I know many of you are concerned about how easy it is to trace your online activity and how that infomation can be used and while I am not suggesting you engage in criminal activity it occurred to me that the collar bomber who attempted to extort money from the pulver family by placing a fake collar bomb around 17 year old Madeleine Pulver’s neck could have easily avoided detection.
Paul Douglas Peters was fingered while checking an anonymous hotmail account he had created to communicate with his victims. He did this by using a public computer at a library which had security cameras in place, now for computers to communicate with the rest of the world they rely on something called TCP/IP which is the communications protocol which drives the World Wide Web. Every time we send a communication we have a return IP (Internet Procotol) address, so that a response can be returned.
Internet providers log these addresses as do hotmail so it was a simple detective task to find where the Hotmail Account was accessed from and at what time.
Then the police only had to look at the cameras to find their guy.
Our bomber could have avoided detection by staying at home and having a cup of tea and an iced vovo. He could have done this is by downloading and installing the TOR Browser onto his home PC.
The TOR BROWSER is provided by independent voluntary organisations and is designed to make it more difficult to trace Internet activity, including “visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages and other communication forms”, back to the user and is intended to protect users’ personal privacy, freedom, and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored. It does this by relaying your communication to websites such as Hotmail via a series of independent proxy servers which do not log the actual transmission as well as encrypting it (source wikipedia).
To give you an example of how it works my current actual IP address provided by IInet is 203.59.251.140. The IP address provided on the TOR network is 128.6..224.107 , see below
anonymous browsing computer repairs
and my physical location on the TOR network is New Jersey , USA.
How reliable is this , it has been reported the US military uses the TOR network as did Edwin Snowden to communicate with the Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers ( source wikipedia).
Other benefits , many countries filter internet traffic to block undesirable sites and this includes Facebook in China , Iran , Syria and Vietnam. By using the TOR network these filters are bypassed.
Download The to browser can be downloaded from https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en.