Is it possible to be TRULY anonymous online. or how close can we get ?

most ppl have seen the evil villain or hacker commit a bad act (fill in your own evil deed of choice) and vanish without a trace. in the REAL world is it possible to be anonymous or are we just being lulled into a false sense of security ?.

obviously the authorities arent gonna admit it either way, and just claim the glory when somebody is caught, and give us a renewed sense of relief or comfort that good will always triumph over evil (even if this isnt REALLY the case)

Gazzer

 

Being truly anonymous is difficult, and it involves far more than technology. If you're using Tor (TBB or Whonix) via chained VPNs, finding you might require very substantial effort. Your ISP can't see that you're using Tor, and to websites you look like any other Tor user. But you're still not really anonymous, because less than 1% of the world's people use Tor.

Tor developers are generally distainful of VPNs, and argue that tunnelling VPNs through Tor reduces anonymity. However, using popular free VPN services through Tor, and browser addons that randomize signature, is arguably more anonymous than Tor alone. That would be so, I believe, as long as more people use free VPN services than use Tor, which seems likely.

But whatever technology you use, as soon as you say or do anything, you become less anonymous. And the more you say or do, the less anonymous you become. You may still be effectively untraceable, but you're not anonymous.

 

It doesn't work like anything in the movies or TV. For one thing, neither the good guys or the bad guys have the kind of abilities they do in Hollywood, much to the dismay of both parties. When people generally think of being completely hidden, they think of groups like Anonymous, LulzSec and others who, seemingly, are able to get away with far too much. The truth is, they aren't using any magic and they aren't "un-catchable". It boils down to a lot of botnet use, chaining freebie/stolen VPN accounts, simple, automated tools among other things. Each of these things are links in a chain. A link could break at any point due to a great many things, carelessness and ego often being two major ones.

It's not as simple as some may think, nor is it as complicated as some may think. Only one truth holds, and that's that nothing is infallible.

 

Using chained vpns behind Tor does make you very hard to trace.

However, if authorities use correlation-timing attacks to figure out the ip address of the first VPN connected to Tor, then all they have to do is look at the logs of that VPN and then trace you back through each VPN until they get to your real ip address.

Also authorities can use stylometric analysis (analysis of your writing style) to figure out who you are.

How do "browser addons randomize your signature"? What does that even mean? I'm no computer geek so could you explain this in layman terms?

 

See https://panopticlick.eff.org/ to get your browser signature.

Search Firefox add-ons about changing "user agent".