Saturday, January 19, 2013

Protect your privacy in internet

Every time you connect to a website it simply scans the source IP address and hence your identity is exposed. You never know when your internet activity is no more private for you. When you surf the internet, Internet Protocol address is exposed. This might be used by hackers to gain access to your computer and all your personal information.

Being anonymous on the internet can benefit you in many ways. Few of them can be enlisted as:
1. Hiding your IP address helps you to protect your privacy from any kind of fraud.
2. You can also access the websites which previously you were banned from surfing using your Proxy IP address.
3. You can also protect your computer from spyware by hiding your IP address.
4. Hiding your IP address also protects your system from the constant display of popup ads.
5. The main benefits of hiding your IP address are to protect your system from others monitoring your system.

Changing your IP address is simply the basic way to hide your presence on the internet. If you can use and show a fake IP address, then you have now successfully protected your privacy and have become anonymous on the internet as shown in below figure.



This can be done in many ways:

1. Using Proxy sites to change your IP: There have been a lot of sites that allow you to browse anonymously. All you need is a web browser and a working internet connection. http://newipnow.com/ is such a website from where you can access any website with different IPs.

2. Using Proxy/Socks and Proxy tunneling applications: This method is a bit more technical than the previously mentioned. It requires the usage of proxies or IPs that you want to use. There are also different kinds of proxy, and a better one noted is the kind of SOCKs proxy.

3. Using Virtual Private Network (VPN): When you use VPN services, you simply connect to a different network and you get a different IP address that is set by the VPN server. This method is a better way to change IP address because VPN is able to give more reliable internet connection. That means almost all applications that connect to the internet can work without problems with VPN connections, without the need for extra configuration and applications. All are done automatically, it just looks like you are connecting under a normal internet connection. Hotspot Shield is such type of application.

4. Onion Routing: I personally like its algorithm. People who are serious about anonymity generally use things like onion routing through a bundled browser within a VM with a spoofed user agent. It takes very little to set up and, if done properly, it is nearly impossible to unmask.

In some cases, your IP address may be located all around the world. And if then you use a fake IP address located outside your country then it is possible that you will suffer from a slow browser. If you belong to such a category then it is advisable to look for the programs which offer the facility of providing IP addresses all over the world.

Looking back (May 02, 2020. After almost 7 years): For that one whole weekend, I kept playing with the router in our apartment and my room-mate, my friend and brother Sonal kept getting patiently mad because of disruption. On Sunday afternoon, he slept in his room and again I started doing my playing around with the router and unknown to me, I found him standing over my shoulder, where he was watching at me with a confused look, did his friend get possessed by a networking spirit. Did I get to know everything, I had intended to? Nope, just a tiny bit of theoretical but yeah I now knew how to f**k with the router and get it back from dead, that's all :-D