hide ip address

The Best Ways to Hide Your IP Address


All devices connected to the Internet are assigned an IP address, a unique identification number. This number can be used to trace your location, and, with the cooperation of your Internet Service Provider, even your identity. There are several ways to mask or hide your IP address online. Most of these methods were designed for people in repressive regimes or as ways to escape censorship. They have other uses as well.


Tor Internet Anonymizer
1. Tor is a free software suite that encrypts your web traffic (making it unreadable to outsiders) and routes your connections through a random chain of other computers around the world. Using Tor, your information is secure. Your IP address is shown as the last computer in the Tor route, wherever that may be. Very often that computer is on another continent, so as far as anonymizing Tor is one of the best solutions. Tor is used by law enforcement, the military, law firms and journalists in some of the most sensitive anonymity situations in the world; it is in many ways the gold standard of online anonymity.

The downside to Tor, however, is the impact on the speed of your connection. Depending on the speed of the computers routing your information, you may find your Internet connection slowed down considerably. Also, Tor is not designed for high-bandwidth applications, like large downloads or bit torrent. Though it is possible to route this sort of traffic through Tor, it puts an enormous strain on the network and the resulting speed would be slow.
Virtual Private Networking (VPN) Software
2. VPN software allows you to redirect all of your Internet connection traffic through another computer, often encrypting the traffic on the way. For example, businesses often set up a VPN so that off-site employees can access resources that are restricted to on-site computers. As far as anyone can tell, when you are on a VPN your IP address is the IP of the VPN server.

If you have access to a server and reasonable technical know-how, the open-source OpenVPN is one of the best packages of its kind. If you lack the resources to set up a VPN entirely on your own, there are many reasonably priced services to do it for you, such as widevpn.com

Not all VPN companies guarantee your complete privacy, however. Most will keep records to allow them to comply with subpoenas and other legal requirements, and most of them explicitly ask you not to use their service for peer-to-peer activity such as bit torrent. There are exceptions, such as the upcoming European VPN service iPredator, which is targeted specifically at file sharers.

Proxies
3. A proxy service works much like a VPN, but without encrypting your traffic. Set up or sign up for a proxy service, enter the information into your web browser and, instantly, all your web traffic is routed through the proxy server. Most proxy services do not guarantee anonymity, but there are some for whom it is a specialty. Anonymizer.com is a popular service that claims to provide complete anonymity, chiefly through use of its proxy. Companies such as Cegaproxy.com even allow you to visit other sites anonymously without any configuration required, all using web proxy technology.

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