Some year ago I was searching for a technology to hide my IP, because some ’smart’ site admins decided to prevent parsing information from a public governamental site. That’s how I found Project Tor , which can be described as an ‘internet anononymizer’, in fact a tunneling technology which makes the original IP very hard to trace back. How and what for others are using it you can read here.
Short time ago one of my partners asked if it’s posibble to have that too, but with the option to switch between real and and anonymus IP. As each application needs to be manually configured to work with Tor a good solution seemed to configure a Linux distribution inside a virtual machine and switch between that machine and the host. But a little search on the web revealed others already did this. It’s called JanusVM.
Using it is straightforward: download and install VMWare Player, plug in this appliance, connect through openVPN to the virtual machine and all traffic is tunneled through Tor. Thanks to squid and privoxy you also get rid of a lot of unwanted internet junk.
Hearing about this, a friend told me it would be nice if he could get anonymous even from internet cafe’s (well I knew he was thinking how he could bypass his companies proxy without having rights to install programms). That’s easy, you get the link from the Tor Project page: Incognito LiveCD. It’s a Gentoo Linux live distribution containing several Internet applications (Web browser, IRC client, Mail client, Instant messenger, etc.) pre-configured for Tor. Just burn it on a CD or USB stick. You don’t even have to restart Windows, just insert the media and you’ll be presented a menu and can start using it.
If you have used this tools, please tell us about your experience with them.