How to Anonymize Everything You Do Online

06-17-2014 • http://www.wired.com, By Andy Greenberg

It's possible, user privacy groups and a growing industry of crypto-focused companies tell us, to encrypt everything from emails to IMs to a gif of a motorcycle jumping over a plane.

But it's also possible to go a step closer toward true privacy online. Mere encryption hides the content of messages, but not who's communicating. Use cryptographic anonymity tools to hide your identity, on the other hand, and network eavesdroppers may not even know where to find your communications, let alone snoop on them. "Hide in the network," security guru Bruce Schneier made his first tip for evading the NSA. "The less obvious you are, the safer you are."

Though it's hardly the sole means of achieving online anonymity, the software known as Tor has become the most vouchsafed and developer-friendly method for using the Internet incognito. The free and open source program triple-encrypts your traffic and bounces it through computers around the globe, making tracing it vastly more difficult. Most Tor users know the program as a way to anonymously browse the Web.

1 Comments in Response to How to Anonymize Everything You Do Online

Comment by PureTrust

Entered on: 6/18/2014 7:11:21 AM

Just a thought. The idea of a power grid Internet is not dead. In fact, it just might be coming into being right now.

Power grid Internet is simply using the power grid to transmit the Internet. Google "power grid Internet." Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication and http://illumin.usc.edu/printer/26/broadband-over-power-lines/.

I, personally, was involved in the late '90s with a company that was setting people up with methods to run much of their home - coffee machines, alarm clocks, central computing from base nodes connected to in-home "kiosks" - all through the central wiring in the home. So, it isn't a big jump to the idea of using the power grid for Internet communications. In fact, the only thing standing in the way of it is the communication "jumps" that are necessary to bypass the power grid transformers.

I expect that high-frequency carrier waves could be generated that would use the current power grid "pulse" to heterodyne a second wave with the secondary windings of the transformers, all of this being read by a computer to generate a second group of waves that matched the frequency of the secondary windings.

Multiplied, this would be able to carry any number of signals across any number of transformers so that there would be the capability to transmit Internet signals anywhere the power grid exists.

Personally, I think that this whole thing has been worked out long ago, and the only reason that we don't see it in action is that the "powers that be" don't want to lose the control that they have via the Internet Service Providers. After all, consider TOR over a power grid Internet. The anonymity could be complete.

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