Anonymity

If a person enters a website. Once you hit any one of the files on the webserver, the website owners can find out these pieces of information about you, and much more:

1. Your IP Address.
2. Your hostname.
3. Your continent.
4. Your country.
5. Your city.
6. Your web browser.
7. Your Operating System.
8. Your screen resolution.
9. Your screen colors.
10. The previous URL you've been to.
11. Your ISP.

If a person gets connected to an IRC network and if he is chatting with his friends.  A person is giving all his information to others indirectly. Like ,

1. Your real name.
2. Your Email address.
3. Your IP address.
4. Your hostname.
5. Your ISP.
6. Your continent.
7. Your country.
8. Your city.

Some ISPs also run finger daemons.

A daemon is a program that waits for incoming connections on a specific or several ports.  The finger daemon is a daemon that waits for open connections on port 79. Once you get in, you need to punch in a username on the system the daemon runs on and you will get tons of information about him.

Below is the list of softwares and tools which prevents any outsiders from getting information about us

Proxies
Proxies were first invented in order to speed up Internet connections. Here's how they work:
You are trying to connect to a server on the other side of the planet. Your HTTP requests are sent to your proxy server, which is located at your ISP's headquarters, which are a lot closer to you than that far-away server. The proxy first checks if one of it's users has accessed this website lately. If so, it should have a copy of it somewhere on it's servers. Then the proxy server starts the connection only to check if his version is not outdated, which only requires him to look at the file size. If it has the latest version, it will send the file to you, instead of having the far server send it to you, thus speeding up the connection. If not, it will download the requested files by itself and then send them to you.

But proxies can also be used to anonymize while surfing the web, because they handle all the HTTP requests.

Wingates
Wingate is a program that is used to turn a PC running Windows 9x or NT into a proxy server. Here are several reasons for why a person would want to run such an application and turn his computer into a proxy:

1. If he owns an ISP and he wants to set up a proxy for it.
2. If he wants to turn his computer into a public proxy.
3. If he wants to give Internet access to a whole bunch of computers that are connected by a Local Area Network, but he can provide Internet access for only one computer. In that case, he would turn his computer into a proxy server and set all the other computers on the network to use him as a proxy. That way all the rest of the computers on the network will relay their HTTP and FTP requests through a single computer, a single modem and a single Internet account.

Anonymous Remailers

Now it is obvious that to keep your privacy, you need to sign up for a free Email account (such as Hotmail [hotmail.com], Yahoo mail [mail.yahoo.com], ZDNet Mail [zdnetmail.com], Net @ddress [netaddress.com], Bigfoot [bigfoot.com] etc'). But what if a person has  a special Email address on a free server that automatically forwards all incoming Email to a real mailbox and keeps all the information discreet?

These are called Anonymous Remailers. Most of them are free and live out of contributions and/or sponsor banners they place on their website. anymous Remailers can be found at http://www.theargon.com.

Here's a good example for an Anonymous Remailer:
First, head to http://anon.isp.ee (by the way, the extension .ee stands for Estonia) and sign up your free account. Once you're a registered user, send an Email to robot@anon.isp.ee with no subject and the following content:
user: your username
pass: your password
realaddr: your recipient's Email address.
realsubj: the subject of your mail.
Example: if I want to send an anonymous mail containing the following:

Subject: ANONYMITY RULEZ!!
Hi.
This is an anonymous Email message.
Let's see you trace me now!

to bgates@microsoft.com, and your username is user and your pass is pass, send the following Email to robot@anon.isp.ee (remember not to enter a subject):

user: user
pass: pass
realaddr: bgates@microsoft.com
realsubj: ANONYMITY RULEZ!!
Hi.
This is an anonymous Email message.
Let's see you trace me now!

You'll receive an Email notification from anon.isp.ee once your message has been delivered.
Once your recipient will reply to this Email, the message will return to you.

You can also use web-based anonymous remailers such as Replay Associates (replay.com/remailer/anon.html), but it won't let you receive replies.

Encryption
Everyone can read a Email. Whether it's some script kiddie who hacked a Hotmail account, a skilled cracker (or a script kiddie with a lot of free time) that hacked a POP3 mailbox or a person who got your Email by mistake. If a person don't want other people to read your Email, use PGP.
Everyone who uses PGP can have their own PGP key. A key consists of tons of characters, whether they are lowercase or uppercase letters, number or symbols. After you make your key, you need to transfer it to everyone you want to send encrypted mail to. Once they have it, you can start sending encrypted mail to them and they'll be able to use your key to decrypt it.
More info on www.pgpi.com.

Note: PGP is very strong and can only be broken with giant supercomputers. The longer your key is, the harder it is to break the encryption.

Cookies
Have you noticed how all those websites on the net are getting "smarter" all of a sudden? You know, like the way message boards remember your nickname, some sites remember your password so you won't have to retype it every time, electronic malls remember what you last put in your virtual shopping cart etc'.
This is all because of cookies. Cookies are small files which a website can request your browser to create and then retrieve information from them. Websites can put your password or any other information in these files.
If you don't want your co-workers or other people to sniff around and see where you've been visiting, what items you've been buying etc', you should delete them when you don't need them.
On Unix, your cookies would usually be stored somewhere in your home directory (usually /home/your-login, /usr/your-login or /usr/local/your-login ,c:\windows\cookies, if you're a regular user and /root if you're root, but anyone with write access to /etc/passwd can change that).

On Windows and Mac, cookies are stored on a sub-directory at your browser's directory called cookies.

Note 1: you can tell your browser to ask you before accepting a cookie. Just change the preferences settings, you'll find it. 
Note 2: if you're browsing from a public computer, do not save any cookies, or other people will be able to snoop around and look at your cookies or even enter various websites with your passwords, your credit card number etc'.

.chk files
Stone Cold Lyin Skunk has pointed out that if you're running Windows and you do a quick reboot (hold down shift while telling Windows to reset) Windows generates a file called FILE0001.chk, FILE0002.chk etc' (usually found on c:\). You will be amazed to see how much information you could find in these files! Delete them ASAP!

The Anonymizer                                                                                             The Anonymizer is an Internet service that helps you anonymize yourself better. The Anonymizer's homepage is www.anonymizer.com. Here's a snapshot from anonymizer.com:

Company Overview

Anonymizer.com is a pioneer in Internet privacy technologies, and the most popular and trusted name in delivering online privacy services. Anonymizer.com, today, has many thousand subscribers to its paid services and makes anonymous over 7.5 million pages a month. Lance Cottrell, founder and President of Anonymizer.com, authored the world's most secure anonymous remailer, Mixmaster and has been active for many years in promoting free speech. Lance received his undergraduate degree in physics from The University of California, Santa Cruz and a masters in Physics from The University of California, San Diego.
Justin Boyan, while a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, designed and implemented Anonymizer surfing. Anonymizer Surfing is now in its 4th generation under development by the Anonymizer engineering team.

Our Mission

Our mission is to ensure that an individual's right to privacy is not compromised once they are online. We began this company as a means to protect this right as embodied in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks." While written 50 years ago, article 19 of this document is now more than ever applicable with the advent of the recent growth of the Internet: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." You can read the full Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the following URL: http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm.

You can use The Anonymizer to surf the web with anonymity for free by going to anonymizer.com and typing in the target URL where asked, or buy an Anonymizer package, which will give more benefits.

Tips to follow on the Net

Using Altavista as a proxy                                                                                                       If you go to altavista.com, and under their tools section choose translation (or go directly to the following URL: http://babelfish.altavista.com/cgi-bin/translate?), you can ask Altavista to translate web pages for you.
But you can also use this as a proxy, since when you tell Altavista to translate a web page, Altavista's CGI translation script retrieves the page for you.

Spoofing browser history                                                                                                           set up a V3 redirect (http://www.v3.com or something like that). then build a quick webpage with a link to the site you want to view discretely.then go to your webpage via the V3 redirect. the URL indicater at the top of the browser will not show the URL you visit even your own .index page it will only show the URL name

the +x mode                                                                                                                            In IRC, it is possible to put yourself into mode x by typing '/mode yournick +x' (do not include the quotes and replace yournick with your own nick. For example: /mode esecure +x).
This tells the IRC server to hide your IP, so when others try to /whois you or /dns you, they won't be able to get your IP (they will get a partial IP instead). This will only work on some servers, but when you're on IRC, it is recommended to use this option. Also, there is a way to bypass this. By simply creating a DCC connection with someone else (either a DCC chat or a DCC file transfer), you could then type 'netstat' (without the quotes) on either Unix or Windows/DOS and see what connections your computer is currently handling. One of them will be the DCC connection to that other person.  Because DCC stands for Direct Client Communication, which means that DCC actions are not done through the server, but directly (because, why would the owners of the IRC server want people to transfer files through their servers and initiate private chats through their servers? It'll just chew up some bandwidth). The netstat command shows all current connections (local or remote), and one of them will be your DCC connection with that other guy. You will then be able to see his/her IP or hostname.

The Proxomitron                                                                                                   Proxomitron is an ace little program written by Scott R. Lemmon program which allows you to change certain pieces of information which web pages can find out about you just by going to their web page. It also allows you to filter what happens when a page loads up eg. Like when you go to a Geocities page and that annoying banner pops up? Well not anymore as it allows you to kill it.

Enter The Proxomitron, Re-Writing the web Your way...                                                              It was out of my own personal frustration with such "browser abuse" that the Proxomitron was born - at it's heart is a powerful text matching engine specially designed to re-write web pages on the fly, as you view them in your browser.

Getting rid of many common annoyances is as simple as clicking on one of the filtering rules included with the program, but best of all, the Proxomitron's rules aren't "hard-coded". You can look at them, modify them, even write entirely new ones.

If you know some HTML, you'll find the Proxomitron allows you to personally customize just about any web page you view. You'll no longer be at some web-master's tender mercy. Even if you know no HTML, you'll find the included rules give you far more control than you've ever had before.

Spies                                                                                                                              Besides filtering web pages, The Proxomitron also allows you to control the normally hidden HTTP header messages that pass between your browser and the outside world. Many people are unaware that this covert conversation is even taking place, yet it can reveal all sorts of information. See exactly what your web browser has to say, then have it tell the world only what you want! Even those notorious "cookies" can be deleted or modified if you wish.

JavaScript
In the wrong hands some JavaScript commands have been used to attack! Less ominous, but still aggravating are commands that do things like add a page to your bookmarks whether you want it there or not. More and more, disabling JavaScript entirely just isn't a viable option - The Proxomitron allows you to selectively disable specific JavaScript commands while leaving the rest working. It's even possible to redefine a command's function entirely.

Here's a partial list of what the Proxomitron can do "out of the box".  

Ø      Stop pop-up windows.

Ø      Stop pop-up JavaScript message boxes.

Ø      Remove web-branding and other scripts tacked on by "free" web providers.

Ø      Convert most ads and banner pictures into simple text links.

Ø      Freeze all animated gifs.

Ø      Make blinking text appear as bold instead.

Ø      Remove slow web counters.

Ø      Stop web pages from "auto-refreshing".

Ø      Prevent pages from changing fonts. 

Ø      Get rid of or replace web page background images.

Ø      Protect against getting "trapped" inside someone else's frames!

Ø      Make background MIDI songs play only when you choose.

Ø      Remove status bar scroll-texts.

Ø      Remove "dynamic" HTML from pages.

Ø      Disguise your browser's identity and version from JavaScripts.

Ø      Remove style sheets.

Ø      Un-hide URLs when the mouse is over a link.

Ø      Disable frames or tables altogether.

Ø      Change or delete cookies.

Ø      Change your browser's user-agent and other identifying fields.

Ø      Hide where you've been previously from inquisitive web servers and, as they say, much, much more.

Can be found http://proxomitron.cjb.net/

Anonymity on Usenet                                                                                                                      Do you post on Usenet regularly? Are you concerned about your anonimity? Then you should go to www.deja.com and sign up for a free account which will let you post anonymously.
Nothing will be revealed about you, not even your IP, since deja.com handles the actual posting.

This concept explained here is really a problem when a system administrator doesn’t want the outside world to know where they reside. The tools explained above will help the system administrator in keeping the network anonymous from prying eyes.