15-10-2012, 05:00 PM
Internet Anonymizers
anonymizers.doc (Size: 116 KB / Downloads: 29)
ABSTRACT
If one wants to explore certain web sites (that require personal data to proceed), how can one explore such sites keeping his identity a top secret?
Internet Anonymizers provide an excellent solution to such problems. Internet Anonymizers are online services that eliminate the trail of information that the user leaves behind, so that the user’s online activities cannot be traced back to him. These services make the user’s web browsing as anonymous as possible. The first Internet anonymizer was Anonymizer.com, developed in 1997 by Lance Cottrell during studies towards a Ph.D. in Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego. Anonymizers are popular for the reason that they offer a broad array of privacy-enhancing features. Government agencies are important users of anonymizers. Anonymizers also have a place for non-governmental users. While an anonymizer has the potential for misuse, anonymizers have historically had more important legitimate uses. According to a recent survey, personal data privacy is the most important issue for 90 percent of the Internet users polled. Thus the importance of anonymizers is increasing day by day.
INTRODUCTION
Internet anonymizers are services that set up a secure connection with your computer, surf the sites you wish to visit on your behalf without disclosing your identity. They offer a broad array of privacy-enhancing features by concealing Web surfers' identities, typically by blocking JavaScript and encrypting URLs. Some anonymizers require the use of client software which creates a virtual proxy that links either with a proxy network or to a public proxy server while others only require that you log onto their website before browsing other sites. The anonymizers vary in sophistication depending on the number of features that you require.
NEED OF ANONYMIZERS
Any web site in the world can track movements of the users’ through its web pages and monitor users’ reading interests using their IP address. The information gathered about user’s operating system using IP address, a Web site can exploit security holes in user’s system using some common free hacking programs. Some of these programs may delete user’s hard drive, but other, more powerful ones, can get access to the content of the hard drive. Anonymizer prevents this by hiding user’s IP address so that no one can access user’s computer via the network
In case the user does not use anonymizer, then he is actually risking vital information about him. For example, a hacker can easily find out user’s IP Address, name, email address, various user ID's and passwords, web browser, Operating System. User can also be easily located geographically, like the hostname, country, city etc.
According to a recent survey by Yank-elovich Partners, personal data privacy is the most important online shopping issue for 90 percent of the Internet users polled. Many companies are violating their customers' trust by selling what was supposed to be confidential personal information to the highest bidder. In all these cases anonymizers provide excellent solution.
HOW DO ANONYMIZERS WORK?
You essentially surf the Web through the anonymizer site, going to that site first and then routing all your pages from there. When you send a page request through the anonymizer, it acts like a super-proxy server, stripping off the header of each data packet, thus making your request anonymous. The requested page is then fed through the anonymizer back to your Web browser.
SINGLE-POINT ANONYMIZERS
This type of anonymizer passes your surfing through a single web site to protect your identify, and often offers an encrypted communications channel for passage of results back to the user. Single-point anonymizers offer less resistance to sophisticated traffic analysis than networked designs, but they also provide a compensating simplicity, organizational familiarity, and apparent trustworthiness. You can access your favorite anonymizer web site, type in your destination, and the anonymizer does your surfing for you and passes the results back to your browser.
With single-point anonymizers, your IP address and related identifying information are protected by the arms-length communications and not transferred to the sites you visit. If you are using a secure channel to the anonymizer, as most services offer, then your communications to the anonymizer site are also confidential to any local eavesdroppers tapping your Internet line connection or service provider -- essential if you have reason to suspect a local tap.
COMMON FEATURES
Both networked and single-point anonymizers share a range of design features. Most importantly, once you access a web page through an anonymizer, the page is filtered so that all of its links are also anonymized. Therefore, you can just continue to click on links and stay in the anonymizer mode. Most anonymizers can anonymize at least the web (http , file transfer protocol (ftp , and gopher (gopher internet services.
There is an overhead with use of anonymizers, and they can add a second or more of delay depending on how busy they are. Some anonymizers keep a local cache of several hundred megabytes of commonly accessed sites to address this problem, and so occasionally you can actually get faster access to a site through the anonymizer. Chaining of anonymizer services is not recommended, since it simply multiplies your risk to confidentiality by the number of services and computers in the chain.
ADVANTAGES
Internet anonymizers are services that make user’s web browsing as anonymous as possible there by protecting personal information and online activities of the user.
Anonymizer services are positioned to become a major market force. They offer a broad array of privacy-enhancing features by concealing Web surfers' identities, typically by blocking cookies and JavaScript and encrypting URLs.
Many anonymizers are relatively inexpensive, priced at about $50 a year. Some even let customers establish multiple user identities.
An anonymous surfing service can make a user feel more secure on the Internet,
DISADVANTAGES
Anonymizers can be misused to evade corporate firewalls, defeating your efforts to stop employees from accessing their personal email accounts and engaging in inappropriate – and sometimes illegal – Web surfing to pornography and gambling sites.
In some cases, employees use anonymizers to hide businesses they're running on company time and company servers, lowering their productivity and eating up precious bandwidth.