IP Hiding software

[Gig-O-Ram]

A question from my wife:

"I recently learned that my location can be easily determined from emails I send. This unnerves me. I looked up IP Hiding software online and was confronted with a LOT of different ones. My question is: What programs would you recommend to do this; or would you recommend them at all? Any and all suggestions are appreciated and of course, any suggestions for freeware or something not too costly will be very much appreciated."

[screwballl]

Relating specifically to emails, just use gmail or another free online email place... as for everything else, I do not know of anything outside of slow proxy based setups that are really worth a damn

[Lead Head]

Your IP can only easily be determined by your ISP, not the person on the other side of the e-mail. Your ISP's e-mail server, and the other persons e-mail server act as a proxy or a buffer.

Your IP can only tell a person the general area where you live, in my case, my IP points to a town around 40 minutes away. Only if the person were to somehow force your ISP to tell them the owner of a specific IP, could they find where you live.

[screwballl]

That is very true, only by legal request with a warrant can an ISP release information about who was using that IP at the given time.
On the flip side, hackers and spambots do not need this info, if they have your IP, they can use that to DDoS or try attacking your IP regardless if you just got it or had it for years.
My IP points to Pensacola, FL which is a good hour away (about 60 miles).

[Gig-O-Ram]

And DDoS means...?

[garetjax]

Originally Posted by Gig-O-Ram

And DDoS means...?

Distributed Denial of Service attack. It's a method hackers use to flood a targeted computer (or server) with excess garbage (ie packets) for which the server cannot cope with all the multiple requests being asked of it. For a DDoS to occur, a hacker would need many computers "attacking" the same server at the same time. Basically, it prevents legitamate requests from going through to the server because the servers bandwidth is too busy handling all the "attacking" packet requests.

[screwballl]

we are dealing with a DDoS now on one of our emails servers that has been going on for almost 6 months now.. has pretty uch left an entire domain of email addresses down... luckily the system can use a few of the others as interchangeable domains so they are using them for now.

[Gig-O-Ram]

She generally sends emails via AOL. It's difficult to tell where a person on the AOL service is emailing from because they use proxy servers. In the case she was refering to with her question, she was using one of her Yahoo email addresses. She emailed someone from there who is on AOL. In AOL, when you get an email from outside of AOL, there's a link in the email that says "Details". The recipient clicked on the link, fed the IP address into a google service called "Find My IP" (she thinks that's what it was called). This service told the recipient she was emailing from the Albuquerque, NM area. It was no big deal, but she was just surprised that the other person could determine where she was emailing from.

[One4yu2c]

One way to keep her location private is to download the XeroBank Browser, which is FireFox configured to travel on the Tor network. In short, page requests get tunneled through a series of nodes, so the originating IP stays hidden from the destination. XeroBank can be run from a USB key too, so she can have privacy on the go. The caveat? Browsing with the free version is incredibly slow - there's a paid version that's supposed to be faster, which I haven't used - but you can run it only on an as-needed basis. Before posting this, I tested XeroBank with Yahoo Mail, and the header shows my message originated in Germay (I'm in Michigan).

For more tips, I recently wrote an article on how to stay anonymous online, which you can read here.

[Gig-O-Ram]

My wife thanks you!

Normally, she doesn't mind if people know where she is, but it is nice to have tools like what you suggested to use on an as-needed basis when she feels it would be necessary.