hiding your IP address

Forums › Off topic › hiding your IP address

obiwan

10 posts

Wannabe Geek

#13380 7-May-2007 17:25

Anyone know any free software solutions? And the pros and cons of hiding your ip.

barf

643 posts

Ultimate Geek

#69832 7-May-2007 17:43

http://tor.eff.org

Pros: total anonymity for TCP connections through onion routing

Cons: true anonymity is not point and click. you will have cookies in your web browser, Windows will still 'phone-home', etc

Sniffing the glue holding the Internet together

Old Grey Geek

149 posts

Master Geek

#69898 8-May-2007 10:18

You can use a proxy service, there are some free services. You could look at this.
http://www.proxy4free.com/

obiwan

10 posts

Wannabe Geek

#69905 8-May-2007 11:19

Bit newb on this. What happens if I use a proxy? Does that interfere with other things in my system...I don't know...operation of cookies or recognition of saved passwords. I suppose they are all related to the website address.
Is there a way to mask your own IP address, but show a changing one to the outside world?

barf

643 posts

Ultimate Geek

#69911 8-May-2007 12:30

using a proxy still exposes your cookies and many proxies use the X-Forwarded-For header, so your IP may be exposed anyway. Tor is the only decent way to hide your IP (site you connect to see a different source IP), other than a VPN/proxy service. you may use privoxy to hide your cookies also.

proxies are an intermediary step between your IE/Firefox/Safari web browser and the web servers your browser usually connects to. IE's proxy setting will affect how some other applications on your PC connect, they will try and use the proxy too. But if you have Firefox the proxy you setup in firefox will only be used by firefox.

Sniffing the glue holding the Internet together

obiwan

10 posts

Wannabe Geek

#69915 8-May-2007 13:30

I use Flock browser and sometimes Avant. I think they are both IE based, so presume a proxy would work in the same sort of way as Firefox.
How does google prevent people from hiding their ip, then clicking all over competitor listings on adwords? Or is this one of the problems with adwords?

barf

643 posts

Ultimate Geek

#69932 8-May-2007 15:18

google prevent click-fraud by using a tracking cookie, at the very least. I can guarantee they will have electronic fingerprinting, so hiding your IP will not be enough, IE will leave a breadcrumb trail for them to pick up in the form of http-referrers, user-agents and etc. I reccomend using Firefox if you are concerned about privacy.

I'm not a webdev expert though. Hopefully someone else can answer your question better.

Sniffing the glue holding the Internet together

rwales

122 posts

Master Geek

#72153 25-May-2007 06:28

How does google prevent people from hiding their ip, then clicking all over competitor listings on adwords? Or is this one of the problems with adwords?

I've given this a little bit of thought myself. You could write a Perl script to manually construct a request (randomizing agent strings etc.). Shouldn't be too hard to simulate a users browse pattern. By requesting a new TOR route for every fake user you could effectively make it look like the requests were coming from all over the world.

Pay-per-click has been open to click-fraud since day one. However, a specialized knowledge would be required to perform this to any degree of scale. I don't suppose the threat is significant enough to herald a change in policy (i.e. pay-per-sale).

Equinox IT

Cloud spending continues to surge globally, but most organisations haven’t made the changes necessary to maximise the value and cost-efficiency benefits of their cloud investments. Download the whitepaper From Overspend to Advantage now.

Fraktul

836 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#73916 7-Jun-2007 22:41

Not to mention that Google are probably very aware of Tor and its potential for misusage and may not even take these clicks into account.

rwales

122 posts

Master Geek

#73928 8-Jun-2007 06:01

Interestingly enough, there have been cases where people browsing through TOR have been warned (by Google) of an infection on their machine, probably due to the sheer amount of traffic coming from a particular exit node. This would imply they weren't aware of the TOR network. However, TOR is not clandestine and publishes a list of exit nodes (it couldn't work, otherwise) so it's quite possible to mitigate against this particular attack vector if you're inclined.

There are other free proxies out there though. If nothing else, there's no way of knowing whether a click was genuine or the result of a botnet. Personally, I hope a technology emerges that does cripple this ad model. Might give the domain-hogging cyber-squatters a kick in the nuts.