Nah, you’re not abnormal. I’ve had the same thing happen at multiple store. The most invasive has been Microcenter; they tell me that I have to give them my email in order to wait in line for tech support, and then bombard me with spam. Every time I buy something new there, I have to tell the cashier to NOT use the address on file that they won’t unlink from my bank card.
I’m curious how hard it would be for a typical user to chain VPNs together so that my traffic went sequentially through VPNs. In theory it seems like VPN #1 would know that it was connected to my home and VPN #2, so it couldn’t tell where data was originating. VPN #2 could see the site that was being accessed and VPN #1, but not me.
I have no idea if it actually works this way in practice through.
It depends on whether you believe that people should be allowed to use narcotics or not. I tend to believe that people should be able to make that choice for themselves–as it’s their own body–and ordering narcotics online decreases violence in the drug trade since there’s no longer obvious fights over territories, etc.
The same interagency cooperation that makes it easier to track down one groups of people and punish them also makes it easier to track down other groups of people that you might agree with.
ISPs definitely keep records. At least some VPNs claim that they don’t, and that their networks are set up in such a way that they can’t. Some organizations claim to validate the claims of the VPNs, but it’s unclear if they’re trustworthy.
So your choice is to use something that definitely keeps logs, or to use a company that at least says that they don’t/can’t.
Oh, yeah, I’ve been seeing that a lot of it has been really dragging for, like, the last year or so.
Yes, if a state-level actor is able to get control of all the nodes, then everyone is pretty much fucked. I suppose that, with enough nodes, you could make that kind of attack really, really hard. I’m also guessing that Monero transactions are taking a really long time right now to go through? I saw that the Finnish (?) gov’t claimed to have ‘broken’ Monero, but they’re not giving any technical information about their claims, and most current speculation is that they busted the guy doing other shit that they were able to trace link to Monero transactions. (I don’t really keep up with Monero; last I knew, there wasn’t a good wallet that didn’t require downloading the whole blockchain, and my home internet is slooooooooooooow.)
Freenet was never really anonymous; there have definitely been busts from Freenet. IIRC it’s distributed, but not anonymized; I haven’t really done anything with it in ten years or so. i2p is probably pretty solid, but it’s often very difficult to use. I’ve tried it, and most of the time couldn’t make configurations work. Or else the eep sites I was trying to reach were offline. IDK.
I dunno; given that Tor was originally designed to be extremely difficult to track, and was designed by spooks, it’s plausible that they aren’t able to crack their own security. If they controlled enough of the network, they could, in theory, track individual users. But it would be extremely resource intensive, and they would already have to be targeting you.
IIRC, the case you’re talking about involved social engineering to gain admin privileges, then illegally hacking computers through malicious javascript to leak their real IP. IIRC a huge number of the cases ended up getting thrown out because there was no way they could legally do what they did, and the convictions they did get were ones that they would have been able to get without the illegal hacking. That was, what, something like ten years ago? Around the time that The Silk Road got taken down? (That was taken down because the site owner used the same username both on the Silk Road and on a clearnet site; he essentially doxxed himself.)
Lots of rumors, very little evidence.
There’s a lot of really bad stuff on Tor. Like, really bad; probably worse than you’re imagining. Things that make the old rotten.com stuff look like a child’s birthday party. If Tor was actually compromised, the people creating and uploading that stuff would be grabbed quickly. Instead, LEAs have to cooperate globally and run long-con sting operations in order to identify people in order to bust them. Most of the time, they’re busting people that use Tor due to social engineering or one kind or another, and the remaining times it’s because someone fucked up configuration on a site.
Not necessarily.
My primary account was banned from Reddit. (I suggested arson as a way of solving the early stages of a Nazi infestation in a neighborhood, and Reddit claimed this was “instigating violence”, as though Nazis were humans.) They also banned all of my alternate accounts. Any account that i tried to open–regardless of which computer I used, browser, VPN, e-mail address, etc.–also ended up getting banned. I think that they must have been doing some kind of hardware fingerprinting that I wasn’t able to get around, even with canvas blocker etc., and any computer that I’d used to log into Reddit on my primary account was linked to that account, and hence banned from creating an account.
It took a while, but I did manage to overwrite every single post and comment I’d made in the last 10+ years for that account.
Seems like it’s a good starting point.
I wonder if you can encrypt the files prior to storing them on the key, which would then encrypt them a second time with a different method. Would the compromise the data in any meaningful way? Or would it mean that you had to decrypt the key and then decrypt the data a second time?
I’ve been using a VPN for several years. I’ve tried using every major browser except Mulvad and Librewolf. As far as I can tell, they’re doing some form of digital fingerprinting that I can’t block. My only option would be getting an entirely new computer. I went through and overwrote/deleted 15 years of comment history (but have not deleted accounts), it’s just not worth it to me.
I am using Firefox, and with a shit-load of add-ons that supposedly prevent unwanted cookies and fingerprinting. I use a VPN.
I was permanently banned from Reddit (for advocating firebombing nazis, as if that’s a bad thing). When I logged in to an alternate account, that account was also permanently banned. Any account I tried to create after that point ended up being banned within a week, regardless of whether or not I was using it. I checked online. Apparently this has become fairly common in the last 2-3 years.
While you can minimize your digital fingerprint, it’s almost impossible to prevent all digital fingerprinting. The EFF says that I have very strong protection against digital fingerprinting, but I’m still identifiable to a company with sufficient resources to devote to the task.
Yeah, but every time I have to buy something new, they automatically sign me up again. They never give me an opt-out.