As far as I know, there are 4 things that we’ll need to take care of in order to stay totally anonymous during surfing the web. First is whenever we’re connected to the Internet, our Internet connection is assigned with a unique IP address. Search engines and websites that has statistical software installed, your IP address will be recorded together with the time you access the site. This can easily be changed by either using VPN such as Hotspot Shield and UltraVPN or an open proxy. The difference between VPN and proxy is VPN routes all internet traffic through the VPN service automatically and as for proxy, you will need to configure it on the application to use it. Proxy is normally slow and unstable but VPN is the opposite where it is faster and stable.
Next comes to Javascript, Java or Flash which can be used to extract more detailed information about your computer. BrowserSpy.dk shows exactly how it can be done and fortunately this can be blocked by using NoScript which I’ve posted earlier this week. Third, is by removing browser cookies. Finally, the fourth one is the user-agent where NoScript cannot block and it is able to identify your browser and provide certain system details to servers hosting the Web sites you visit.
To check your user agent string, use your web browser and go to http://www.useragentstring.com/.
The user agent string that is gotten from my latest Firefox 3.6.11 browser is the following:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101012 Firefox/3.6.11
Quite a lot of information is revealed from that short line. It shows Mozilla version, platform, security values, operating system, language tag, version of Gecko, build date, and version of Firefox.
If you’re a firefox user, there’s a very useful extension called Proxy Tool where you can set it to randomly change your user-agent string whenever a page is refreshed. No configuration is needed except the only gripe I have on this extension is you need to always enable the Randomize ALL feature whenever you open Firefox because it seems that the settings are not saved.
Other than that, Proxy Tool extension also has other useful feature such as changing the Referrer (where you came from) and also using of free HTTP proxies which I do not recommend because it’s slow, unstable and you never know if the other side is actually sniffing your internet traffic. By default this plugin also automatically deletes your Firefox cookies.
With a combination of NoScript to block untrusted Javascripts, Java and flash, VPN to hide your IP address, and Proxy Tool to spoof your user-agent string together with auto cookies removal, maybe even the almighty Google who keeps their logs of what you searched for cannot identify that it is you.