Can You Be Identified / Tracked By Your Browser Configuration?

[Guest i is Sam :-)]

MODS PLEASE REPLACE 'INTERCOURSE' WITH E F F it cannot be avoided it will wreck the link. I think there are 7 instances need replacing. This is the Electronic Frontier Foundation they are very important to anyone who cares about privacy online and your digital rights.

This is important stuff guys and girls for those of you worried about the government or other groups being able to know what websites you visit.

From intercourse.org

Help intercourse Research Web Browser Tracking

What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web? Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their web browser. Unfortunately, this is not the whole story.

When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer's configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer. But how effective would this kind of online tracking be?

intercourse is running an experiment to find out. Our new website Panopticlick will anonymously log the configuration and version information from your operating system, your browser, and your plug-ins, and compare it to our database of five million other configurations. Then, it will give you a uniqueness score — letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.

Adding your information to our database will help intercourse evaluate the capabilities of Internet tracking and advertising companies, who are already using techniques of this sort to record people's online activities. They develop these methods in secret, and don't always tell the world what they've found. But this experiment will give us more insight into the privacy risk posed by browser fingerprinting, and help web users to protect themselves.

To join the experiment:

http://panopticlick.intercourse.org/

To learn more about the theory behind it:

http://www.intercourse.org/deeplinks/2010/01/prime...ry-and-priva...

[MaryEllen]

If anyone wants to find this site just Google "Electronic Frontier Foundation". You'll get there.

As far as covering up your internet tracks if you are using Internet Explorer, click on "Tools", "Internet Options and then select what you want to delete. Most other browsers, more or less, work the same way. You can also purchase software that will erase your tracks. C/Cleaner works well too.

[Guest i is Sam :-)]

I see you didn't read it then.

[Guest Anna_Banana]

As a computer networking major with a forensics background, I can safely tell you that no matter what you do, you CANNOT cover up your tracks. The safest computer is one that is unplugged, disassembled, encased in concrete, and buried deep underground. Most of the time hackers aren't concerned with your browser configuration. If they want to see where you are going, they can just sniff the packets you are transmitting. I'm actually taking a class right now on network intrusion detection, avoidance, and counter-measures.

MaryEllen said:

If anyone wants to find this site just Google "Electronic Frontier Foundation". You'll get there.

As far as covering up your internet tracks if you are using Internet Explorer, click on "Tools", "Internet Options and then select what you want to delete. Most other browsers, more or less, work the same way. You can also purchase software that will erase your tracks. C/Cleaner works well too.

This does not erase your tracks. Maybe the every-day user won't see where you've been, but an IT professional can. Even when you think you are "deleting" items, you aren't really getting rid of them. That item still exists on your hard drive, unless you physically destroy the platters so that not even a single piece remains. Even the slightest fragment of a hard drive platter can be used to recover information.

.Anna

[Guest April63]

This does not erase your tracks. Maybe the every-day user won't see where you've been, but an IT professional can. Even when you think you are "deleting" items, you aren't really getting rid of them. That item still exists on your hard drive, unless you physically destroy the platters so that not even a single piece remains. Even the slightest fragment of a hard drive platter can be used to recover information.

.Anna

That's technically true, but you would have to go to great lengths to recover data from a drive like that. Professionally it costs several thousands of dollars. I think that's not really the point made with this post.

[Guest i is Sam :-)]

Thanks Anna, yeah I mean randomly overwriting data 7 times is supposed to be good enough for the US government, so I'm not sure much would be accessible after that, but as we create more sensitive equipment we can detect more subtle variencies in the magnetic fields.

But this is about the fact that our browsers provide quite a lot of seemingly innocuous data to every website we visit, which it turns out might end up being very specific to each of us. I.E. just like leaving a finger print at a crime scene. It certainly has very worrying implications, we may need to use multiple broswers with different configurations, perhaps add plugins that change name randomly to try and poison the well so to speak, sending entirely false data isn't very useful because the information is for the purposes of ensuring compatibility.

However right now the E F F just need to test as many machines as possible to try and see just how unique each of them is, because right now we're not sure. My system was unique out of 28,000 or whatever it was they tested, so was my sister's and a friend's. If one of us visited the site again now, even through a proxy server it would know which of us it was. Of course it's not set up like that, and doing so would just make it believe your system wasn't unique, but it would work.

I don't know why they decided not to correct the post, especially since intercourse dot org is a porn site. Apparently that's better than the vowel sound 'F'. But I'v had this argument before, I will never win.

Here are tinyurl links to take people to the right place

To join the experiment / test your machine

http://tinyurl.com/yebgvrt

To learn the theory

http://tinyurl.com/yz45le2

Hopefully yz45le2 isn't a swear word klingon or whatever.

[Guest ChloëC]

As with so many other things, a determined person can figure it out. Security was made to be broken. About the only thing one can do is make your system a little bit harder to be traced/broken into/compromised, so hopefully a casual hacker will go to easier pickings. But as has been said, if someone is really determined and can obtain the means, our computers are just filled to the brim with information about us that is very hard to hide, much less destroy.

And I don't think it's going to get better in the future. George Orwell definitely had the concept right, he just couldn't forsee the timing or the mass proliferation of electronic devices. Governments don't need to install blinking eyes in everyones rooms. We've done that for them with cell phones, laptops, desktops, whatever. (Actually, I think the ending of 'The President's Analyst' is probably closer to our future)

Chloë

[MaryEllen]

I see you didn't read it then.

Admittedly other than a brief skim through, I didn't read it. Mainly because there's nothing on my computer that I'm concerned about anyone seeing. Anna is right, however. Nothing is ever completely erased from the hard drive. Anyone who has ever visited or downloaded from, say, a kiddy porn site or engaged in terrorist activities, for example, has plenty to worry about. That person should immediately take their computer out to the back yard, pound it into a million pieces with a sledge hammer, incinerate the pieces and scatter the ashes about 10 miles out in the ocean. That's about the only way you can be reasonably sure that your tracks are covered.

BTW No. We're not going to change the word filter.

MaryEllen

[Guest i is Sam :-)]

You're still missing the point. This is about tracking you online from a remote location. They don't need access to your computer, and destroying it would only prevent them from being able to match the signature to your hardware config, this wouldn't matter if you'd ever visted a site anywhere, where you'd given details or simply not used a proxy.

And EVERYONE should be concerned about their privacy, if you give it away you don't deserve it. It doesn't matter if you think you have nothing to hide, at least maybe you don't by your countries current standards. What happens when the law changes, when if say blasphemy became illegal? Or a recent example from the UK, the outlawing of "violent pornography" something which until recently was completely legal, when staged or simply as images of concenting adults. Now a picture of your own husband or wife tied up could be considered illegal and get you 6 years in jail.

So don't think that you shouldn't care, you have no idea what's going to happen in the future. Choosing to remain ignorant is nieve at best, arrogant at worst.

[Guest i is Sam :-)]

Oh and you didn't have to change the filter, you just had to manually edit the post, but you know this, I bet you could also include an overriding phrase in the filter such as replacing intercourse.org with e f f . org without having to remove the other filter.

[Guest ~Brenda~]

When I am at work, I enter Laura's through such a jump in worldwide proxy servers. I am not worried

Between the firewalls setup to prohibit intruders into my work PC, and my server jumps. I don't care.

Besides, at this point in my life if someone confronted me about being on Laura's, I would simply say that "Yes I frequent a Transgender Support Site... What's your problem?"

Love

Brenda

[Guest ~Brenda~]

Admittedly other than a brief skim through, I didn't read it. Mainly because there's nothing on my computer that I'm concerned about anyone seeing. Anna is right, however. Nothing is ever completely erased from the hard drive. Anyone who has ever visited or downloaded from, say, a kiddy porn site or engaged in terrorist activities, for example, has plenty to worry about. That person should immediately take their computer out to the back yard, pound it into a million pieces with a sledge hammer, incinerate the pieces and scatter the ashes about 10 miles out in the ocean. That's about the only way you can be reasonably sure that your tracks are covered.

BTW No. We're not going to change the word filter.

MaryEllen

[Sally]

Well in the event that someone breaks into my computer that means that they have broken a law and I am not too worried about them telling anybody that matters - if they do then that's as good a time as any to come out and go full time!

Love ya,

Sally

[Guest Nelly]

Hi,

to put cream on the top, you also can be found on the way you wrote. Many people write many thinks in many boards of the web. Their is software around that is able to analyze the writing style and it is able to connect different articals of "different" person in different boards to show that it is all written from one person. So also if you use some servers to make your IP anonym, you must also use different styles of writing.

Greetings

Nelly

[Guest Joanna Phipps]

1. 
   

1. Anyone who has managed, run, or interacted with a message service such as this one for any length of time can tell you that a person's message style is much like a finger print, it is unlikely that two people will use the same words, sentence and paragraph length, phrase structure and construction.
   
2. There are programs designed to totally wipe the free space, slack space or total hard disk. Norton's wipe info (part of the Norton Utilities Package) comes to mind, these programs work by over writing the empty space with random ones and zeros there by removing all traces of what you had done. The slack space on a hard drive is the left over space at the end of a file, if a file does not fill an entire sector then the rest is left with what ever data was in that sector before. If you wipe the format, wipe the hardrive, then write meaninless data to it in precise sector size chunks, the remove all partitioning information you will stop 98% of investigators. Figuring out the sector size isnt a problem, it will be in the HDD specs. Once departitioned and repartitioned there is no guaranteeing that the sector boundaries will be in the same place.
   
3. Short of governement agencies the only way to track your movements online is via your IP address, in most cases this will only resolve to a city, and in many cases it isnt the city you live in. This is because ISP's tend to centralize there services and this makes the ip trace to the location of the address servers not to your location. Both my home and work IP's trace to Albuquerque not to where I actually live, this is because of the way Qwest has things set up.
   
4. Most of what can be read from your browser is stuff like browser plugins, mime types accepted by your browser, system fonts, cookies enabled and other innocuous stuff.
   
5. locks are made to keep honest people out, someone who really wants access to your machine or server will find a way to get it
   

[Guest Nelly]

Hi,

I know only a bit about what kind of data is sent to the other side of the line, but as a mod in a different board, I can see some nice infos about the used system and the browser. So I think we have a view lines in the webpage codes that ask for this information. What I mean, the other side must ask the browser to sent the harddrive infos or so. Or do I completly wrong? If it is ask why can I set the browser to not answer this request?

Also if you have installed a fire wall and you get a message every time software tries to enter internet, than you can see that it is a lot of traffic. So do you know what all the updatemanager really are doing? I turned them all off and only do an update if it is recomended from some specialist. Adobe reader for example do not need to check every day if their is a new version.

Greetings

Nelly