Computing and communicating through the Web makes it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview; a lost or stolen laptop can expose personal photos or messages; or a legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating or just embarrassing details from the past.
Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.
Vanish is helpful in both positve and negative way how you wan to use it and your intensions. As some confidential data can be traced and your secret is out . Vanish will help you to secure your data once read will be deleted or will be encrtpted so no one can read it and your secret is safe.
There are times when you have to send emails anonymously. But, not many options remain when you want to do it. The best way out possible is a ‘remailer‘.
But, what is a remailer? A remailer is an address through which an electronic message passes before continuing the rest of its journey to its actual destination. It wipes out all the headers that can disclose your identity! There are two different classes of remailers: Cypherpunk and Mixmaster. We will try to discuss both in short.
Cypherpunk or Type I remailers: In a Type I remailer, a single message is forwarded between several systems before reaching its destination and has its identity stripped at each link. Type I remailers never create a database of identities! It is achieved in the following way: A user constructs a chain of remailers, encrypting a mail in a separate layer for each remailer. Each remailer publishes a PGP public key that users use for an encryption layer. When a Cypherpunk remailer receives a message, it strips off a layer using its own private key, finding the identity of the next remailer within the decrypted bundle. Each remailer is able to decrypt the bundle it receives but it cannot itself look more than one link ahead (the one it should forward the message to), let alone determine the final destination. So, in theory, after the first link the sender’s identity is removed, the first link only knows the sender, and learns it not from anything in the bundle, but from who sent the bundle in the first place!
MixMaster or Type II remailers: Type II remailers go one step further by explicitly assuming that every network connection is being monitored. In order to protect email from those with the computing resources to monitor all network traffic, MixMaster creates specific mechanisms to overcome agents studying traffic patterns. These mechanisms include reordering, message padding, message delay, etc. Rather than simply forwarding each package to the next link as soon as it is received, a Mixmaster node will save messages for variable durations, bundling collections of messages together for transmission to a downstream node. So, type II remailers are much more resistant to traffic analysis, unreliable nodes, and other attacks than Type I remailers are.
If you want to find a good anonymous service, you either have to pay for it or scan through large subnets for it. The first option has the following drawbacks: 1. Your remailer will always be the same or a group of known remailers. Once your provider is known, the list is known as well. 2. No matter how secure you think your remailer service is, it can give off your logs to the Government in case it is asked for! Ofcourse, everyone should comply with the Government.
Second option will take a lot of time! We consider that you have already scanned and found a remailer. But, using a remailer for anonymity without using encryption for privacy does not work! You need some kind of encryption so that the message stays crypted. If you send your message through just one remailer and unencrypted, the remailer operator (or somebody monitoring their email traffic!) knows both where the email came from, where it is heading and its contents. To prevent this, you have to chain at least two remailers and encrypt the message using OpenPGP. To encrypt the message, you have to know the remailers’ public keys.
To find and import the public key of your remailer: * Make sure you have either PGP or GnuPG installed. * Send an empty email to the remailer with “remailer-key” (not including the quotation marks) in the subject line. * Import the PGP key you get back into PGP or GnuPG.
Fortunately for those who do not want to trouble their asses and find remailers, there are a lot of friendly souls who operate remailers. Not all of the remailers are always online, and not all of them are always functional, but fortunately you can find out about the remailer’s reliability too! Here are a few famous lists to get you started: 1. Visit the list of Type-I (Cypherpunk) Remailers. 2. Anon-Remailer 3. Secret101 4. Mix2Minion. (We have not tested this software, nor are we in any way affiliated with this site!) 5. MixMaster Remailer Interface. 6. MixMaster. (We have not tested this software. It is open source, so, maybe you can modify it.)
Having typed all of that, we think you are ready to send some anonymous emails. If you still need some help, visit here or here.
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Minnesota News Council » Blog Archive » | Surveillance, Anonymity…
