[SGVLUG] PRIVACY???

[Chris Smith]

On 9/27/05, Emerson, Tom <Tom.Emerson at wbconsultant.com> wrote:
> If the "anonymizer" you are using strives to hide your location, it may be "too good" and
> NEVER reveal your exact location, which would be a bad thing.  For instance, presuming
> you've become the number one guy on the jack-booted-thugs list of usual suspects, an
> attempt at "pinpointing" you using this technique would show you as being in a completely
> different place [perhaps even halfway around the globe] from one "packet" to the next.
> The one place it would NEVER indicate as "where you are" is, of course, where you really
> are.  Now, I realize the world is a really big place, but most of it is water, so you aren't
> likely going to string out some cat-5 to the middle of the ocean, which reduces the problem
> domain a bit. :)

That's not how anonymizer's or onion routing in general work. Indeed,
it's entirely possible for an onion route to end up exiting from your
own node (sometimes your "own node" isn't your computer, but rather
the machine that is your gateway into the system). It's just that the
odds are slim for a sufficiently large network. The whole idea is to
ensure that for the packets that come out of the network, it would
appear that *any* of the nodes in the network could have been the
source.

--
Chris