Old Li2-Crystals

Welcome back!

IP address is a term that more and more people are becoming aware of. Not all know what it really is but they are learning that this address is tied to everything you do online.... emails, web surfing, downloads, chat sessions... the IP address of the computer you use is recorded on webserver logs as you load web pages and download files. Your ISP knows what IP address is assigned to you when you connect to them and they can be required to tell whose account an IP address was assigned to at a particular time.

To be really secure you have to hide IP address. A program called Hide My IP Address is designed to take care of that. It's a modified version of the Firefox web browser that automatically routes your web traffic through the Tor anonymity network. It can be installed on a USB drive for portability and will erase it's temp files and cookies when you exit it.

You can find out more at http://www.hide-my-ip-address.com/

Edit: This solution is NOT a good idea. Why? Because they make claims like this:

Hide My IP Address is a specially-modified browser, based on Firefox. It automatically routes all of your Internet traffic through at least TWO ultra-secure, ultra-fast anonymous servers -- using the POWERFUL and well-known Tor network for total privacy.

They route through TWO servers??? If they were really using un-tampered with TOR, then it would be going through THREE nodes.

By the way, the real TOR network is actually somewhat slower than normal internet. Why? Because security and anonymity require using encryption and involve a certain (varying) amount of latency (time to process and transmit). There's no way around it. If you want anonymity, you pay for it in a speed tradeoff. It just depends on how serious your need for security is.

On top of that, there's a lot that they're NOT telling you about that kind of anonymity, like the fact that there's several ways that a careless user can break their anonymity without even realizing it. Read the documentation of the TOR website and learn some more before you trust this kind of crap that promotes itself with scare tactics like headlines screaming about how your computer is "Broadcasting ALL your personal details".

In a word, it's bullshit, use TOR, read it's documentation and use it the way it's developers recommend. it's FREE and a hell of a lot safer than that scare-ware crap.