secure than a landline—was wrong. Tracking anonymous peer-to-peer VoIP traffic over the Internet is possible (PDF). In fact, it can be done even if the parties have taken some steps to disguise the traffic.

Let this be a warning to all of you who thought Skype was anonymous.

Posted on August 24, 2006 at 1:45 PM • View Comments

TrackMeNot

In the wake of AOL’s publication of search data, and the New York Times article demonstrating how easy it is to figure out who did the searching, we have TrackMeNot:

TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of indistinguishable ‘ghost’ queries, making it difficult, if not impossible, to aggregate such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. TrackMeNot integrates into the Firefox ‘Tools’ menu and includes a variety of user-configurable options.

Let’s count the ways this doesn’t work.

One, it doesn’t hide your searches. If the government wants to know who’s been searching on “al Qaeda recruitment centers,” it won’t matter that you’ve made ten thousand other searches as well—you’ll be targeted.

Two, it’s too easy to spot. There are only 1,673 search terms in the program’s dictionary. Here, as a random example, are the program’s “G” words:

gag, gagged, gagging, gags, gas, gaseous, gases, gassed, gasses, gassing, gen, generate, generated, generates, generating, gens, gig, gigs, gillion, gillions, glass, glasses, glitch, glitched, glitches, glitching, glob, globed, globing, globs, glue, glues, gnarlier, gnarliest, gnarly, gobble, gobbled, gobbles, gobbling, golden, goldener, goldenest, gonk, gonked, gonking, gonks, gonzo, gopher, gophers, gorp, gorps, gotcha, gotchas, gribble, gribbles, grind, grinding, grinds, grok, grokked, grokking, groks, ground, grovel, groveled, groveling, grovelled, grovelling, grovels, grue, grues, grunge, grunges, gun, gunned, gunning, guns, guru, gurus

The program’s authors claim that this list is temporary, and that there will eventually be a TrackMeNot server with an ever-changing word list. Of course, that list can be monitored by any analysis program—as could any queries to that server.

In any case, every twelve seconds—exactly—the program picks a random pair of words and sends it to either AOL, Yahoo, MSN, or Google. My guess is that your searches contain more than two words, you don’t send them out in precise twelve-second intervals, and you favor one search engine over the others.

Three, some of the program’s searches are worse than yours. The dictionary includes:

HIV, atomic, bomb, bible, bibles, bombing, bombs, boxes, choke, choked, chokes, choking, chain, crackers, empire, evil, erotics, erotices, fingers, knobs, kicking, harier, hamster, hairs, legal, letterbomb, letterbombs, mailbomb, mailbombing, mailbombs, rapes, raping, rape, raper, rapist, virgin, warez, warezes, whack, whacked, whacker, whacking, whackers, whacks, pistols

Does anyone reall think that searches on “erotic rape,” “mailbombing bibles,” and “choking virgins” will make their legitimate searches less noteworthy?

And four, it wastes a whole lot of bandwidth. A query every twelve seconds translates into 2,400 queries a day, assuming an eight-hour workday. A typical Google response is about 25K, so we’re talking 60 megabytes of additional traffic daily. Imagine if everyone in the company used it.

I suppose this kind of thing would stop someone who has a paper printout of your searches and is looking through them manually, but it’s not going to hamper computer analysis very much. Or anyone who isn’t lazy. But it wouldn’t be hard for a computer profiling program to ignore these searches.

As one commentator put it:

Imagine a cop pulls you over for speeding. As he approaches, you realize you left your wallet at home. Without your driver’s license, you could be in a lot of trouble. When he approaches, you roll down your window and shout. “Hello Officer! I don’t have insurance on this vehicle! This car is stolen! I have weed in my glovebox! I don’t have my driver’s license! I just hit an old lady minutes ago! I’ve been running stop lights all morning! I have a dead body in my trunk! This car doesn’t pass the emissions tests! I’m not allowed to drive because I am under house arrest! My gas tank runs on the blood of children!” You stop to catch a breath, confident you have supplied so much information to the cop that you can’t possibly be caught for not having your license now.

Yes, data mining is a signal-to-noise problem. But artificial noise like this isn’t going to help much. If I were going to improve on this idea, I would make the plugin watch the user’s search patterns. I would make it send queries only to the search engines the user does, only when he is actually online doing things. I would randomize the timing. (There’s a comment to that effect in the code, so presumably this will be fixed in a later version of the program.) And I would make it monitor the web pages the user looks at, and send queries based on keywords it finds on those pages. And I would make it send queries in the form the user tends to use, whether it be single words, pairs of words, or whatever.

But honestly, I don’t know that I would use it even then. The way serious people protect their web-searching privacy is through anonymization. Use Tor for serious web anonymization. Or Black Box Search for simple anonymous searching (here’s a Greasemonkey extension that does that automatically.) And set your browser to delete search engine cookies regularly.

Posted on August 23, 2006 at 6:53 AM • View Comments

Flying Without ID

According to the TSA, in the 9th Circuit Case of John Gilmore, you are allowed to fly without showing ID—you’ll just have to submit yourself to secondary screening.

The Identity Project wants you to try it out. If you have time, try to fly without showing ID.

Mr. Gilmore recommends that every traveler who is concerned with privacy or anonymity should opt to become a “selectee” rather than show an ID. We are very likely to lose the right to travel anonymously, if citizens do not exercise it. TSA and the airlines will attempt to make it inconvenient for you, by wasting your time and hassling you, but they can’t do much in that regard without compromising their avowed missions, which are to transport paying passengers, and to keep weapons off planes. If you never served in the armed services, this is a much easier way to spend some time keeping your society free. (Bring a copy of the court decision with you and point out some of the numerous places it says you can fly as a selectee rather than show ID. Paper tickets are also helpful, though not required.)

I’m curious what the results are.

EDITED TO ADD (11/25): Here’s someone who tried, and failed.

Posted on March 10, 2006 at 7:20 AM • View Comments

Anonym.OS

This seems like a really important development: an anonymous operating system:

Titled Anonym.OS, the system is a type of disc called a “live CD”—meaning it’s a complete solution for using a computer without touching the hard drive. Developers say Anonym.OS is likely the first live CD based on the security-heavy OpenBSD operating system.

OpenBSD running in secure mode is relatively rare among desktop users. So to keep from standing out, Anonym.OS leaves a deceptive network fingerprint. In everything from the way it actively reports itself to other computers, to matters of technical minutia such as TCP packet length, the system is designed to look like Windows XP SP1. “We considered part of what makes a system anonymous is looking like what is most popular, so you blend in with the crowd,” explains project developer Adam Bregenzer of Super Light Industry.

Booting the CD, you are presented with a text based wizard-style list of questions to answer, one at a time, with defaults that will work for most users. Within a few moments, a fairly naive user can be up and running and connected to an open Wi-Fi point, if one is available.

Once you’re running, you have a broad range of anonymity-protecting applications at your disposal.

Get yours here.

See also this Slashdot thread.

Posted on January 20, 2006 at 7:39 AM • View Comments

Anonymity and Accountability

Last week I blogged Kevin Kelly’s rant against anonymity. Today I wrote about it for Wired.com:

And that’s precisely where Kelly makes his mistake. The problem isn’t anonymity; it’s accountability. If someone isn’t accountable, then knowing his name doesn’t help. If you have someone who is completely anonymous, yet just as completely accountable, then—heck, just call him Fred.

History is filled with bandits and pirates who amass reputations without anyone knowing their real names.

EBay’s feedback system doesn’t work because there’s a traceable identity behind that anonymous nickname. EBay’s feedback system works because each anonymous nickname comes with a record of previous transactions attached, and if someone cheats someone else then everybody knows it.

Similarly, Wikipedia’s veracity problems are not a result of anonymous authors adding fabrications to entries. They’re an inherent property of an information system with distributed accountability. People think of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, but it’s not. We all trust Britannica entries to be correct because we know the reputation of that company, and by extension its editors and writers. On the other hand, we all should know that Wikipedia will contain a small amount of false information because no particular person is accountable for accuracy—and that would be true even if you could mouse over each sentence and see the name of the person who wrote it.

Please read the whole thing before you comment.

Posted on January 12, 2006 at 4:36 AM • View Comments

Anonymous Internet Annoying Is Illegal in the U.S.

How bizarre:

Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

[…]

Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called “Preventing Cyberstalking.” It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.”

What does this mean for the comment section of this blog? Or any blog? Or Usenet?

More importantly, what does it mean for our society when obviously stupid laws like this get passed, and we have to rely on the police being nice enough to not enforce them?

EDITED TO ADD (1/9) Some commenters to BoingBoing clarify the legal issues. This is from an anonymous attorney:

The anonymous harassment provision ( Link ) is the old telephone-annoyance statute that has been on the books for decades. It was updated in the widely (and in many respects deservedly) ridiculed Communications Decency Act to include new technologies, and the cases make clear its applicability to Internet communications. See, e.g., ACLU v. Reno, 929 F. Supp. 824, 829 n.5 (E.D. Pa. 1996) (text here), aff’d, 521 U.S. 824 (1997). Unlike the indecency provisions of the CDA, this scope update was not invalidated in the courts and remains fully effective.

In other words, the latest amendment, which supposedly adds Internet communications devices to the scope of the law, is meaningless surplusage.

Posted on January 9, 2006 at 2:38 PM • View Comments

Kevin Kelly on Anonymity

He’s against it:

More anonymity is good: that’s a dangerous idea.

Fancy algorithms and cool technology make true anonymity in mediated environments more possible today than ever before. At the same time this techno-combo makes true anonymity in physical life much harder. For every step that masks us, we move two steps toward totally transparent unmasking. We have caller ID, but also caller ID Block, and then caller ID-only filters. Coming up: biometric monitoring and little place to hide. A world where everything about a person can be found and archived is a world with no privacy, and therefore many technologists are eager to maintain the option of easy anonymity as a refuge for the private.

However in every system that I have seen where anonymity becomes common, the system fails. The recent taint in the honor of Wikipedia stems from the extreme ease which anonymous declarations can be put into a very visible public record. Communities infected with anonymity will either collapse, or shift the anonymous to pseudo-anonymous, as in eBay, where you have a traceable identity behind an invented nickname. Or voting, where you can authenticate an identity without tagging it to a vote.

Anonymity is like a rare earth metal. These elements are a necessary ingredient in keeping a cell alive, but the amount needed is a mere hard-to-measure trace. In larger does these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They kill. Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishingly small doses, it’s good for the system by enabling the occasional whistleblower, or persecuted fringe. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system.

There’s a dangerous idea circulating that the option of anonymity should always be at hand, and that it is a noble antidote to technologies of control. This is like pumping up the levels of heavy metals in your body into to make it stronger.

Privacy can only be won by trust, and trust requires persistent identity, if only pseudo-anonymously. In the end, the more trust, the better. Like all toxins, anonymity should be keep as close to zero as possible.

I don’t even know where to begin. Anonymity is essential for free and fair elections. It’s essential for democracy and, I think, liberty. It’s essential to privacy in a large society, and so it is essential to protect the rights of the minority against the tyranny of the majority…and to protect individual self-respect.

Kelly makes the very valid point that reputation makes society work. But that doesn’t mean that 1) reputation can’t be anonymous, or 2) anonymity isn’t also essential for society to work.

I’m writing an essay on this for Wired News. Comments and arguments, pro or con, are appreciated.

Posted on January 5, 2006 at 1:20 PM • View Comments

RFID Car Keys

RFID car keys (subscription required) are becoming more popular. Since these devices broadcast a unique serial number, it’s only a matter of time before a significant percentage of the population can be tracked with them.

Lexus has made what it calls the “SmartAccess” keyless-entry system standard on its new IS sedans, designed to compete with German cars like the BMW 3 series or the Audi A4, as well as rivals such as the Infiniti G35 or the U.S.-made Cadillac CTS. BMW offers what it calls “keyless go” as an option on the new 3 series, and on its higher-priced 5, 6 and 7 series sedans.

Volkswagen AG’s Audi brand offers keyless-start systems on its A6 and A8 sedans, but not yet on U.S.-bound A4s. Cadillac’s new STS sedan, big brother to the CTS, also offers a pushbutton start.

Starter buttons have a racy flair—European sports cars and race cars used them in the past. The proliferation of starter buttons in luxury sedans has its roots in theft protection. An increasing number of cars now come with theft-deterrent systems that rely on a chip in the key fob that broadcasts a code to a receiver in the car. If the codes don’t match, the car won’t start.

Cryptography can be used to make these devices anonymous, but there’s no business reason for automobile manufacturers to field such a system. Once again, the economic barriers to security are far greater than the technical ones.

Posted on October 5, 2005 at 8:13 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.