Online anonymity


After having a post removed on the above mentioned subject by an unscrupulous moderator with NO explanation given as to why the post was removed I hereby provide a guide for those persons who wish to remain anonymous on the internet. I will waste NO time detailing why you would want to remain anonymous because privacy in communication is a right. 1. Mask your IP address. Sites like ebay, youtube, facebook use your IP address to get a geolocation as to your whereabouts. They say they do this to provide you with a better service when infact all they want is to gather data about you to sell to advertisers. Use a VPN to mask your IP. The Opera web browser comes with a built in VPN although it uses a google server for DNS (but that's another story) https://www.opera.com/ What this does is make it appear that you are connecting to the internet from a different geolocation than you actually are. You connect to your ISP, it connects to the VPN and the VPN connects to the net. Its a good first attempt at remaining anonymous but not full proof (DNS leaks can occur) 2. Download the TOR browser bundle and use the TOR network. https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en This is a network of connected relays/nodes which encrypt the traffic from each one. You connect to your ISP, it connects to the TOR network and through a series or encrypted communications you will connect to the internet. You can further enhance your privacy by disabling javascript which reduced some functionality but you remain covert. 3. Use a private and encrypted email. Google and other nefarious agencies can and do scan the contents of your emails so as to target and profile you for advertising. They compile this data with your searches and map queries and youtube viewing to create a profile. The ultimate solution is to use a program like PGP (Pretty good privacy) which encrypts your emails and can be read by no one except the intended recipient if they have 'a key' to descramble the encrypted message. There are many way to improve your privacy on the internet and if you are serious about it then there are some excellent resources to help you. If you are interested in some of the contemporary issues facing the right to anonymity on the internet than here is a good place to start. https://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity

My father-in-law works in cyber security. He uses TOR via a VPN for his personal internet.
There is a great program called proxychains which lets you use TOR to build as many encrypted connections as you like. Of course the more you do the more slower its gonna send and receive data but still. TOR is great but you need to use an exit node (the last link in the chain) to access the internet and this communication can be monitored. Also if you run some applications while using TOR information can be extracted to ascertain your real IP. A group of researches managed to get the IP addresses of about 10,000 TOR users who were using bittorrent clients over the TOR network to exchange data thinking that they were anonymous.

I don't wanna know how many of the always recurring trolls are behind a proxy and chess.com is (almost) helpless getting rid of them. Maybe the same trolls spreading wrong information in the forums here regarding IP-Blocking.

Actually, I already use Tor to access most of the Internet, and I was contacted by a moderator about having multiple accounts (I don't.) because they saw my IP address matched another account. I almost had to explain to them that IP addresses are shared between people who value their anonymity, for good or bad reasons it doesn't matter.
Even if you aren't suspicious or doing anything wrong your IP (and by extension your real physical address) is being monitored every time you post.
Not on my watch. Great guide Robbie.

"If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about." - is BS! Let's just make stalking legal too! But that's not legal just because it's not automated by a machine?
It's creepy, people! Put some clothes on, cover your IP address!! That's your real address exposed to any website you visit (not to mention the selling of user information, which you bet your butt even chess.com is not above that when they start going under).

I don't wanna know how many of the always recurring trolls are behind a proxy and chess.com is (almost) helpless getting rid of them. Maybe the same trolls spreading wrong information in the forums here regarding IP-Blocking.

Actually, I already use Tor to access most of the Internet, and I was contacted by a moderator about having multiple accounts (I don't.) because they saw my IP address matched another account. I almost had to explain to them that IP addresses are shared between people who value their anonymity, for good or bad reasons it doesn't matter.
Even if you aren't suspicious or doing anything wrong your IP (and by extension your real physical address) is being monitored every time you post.
Not on my watch. Great guide Robbie.

So you are fluent in English, Scot and now whatever you are speaking in this thread, Robbie?


Some say the mad queen we use nowadays in chess was created in her honour...

If someone did this then how would the site be able to tell if you have more than one account?

I don't wanna know how many of the always recurring trolls are behind a proxy and chess.com is (almost) helpless getting rid of them. Maybe the same trolls spreading wrong information in the forums here regarding IP-Blocking.
IP blocking is only good for a single IP address and normally ISP's assign a dynamic IP address (which changes over time) rather than a static one anyway.
Yes, that's the point.
Usually there's a pool of IP-Addresses assigned to an area (likely based on the DSLAM, a distribution center for dsl-connections) and if you are unlucky you get an IP-Address assigned which one provider has blocked before. Had this a few times when I was in my other flat with University-Appartments nearby. Regularly they were provocing the email-provider and I had to call them for an Unblock. Such things happen when devs of a website don't know what they do.

If someone did this then how would the site be able to tell if you have more than one account?
There are better ways these days than solely relying on the IP, which is error prone and anything but reliable. But yes it's an common approuch and mapping the activities by one specific IP onto the activities in the community it's possible to find a missing link between two suspicious user. Not going into details ...