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Tor, Privoxy, Glype, Anonymizer, the Cloak... what is the real difference?

Hi experts,

while doing some research on anonymous surfing I came across different ways to achieve the same result, i.e. hide the IP address. Tor, Privoxy, Glype, Anonymizer, the Cloak, and many others seem to reach the goal in different ways. Although I can understand how the different solutions work in principle I would like to have a better understanding of the pros and cons of each approach, assuming that my objective is to browse Google and Yahoo in total anonymity (of course without using any account).

Can you please help me?

Tolomir

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privoxy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glype
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymizer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

jiiins2

ASKER

Thanks, but I'm looking for something more specific like the pros and cons of each approach.

Tolomir

In General: Tor can be problematic since hosting the exit points are very interesting for secret services (word wide)
They still don't know who sent what but they can create profiles, there are techniques to identify computers to profile them (tcp timing mechanism and such) can be countered with tools like privoxy but I would not rely on it 100%

A service provider like anonymizer can be forced to reveal the true identify of a user.

See disclaimer from cloak: In accordance with our abuse policy described below, we reserve the right to turn over the IP addresses of people who abuse our system either to the appropriate legal authorities, or to those against whom abuse has been perpetrated. Use of this service constitutes acceptance of the terms of our abuse policy.

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So you could go best with tor but still there is a small chance to get identified.

Tolomir

jiiins2

ASKER

I see... but what about using a web proxy like Glype or CGIProxy as opposed to the rest? Do they truly hide the IP address? It would seem as by far the easiest solution as they are free and very easy to install and control.

Thanks
J

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Tolomir

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Tolomir

Especially nasty is the useragent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.20.1

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648)

helps a lot to profile a computer....

Tolomir

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.30 Safari/525.13

jiiins2

ASKER

So let's say I want to browse google and yahoo in complete privacy. I want to be 100% sure that nobody at google or anywhere else can see my real IP. I don't do anything criminal and I can exclude that authorities will come to my home to confiscate my pc. What would be the best approach?

jako

use privoxied tor. you can easily use one preconfigured if you install Vidalia: http://www.vidalia-project.net/

jako

btw: Tolomir pointed out the simultaneous use of tor and privoxy in #22874962 so please award all the points to him for I'm not trying to snatch points but only close up open issues.