Wikinews:Anonymity

= Introduction =

For a variety of reasons, both Wikinews sources and contributors may have a need to access the Internet anonymously and take measures to conceal their location and identity. For example, a Wikinewsie may wish to access a banned document without their ISP knowing they have done so, or the site hosting the document from knowing their location and identity.

There are a variety of tools to make this possible, they rely on strong encryption, and can be quite daunting to set up. The details herein are intended to cover Windows, and, to keep to a simplified toolset, assume the Firefox web browser is to be used.

Web browsing
Whenever you visit a website, the computer running the site gets details of your IP address, information about the browser you are using, details from any cookies you have for the site, and a few other bits and pieces - like what add-ons you have installed on your browser. Your ISP will also get to see these details, as well as all the address lookups (DNS) required to get the web page.

The tool built to deal with this is Tor. The project's website is a good compliment to the Wikipedia page on Tor. Onion routing explains more of the technical details, but there is good science behind the assertion that good use of Tor will make you untraceable.

Non-http Internet applications
Most people know very little about the Internet, and the specifications for services other than the web. The most obvious application is email - and there are ways to anonymise that - but other applications like instant instant messaging, IRC, or Usenet work over different protocols. The safest approach is to avoid using these, and for email use a webmail service.

= Installing Tor =

Remember, this assumes you are going to use Windows and the Firefox browser.

The downloads page for Tor is here. At present it offers a 'standard' package, and a 'Windows Browser Bundle'. The latter allows setting up a USB stick that you can run the whole thing off, this may be useful to some, but select the standard Windows bundle - this document covers it, and is intended as a basis to allow non-web applications to be anonymised through tor.

Contents
When you have downloaded the Tor bundle, you must install it without Firefox running. The installer can be started from the downloads window, left at the first dialog, and all Firefox windows closed down. This will include the downloads window itself, and any other applications such as Chatzilla.

The bundle should contain
 * Vidalia
 * Tor
 * Privoxy
 * Torbutton

select a Full install - all components.

Install process
The install is fairly straightforward until the Torbutton component is installed. This is a Firefox add-on, so the browser is launched to do the install, and when it is complete Firefox will need to be restarted. Following the restart, close all browser windows and complete the install process for the Tor package.

Vidalia
This is a graphical front-end that allows you to control Tor, it should not need any changes to the default settings unless your ISP uses a proxy server.

Tor
This is the back-end that processes all your requests, encrypts them, and sends them out through the Tor network. It is very rare that any changes are required that cannot be performed through the Vidalia front-end.

Privoxy
This is a special program that works between your web browser and Tor. Its job is to strip all the information that might identify you from a request before it is passed to Tor. There are some fairly sophisticated filtering rules in this, you will find a lot of advertising and flashy junk is filtered. For example, web cookies are blocked in most cases, but Flash must be blocked altogether because the plug-in implements its own cookie system that cannot be filtered by Privoxy.

Torbutton
This is a Firefox add-on that switches between browsing through Tor, and directly. If you get the install correct it should display "Tor disabled" in the status bar of a Firefox session (bottom right). Clicking on this will switch to Tor.

If there is any problem with this, search for Torbutton in the Firefox add-ons, remove it, search using the Firefox add-ons manager for the latest version of Torbutton, and install that.

Additional steps to take
Many Firefox add-ons and toolbars can interfere with the Tor package (i.e. leak information about who you are). Avoid using add-ons that strip advertising, change the browser identification string, or track data like PageRank - yes, if you have the Google Toolbar, disable it.

Once you've gone through all this, you're ready to click on the "Tor Disabled" text in the status bar, and browse anonymously.

Browsing through Tor will be noticeably slower than without it, this is a side-effect of hiding your connection.

For extra security, the first step to take after enabling Tor is to start a private browsing session. This is under the Tools menu on Firefox.

To check the whole thing is working, visit this proxy checker. Verify the check does not give your IP address.