and it got me thinking that too many people don't really know how to truly be anonymous on the Internet
OK. In my case, this is bollocks. I know how to stay anonymous. I'm simply trying to figure out (for about five years now) why I should have to. Why I must use Tor and anon proxies and fake names/emails/accounts/https or anything else. It pisses me off that there is zero protection of your identity and other personal details on the Internet. I don't use what I should use to hide/protect myself not because I don't know how to (I could give ya'll a five page tutorial on how to at the drop of a hat) but because I feel I shouldn't have to. No one should have to.
So yes, when LJ did the big auto-stalking reveal, there was my location plain as day for all who had IP logging turned on to see. LJ should never have made it that easy to see, though, period. They let us down. To go outside the realm LJ is responsible for: The very nature of IP allocation should not have made it so easy to figure out my or anyone else's location in the first place.
The Internet was not built with anything but pure trust in mind, which is a fabulous self-contradiction considering what it was invented for: highly classified/sensitive military communications. People praise the US for coming up with the military version of the Internet in the first place yet the locations of its users are completely transparent so how does it's default iteration protect anyone, much less our military? The way IP is allocated and so easily revealed makes it, not its users, stupid. Extremely so. We have the right to privacy online. We don't get it thanks to the way the Internet is designed. Change the design, not the way users have to use it to gain any privacy.
Short of that, if you want to drive yourself half-bonkers with the built-in difficulties and unreliability of most anonymizing proxies, go nuts configuring secure, invisible VPNs, creating sky-high privacy settings in every program/on every website you use, and faking half to most of your email names/online user accounts, then hey, guess you gotta do what you gotta do.
I say you shouldn't have to - the whole system needs to change.
no subject
OK. In my case, this is bollocks. I know how to stay anonymous. I'm simply trying to figure out (for about five years now) why I should have to. Why I must use Tor and anon proxies and fake names/emails/accounts/https or anything else. It pisses me off that there is zero protection of your identity and other personal details on the Internet. I don't use what I should use to hide/protect myself not because I don't know how to (I could give ya'll a five page tutorial on how to at the drop of a hat) but because I feel I shouldn't have to. No one should have to.
So yes, when LJ did the big auto-stalking reveal, there was my location plain as day for all who had IP logging turned on to see. LJ should never have made it that easy to see, though, period. They let us down. To go outside the realm LJ is responsible for: The very nature of IP allocation should not have made it so easy to figure out my or anyone else's location in the first place.
The Internet was not built with anything but pure trust in mind, which is a fabulous self-contradiction considering what it was invented for: highly classified/sensitive military communications. People praise the US for coming up with the military version of the Internet in the first place yet the locations of its users are completely transparent so how does it's default iteration protect anyone, much less our military? The way IP is allocated and so easily revealed makes it, not its users, stupid. Extremely so. We have the right to privacy online. We don't get it thanks to the way the Internet is designed. Change the design, not the way users have to use it to gain any privacy.
Short of that, if you want to drive yourself half-bonkers with the built-in difficulties and unreliability of most anonymizing proxies, go nuts configuring secure, invisible VPNs, creating sky-high privacy settings in every program/on every website you use, and faking half to most of your email names/online user accounts, then hey, guess you gotta do what you gotta do.
I say you shouldn't have to - the whole system needs to change.