Products available to hide your IP

[Duckie]

Can anyone recommend a product to hide your IP?

I've seen loads advertised, but would like to use a recommended one.

I just want to hide my IP when surfing the net, (so my boss doesn't know I'm on here!!) and when I send emails.

We are tracked and monitored enough in life I think, and I think which websites I go to, and what emails I send, are my business, and no one elses!!!

I would like a free service, obviously, but have seen some for £10 or £20 that hide your IP for life.

Any good ones or bad ones out there?????

Thanks!

 

[Tremaine]

Deleted by poster as info was apparently incorrect.

 

[Good CO]

You can hide your IP using a proxy server (google that and you'll find loads). This is man-in-the-middle that knows your IP address so receives data and forwards it on to you. Otherwise you have to have an IP address visible to the sites you use or they wouldn't be able to deliver the content back to you. Kind of like writing off to Blue Peter with a blank self-addressed envelope inside. You will never know about that competition win and your blue peter badge will be lost forever.

If like most people you have a dynamic IP address, then you are nigh on untraceable anyway. You share that address with thousands of others who use the same ISP. For someone (eg. us) to trace you we would have to go with a court order to your ISP giving the exact time you were accessing ARRSE.

Conclusion - stop worrying. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.

 

[Good CO]

By the way - the information in Tremaine's post is mostly wrong. IP addresses are not affected by firewalls, nor are they uniquely associated with machine names and you can change it. Tremaine may be confusing it with a MAC address, but this is not visible to websites anyway so I won't bore you with it.

Not responding to ping (or any other connection) requests is fine, but has nothing to do with the issue you ask about.

 

[blue-sophist]

Weird ... my IP address is Trowbridge, Wilts - about 250 miles away.

I don't understand computers any more

Happy New Year, GCO ... and BCO, of course.

 

[smudge67]

Weird ... my IP address is Trowbridge, Wilts - about 250 miles away.

I don't understand computers any more

Happy New Year, GCO ... and BCO, of course.

Persec!!! FFS!!!

 

[Argee2007]

Weird ... my IP address is Trowbridge, Wilts - about 250 miles away.

I don't understand computers any more

Happy New Year, GCO ... and BCO, of course.

If i were you i'd get an IP hider to stop people thinking you lived in that sh1thole

 

[blueygirl]

Apologies for hijacking the thread but I wonder if anyone can explain (in very simple language I am a bit of a luddite) if it is possible to find out which machine, country, etc an email came from?

I have a received a couple of vey nasty emails from the account of someone I know. They have stated categorically that they did not send them, but have said that their account has been hacked in the past. I am not sure I believe them but being a trusting sort of girl have taken this at face value. I did however take the precaution of telling them that if this happens again I will have no hesitation in informing the email provider and the police. Any advice (even if it is that there is nothing I can do) would be most helpful.

 

[blueygirl]

It's OK chaps, I think I've managed to decipher some stuff found by way of google.

 

[happybonzo]

Link: http://whatismyipaddress.com/

Good bit of software - many thanks

 

[Good CO]

Apologies for hijacking the thread but I wonder if anyone can explain (in very simple language I am a bit of a luddite) if it is possible to find out which machine, country, etc an email came from?

I have a received a couple of vey nasty emails from the account of someone I know. They have stated categorically that they did not send them, but have said that their account has been hacked in the past. I am not sure I believe them but being a trusting sort of girl have taken this at face value. I did however take the precaution of telling them that if this happens again I will have no hesitation in informing the email provider and the police. Any advice (even if it is that there is nothing I can do) would be most helpful.

The email protocol doesn't carry any information about the PC (operating system et al) like a normal web page HTTP request. It does have IP addresses though as it's not fire-and-forget; the receiver communicates back to the sender "hello a", "hello b", "got an email for..", "that's cool, send it" etc, and to do this you need IP addresses. You'll get a chain of them as the email was forwarded through intermediaries called mail exchangers.

However it's much easier to hide the true originating IP address as the system effectively uses the proxy system I mentioned in my first post. The second 'however' is that most people have dynamic IP addresses, given to them by their service provider (ISP) from a pool of addresses shared with all customers. The upshot is that the IP will likely only give you a rough geographic area and the ISP. You may be lucky and get a company (not just the ISP), but even then you won't know where it came from within that. The third 'however' is that you probably won't get the originating IP at all as most private PCs don't actually send mail, but just pass it to the computer (owned by your service provider, or hotmail etc) that first properly transmits the email.

Anyway, somewhere in your email client you'll find the option to show you the full email headers. This looks something like (spam to us):

X-Yahoofilteredbulk: 217.146.97.5
X-Ymailisg: akHaKt4tYB3Jj4eShfrMCib9Ii0wItJqJ_87MR6Ua13w8N49hkfDrpmwWZj5KHY3.EKcEPuwwzgOYNwE7ApRvN80lM3a9UGoXQQW.Dnn09Bj5_eT2c29G_K945eKUfC53DltPtYgJoZMCdxFSXGir15_8Jy39HmKB.3CdHD151nsmrTzsDoG_K3sXkO5jDdQnOJXutQl9dVD_kJs2X3TsG8RKApVDrxgXKi17rBar94RgOTSSa1XeWMo74Qw
X-Originating-Ip: [217.146.97.5]
Authentication-Results: mta137.mail.ukl.yahoo.com from=arrse.co.uk; domainkeys=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 217.146.97.5 (EHLO gawain.merula.net) (217.146.97.5) by mta137.mail.ukl.yahoo.com with SMTP; Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:28:18 +0000
Received: from athedsl-395321.home.otenet.gr (athedsl-395321.home.otenet.gr [79.131.96.55]) by gawain.merula.net (8.14.1/8.14.1) with ESMTP id n020M2RC029817 for <yabbadabbadoo@arrse.co.uk>; Fri, 2 Jan 2009 00:22:03 GMT
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 00:22:02 GMT
Message-ID: <200901020022.n020M2RC029817@gawain.merula.net>
To: <yabbadabbadoo@arrse.co.uk>
Subject: She's writhing in pleasure
From: <yabbadabbadoo@arrse.co.uk>
..........

It starts at the most recent and works back down the chain of intermediaries, so the last "received: from" is the one you want. Type the ip address in to samspade.org and you'll get some information - probably useless.

*** health warning *** I'm not as good on the email process as on web page transfer. This post may have errors, but only minor ones I think - these will be in the exact forwarding details and terminology.

 

[blueygirl]

Thanks GCO - much as I have already discovered...some of this 'pooter lark is not as complicated as it first appears

....in the absence of other methods of discovering where/who they came from, I will wait and see if they heed my warning...

 

[Mikal]

I haven't used this for a while but if you're really determined....

http://www.anonymizer.com/

 

[Cooks_Assistant]

Another suggestion, since email headers can be faked:
Use a web beacon.
This is a remote file (normally an image) included in a HTML email (or PM). When the email is read the persons email reader 'fetch's' this image from a location of your choosing, typically a server you own. You then check your server logs to find the IP which fetched your image. As a bonus you'll get their user-agent giving you their operating system, web browser and version.
I recommend a 1x1 pixel white spot. Very hard to spot. Many email clients /web-portals block remote images now so it's becoming harder to do but it used to be the way to get peoples IP by email.

It's more complex than email headers but it will give you a more accurate IP location than a public mail server which with services like Gmail is all you will get. I won't explain the ins and outs, Google will help you there.

Edited to add, some of the avatars people use on arrse are remote images. The reason for doing this may be innocent but some are there to harvest IP's of arrse users.

 

[Good CO]

" The reason for doing this may be innocent but some are there to harvest IP's of arrse users."

To the casual reader that sounds like you're accusing US of some sort of underhanded behaviour. I would appreciate a second post just clearing that one up.

Interesting stuff though and thanks for the post.

 

[GoodIdeaAtTheTime]

If like most people you have a dynamic IP address, then you are nigh on untraceable anyway. You share that address with thousands of others who use the same ISP. For someone (eg. us) to trace you we would have to go with a court order to your ISP giving the exact time you were accessing ARRSE.

As we (the industry) are not required to log the NAT translations there is not going to be anything to produce.

HINT: Most of the stuff you see on Bourne and Spooks is fictional.

 

[Good CO]

If like most people you have a dynamic IP address, then you are nigh on untraceable anyway. You share that address with thousands of others who use the same ISP. For someone (eg. us) to trace you we would have to go with a court order to your ISP giving the exact time you were accessing ARRSE.

As we (the industry) are not required to log the NAT translations there is not going to be anything to produce.

HINT: Most of the stuff you see on Bourne and Spooks is fictional.

Very interesting. Do you have a reference of any sort for that? I ask as we are periodically threatened with something and told to reveal IPs. This gets the response above - court order for us, then try your luck with the ISP. Our replies would be more complete if we could include "and in accordance with XYZ, your ISP is under no obligation to...."

 

[Bravo_Zulu]

Here's one I made earlier

 

[Cooks_Assistant]

" The reason for doing this may be innocent but some are there to harvest IP's of arrse users."

To the casual reader that sounds like you're accusing US of some sort of underhanded behaviour. I would appreciate a second post just clearing that one up.

Interesting stuff though and thanks for the post.

You're right. As the admin you have the weblogs so no need.

I was referring to users who link in a remote image for an avatar or signature block. You've got to ask yourself why if there's a perfectly good image upload feature?

It's a privacy concern, especially when included in PM's, but easy enough to prevent by configuring your browser settings to block remote images.

 

[Bravo_Zulu]

" The reason for doing this may be innocent but some are there to harvest IP's of arrse users."

To the casual reader that sounds like you're accusing US of some sort of underhanded behaviour. I would appreciate a second post just clearing that one up.

Interesting stuff though and thanks for the post.

You're right. As the admin you have the weblogs so no need.

I was referring to users who link in a remote image for an avatar or signature block. You've got to ask yourself why if there's a perfectly good image upload feature?

It's a privacy concern, especially when included in PM's, but easy enough to prevent by configuring your browser settings to block remote images.

Because when some of us chose an avatar we just hotlinked to somewhere like photobucket, rather than go through the hassle of downloading, uploading, linking etc. I think you're being a teeny pit paranoid.