On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 11:53, Job wrote: > . . .I just want to be sure receivers of email wont be able t see my > IP and stuff. . . > As long as i dont send any emails to anyone isnt it safe? I > understand my ISP and mail.com will be able to trace me but not > receivers of emails as I am not sending any at that moment. I got curious about Tor because of concerns of businesses, including my ISP, tracking my activities over the Internet. Ultimately I became most concerned about Google due to the thousands of searches I've performed over the years, including medical, political, and financial searches that I thought were of a private nature. I've learned that Google keeps a permanent history of all searches, and if they wished, could probably sell most of my search history, properly linked to my real name and address. I don't believe the US has any laws to stop this. What I've learned about Google disturbed me enough that I removed Google ads from my web site. As it develops, it appears that Tor's most valuable contributions will be in the area of allowing people under repressive governments (and other non-benign powerful organizations) to access and share information their governments does not want them to see, and to communicate with like minded individuals, in and out of their own countries. The "Why We Need Tor" section of the Overview http://tor.eff.org/overview.html.en says "It [lack of anonymity] can even threaten your job and physical safety by revealing who and where you are. For example, if you're traveling abroad and you connect to your employer's computers to check or send mail, you can inadvertently reveal your national origin and professional affiliation to anyone observing the network, even if the connection is encrypted." While Tor certainly can hide you from your final destination, whether it be a server or individual, that seems more a by product than a core feature. I've found parts of this thread mildly disturbing. The Overview suggests an excellent reason for email through Tor, though in such a case you will not at all be anonymous to the email's recipient, but should be anonymous to the first and subsequent links providing the connection back to your employer. I'm having some trouble visualizing (maybe I lack imagination) why it should be so important to hide yourself from someone receiving your email. If you've already gone through a free email service, and used an obscure email name, your real IP has negligible value. That is unless the emails were harassing or otherwise violated the origin ISP policies, in such a way that the ISP might reveal sender information to the recipient, or cancel the sender's account. Job, can you explain, in an abstract manner, why it is important to you to send emails where the recipient has no way to identify you, but you do not care about your ISP or independent email provider being aware of your other activities, except when you are contacting these special recipients, when you will be using Tor? It's unlikely to be relevant in this situation (Job does not appear to be a US resident), but US residents who use Tor to harass or annoy email recipients anonymously are committing a federal crime. In early January 2006, Bush signed the Violence Against Women Act, which provided among other things "Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both." http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3576511 So you can annoy someone by email if you don't hide your identity, but if annoy someone anonymously it becomes a federal crime. George Shaffer -- Get my GnuPG public key from http://geodsoft.com/about/ or use gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key A1A23194
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