Anonymous surfing suggestions

Hi all! I am currently living in Beijing China and I have finally decided that I need to take steps to protect my identity while surfing the internet. I have always heard that the Chinese govt has these "wonderous" tools at their disposal to track and block all internet activity. For a while, I thought that most of these stories were just a healthy dose of sensationalism and paranoia among my fellow expats. Yes, there are always sites that are forever blocked, I have been here four years and I have never been able to access the BBC site or any news articles by them, but most of the stories seemed far-fetched.

However, recent events have convinced me that privacy and security may be more important than I realized. There have been a wave of people being arrested because of their actions on the web, labeling it "politically sensitive". In general, most foreigners are left alone in these types of situations. But there are now rumours that a few expats have been arrested and/or deported also. In addition, the US State department has issued a release today blasting the Chinese monitoring of the internet and Cisco providing the technology to do so.

I am enclosing a short clip:

"There are some encouraging and innovative public and private efforts
already underway in this area. Electronic Frontier Foundation, for instance,
allows Windows based computers to become proxies for Internet users,
circumventing local Internet restrictions. Through the efforts of the U.S.
Broadcasting Board of Governors' fund of a mere $100,000, VOA and Radio Free Asia's websites are accessible to Chinese Internet users through proxy servers because of the technology of Dynaweb and UltraReach.

Earlier this month, the technology firm Anonymizer announced that it is
developing a new anti-censorship technology that will enable Chinese
citizens to safely access the entire Internet filter-free. The solution
will provide a regularly changing URL so that users can likely access the
uncensored Internet. In addition, users' identities are apparently protected
from online monitoring by the Chinese regime."

So, my basic question is is there anything that exists now that will give surfers privacy? I have checked into onion routers, proxys, and anonymous software, but most claim that nothing provides complete security. If this is true, what will provide the most protection utilizing what is available today? By the way, www.anonymizer.com cannot be accessed at this time!

I am running Winxp on adsl.

 

I'm no real expert in this, but I have been experimenting recently with proxies. If you are using Firefox browser (and if not, why not? It's better than IE6 and free), you could try downloading one of the proxy extensions and getting a list of free proxies. This might enable you to get to Anonymizer (which is what I use if I want to go dark).

 

I have used firefox it's useless

 

Now that's a fairly broad and general condemntion of one of the web's better browsers. Are you sure you had it configured correctly?

And exactly what was "rubbish" about it? Slow? Graphics rendering? Features?

It sits lightly on your system, does not accept ActiveX and is not integrated into the OS. What's not to like?

Mind you, I have heard good things about Opera. Or do you work for Big Bad Bill?

 

Old thread, start a new one.

Firefox sits lightly on a system?

Hardly.