Have I been hacked into?

I reported problems with JAP in another post - it's a hard error now. However, I'm also getting problems with Anonymizer 2004 - every single time it's turned on I get a 404 error (and the spinning "A" in the systray won't apear any more. So...is something stopping me from enjoying privacy? Whenever I turn anonymous browsing off, I can reach the sites I want to visit.

Colour me paranoid, but... Also, whenever I go to www.anonymizer.com and click for support, all I get is advertising for Anonymizer 2005.

Sorry, not sure if I'm paranoid or cynical here. All help appreciated.

 

I've noticed problems on some mixes with JAP in the past. Did changing the mix server help or did you receive an error always? (and what was the error). As for Anonymizer, there are 2 possibilities - your PC cannot connect to their server or their server cannot connect to the destination website. Doing a ping to the Anonymizer server should confirm the first while the second would seem an issue for Anonymizer support (I don't use the service so I'm afraid I can't offer much more help).

However there is another option - Tor which should be worth trying (faster than JAP and arguably more secure).

 

Hi, honestly the IP annomilyzers etc can hide certain info from the net, but there will always be a record of your IP address at the ISP, which sites visited etc.

Alot of these programs are sold on false pretences, and the requirement of using one is suspicoius to say the least. They will not protect you from the authorities.

 

Aologies, Sweetie, but it's kind of hard not to read this as an accusation.

 

Not so, anonymizing systems like JAP and Tor encrypt the traffic between your PC and the first mix server - so the ISP will only see an encrypted connection to this server, they have no way of determining the final destination.

This has been pretty well discussed in the Don't Fear Internet Anonymity Tools so referring to that thread would seem more sensible than rehashing this old chestnut.

 

So you honestly believe that this software will hide all that you do?


Id suggest that you take a look at the news in australia, late last year;
Many (over 500) people arrested for illegal activities, mainly child porn, were tracked through their ISP by police. Almost all had their PC's set up with IP blockers/annomilyzers and security software, they were tracked by the sites they visited, Emails sent, and P2P activity.

Id assume the police had warrants for this, but the monitoring is particularly easy, using hardware that works similarly to the american NSA's keyword system, when certain sites, words, letters are entered the system records the activities of that IP number. Even those that encrypted their hard drives were caught, using the software program developed by the FBI, addmittidly this was a big investigation where the government spent big on detection experts, but it shows what is possible.

 

Notice that no information is ever given about what exact methods were tried or what software was used (what are the odds that the culprits were relying on Evidence Eliminator?).

"IP blockers" (more normally described as "proxy servers") do not encrypt traffic from your PC so anyone relying on these could certainly be monitored by their ISP. Systems using strong encryption (and JAP/Tor use 128-bit AES) cannot be monitored in such a fashion, the only way to identify users' activities is to monitor every server in the system and use traffic analysis to link the incoming and outgoing network connections - with this information it would then be possible to track the encrypted traffic going into the network with the unencrypted traffic exiting the network.

Obviously doing this sort of analysis is highly non-trivial (especially when the servers are spread across several countries and have hundreds of simultaneous network connections), possibly requiring the ability to monitor large sections of the Internet and would be more in the province of government TLA agencies rather than police forces. However this has been extensively discussed in the Don't Fear Internet Anonymity Tools thread so I will not comment further here.