The Art Of Anonymity

The book I read to research this post was The Art Of Anonymity by Nathan Carlyle which is an excellent book that I bought from kindle. This book is only short around 45 pages but contains a lot of interesting information and is quite easy to understand so I was quite impressed by it. The book is about hiding your online identity which in some cases like if you are a pro democracy activist from China might be quite justifiable. It isn’t just about people doing things like buying recreational drugs. Your top priority in this kind of thing is probably hiding your IP address from which your location can be traced. Bear in mind your ISP probably has this information and if you are breaking the law will probably pass it on to the police. There is a website called Infosniper that will let you check what IP address and location is visible. There is also a website called Private Internet Access that for $7 per month will hide your location and IP address although it is probably still visible to your ISP. They also suggest you use the Tor browser at http://www.torproject.org which is a necessity to visit .onion or darknet sites. There is a directory of dark net sites at http://torlinksysgthcbz.onion. You of course have to be careful what you view on dark net sites which aren’t indexed by google and are literally like the wild west as far as censorship is concerned. I must admit I personally would avoid them but I can see for people like those living in oppressive regimes it may be useful. I enjoy reading books about the dark net and internet privacy anyway. If you want an e-mail provider that is free and doesn’t sell the information from your e-mails to some marketing company try hushmail.com. You have to check your account every 3 weeks or it gets deleted. There is also trashmail.com where you can hire an e-mail account for a specific period. A lot of these kinds of accounts can still be traced back to you. A good anonymous one is silentsender.com. They do suggest for anonymous payments over the internet the non top up type cards you can buy in supermarkets are pretty good. These are loaded with a specific amount and if they are the type you can top up they normally require a social security number which exposes your identity. Another option is bitcoins which among other sites you can get from coinbase.com. Bear in mind you often give information when you buy these that can be used to trace you. A couple of sites which help hide this information are localbitcoins.com & bitcoin.fog with the later routing the payment through several accounts to make it harder to trace. This is definitely an interesting book that I would recommend, has far more information than what I’ve written about and I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

 

 

 

Bitcoin And Digital Currency

The book I read to research this post was Bitcoin And Digital Currency For Beginners by Alex Nkenchor Iwajeh which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Actually I think this book was free and although it’s on an interesting subject is a bit short. Banks have used paperless or digital transactions for some time and although they are done using traditional currency money doesn’t physically change and they are done electronically using encryption to ensure security. Digital currency like Bitcoin and Litecoin are different in that they are often open source to allow volunteer programmers help improve the encryption. You usually download software and the currency doesn’t exist in a physical form and there are only 21 million Bitcoins in existence. If you are buying some you have to be careful it is the genuine product. They are used with Bitcoin registered retailers on the internet. Currently the value of Bitcoins has increased a lot. There is no single authority that governs Bitcoins. I really enjoyed reading this book and it does a good job of explaining the subject. I notice has also written a book on investing in precious metals that are used in technology like palladium and platinum. I may very well read that at a later date. I recommend this book and haven’t seen any other books on this subject perhaps surprisingly.