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Anonimity on the Internet

billw said:
True, but it's trivially easy to change the user agent string, at least in Firefox. Panopticlick now reports my user agent as "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"
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Which is only part of the fingerprinting model. To an uninitiated user, tor by itself is useless.
 
Ducky said:
Which is only part of the fingerprinting model. To an uninitiated user, tor by itself is useless.
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Yeah, you're right. I'll get back to working on my browser plugin details and system fonts :boggled:
 
Ducky said:
Which is only part of the fingerprinting model. To an uninitiated user, tor by itself is useless.
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But isn't this defeated by some simple measures? I turned off Javascript and most of their fingerprint data was not measurable anymore. Turn off cookies also and you're only left with the User_Agent string and the HTTP_ACCEPT header. You can tweak the first - set it to Googlebot, or set it to IE8 to get a meaningless value. For the second, don't set any language preferences other than English and it's meaningless too. So it's not like rocket science - OK, granny won't grasp this but the average power user raised in the internet age understands it. As you don't want to surf the net all the time with those settings you use another browser than your standard browser for anonymous browsing.
 
Ed said:
Unless you swipe a machine your IP is logged, I would think. No that would be assigned on the fly. But your machine ID?

I was thinking about this yesterday when they were talking about that horror chick that cut the baby from it's mother. Evidentially they tracked her thru a chat room and nabbed her in 23 hours. All via the Internet, or so they said.
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mac address is specific, but with multiple usb wifi sticks.....
 
nimzov said:
If you use a chain of proxies I don't see how it will be possible to follow the track. No court order will be appliquable to all elements of the chain. And of course it takes only ONE of the member of the chain to delete their log, for anonymity to be assured.

nimzo
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connection would be unreliable and slower than mud though.
 
ddt said:
But isn't this defeated by some simple measures? I turned off Javascript and most of their fingerprint data was not measurable anymore. Turn off cookies also and you're only left with the User_Agent string and the HTTP_ACCEPT header. You can tweak the first - set it to Googlebot, or set it to IE8 to get a meaningless value. For the second, don't set any language preferences other than English and it's meaningless too. So it's not like rocket science - OK, granny won't grasp this but the average power user raised in the internet age understands it. As you don't want to surf the net all the time with those settings you use another browser than your standard browser for anonymous browsing.
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We covered this already. Turning off javascript and changing your header covers some of the identifying information. With javascript off and my headers changed, I still had 10.24 bits of identifying information according to their algorithms. Please go back and reread what the project is actually doing.
 
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