Bill Stewart wrote:

I'm reading off-line, but the IP address is probably that of the machine at the internet cafe you're using - depending on how organized the cafe and someone tracing you are, they may be able to find you quickly, or not. For instance, if you're at joesinternetcafe.com, Joe's Internet Cafe, 1234 5th street, San Francisco, and Joe's system adminstrator can tell that .63 is the table in the corner, you may be toast. On the other hand, if your IP address is a NAT box on a DSL line connected to Pac Bell Internet, at a chain of coffeeshops staffed by non-technical baristas, "I don't know how the router thing works. Want donuts?" and you're a 17-year-old kid in a room full of 15-20-year-old kids playing Quake, you'll have plenty of time to boogie out of there before the cops show up, or certainly before they figure out it was you - unless you've threatened to nuke Washington now, any investigation will be after the fact, so the real issue is whether you paid by credit card or cash and whether any name you used is traceable to you.

Any Internet Cafe - well any shop with any expensive goods in it these days - is going to have TV cameras. Probably a bad place to be for anonymity, if what you are doing is serious enough to expect security-service or serious police reaction. If they can't trace your cash they might be able to trace your picture. In general you would want to be in the biggest place you can find of course. The best place to hide a needle is in a pile of needles - haystacks are the place to hide hay. And it would help if it was in a big city. If you want to get lost, get lost somewhere where millions of people get lost - London, Paris, New York, huge cities where people walk and travel by train and bus. You finish your business & walks straight into the crowd. A few changes of Metro/Tube whatever & you could be anywhere. The getaway car is an obsolete idea. In a car, they can see you from orbit. Or, more to the point, from all the little machines on the roadside that take photos of car. Physical anonymity is getting harder, but it's less hard in big cities. There are a lot of anonymous people in cities. Those guys you see sitting on the side of the road asking for money, they're anonymous. As far as you're concerned anyway. Lost in the city. So just walk into the biggest Internet Cafe you can find within 50 yards of a train station. On-line anonymity probably works best through a layers of indirection of course. RTFA :-) Ken

At 10:52 AM 3/28/01 +0100, Ken Brown wrote:

Any Internet Cafe - well any shop with any expensive goods in it these days - is going to have TV cameras. Probably a bad place to be for anonymity, if what you are doing is serious enough to expect security-service or serious police reaction. If they can't trace your cash they might be able to trace your picture.

If you make a heavy threat, they'll seize the videotapes of nearby security cameras ---you didn't stop for gas, did you? Of course, there will be cameras on the Olympic internet kiosks for sure. That Orwellian football game face-scanning was only a warmup. .......

--- Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com> wrote:

It's been 30 years since I read The Time Machine, but didn't the Eloi only have 1 L in their name?

Yeah, I know. Got pissed off after finding out that *ALL* fictious and real names are taken.

If you care, find an anonymizer to read your webmail through.

There is no anonymizer/webmail combination that works, AFAIK. The barrier are the cookies. They're not stoopid.

On the other hand, if your IP address is a NAT box on a DSL line connected to Pac Bell Internet, at a chain of coffeeshops staffed by non-technical baristas, "I don't know how the router thing works. Want donuts?"

I see the future ... 2002: new law requires taking photo ID when using public 'net terminals. Something to do with children, genitals and terrorists. Better yet, the whole session will be videotaped. Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/?.refer=text