That would be rather useless since you should not be using the root account for regular tasks in the first place.


Define "safe" from your perspective?.. Or at least tell us what doubts you have? What I mean is that if you have concerns like these you should do some research yourself, read about things so you know what you're talking about and *then* ask. That way you can easier spot errors, caveats, omissions, assumptions et cetera. If you don't do any research yourself you'll be relying on the answers to be either correct, correct in some circumstances or in a parallel universe.


Like 'sha1deep -r /pathname' or 'find /pathname -type f|xargs sha1sum 2>/dev/null'.

Well, what I want to achieve, basicly is minimize the chances of either the ISP or tertiary personas spotting my research data I enter into my machine. I am indeed currently reading and researching this matter, but I have received some replies from some people over the IRC that TOR might really be unsafe. What I basicly want, is to minimize the chances of someone gaining access to my machine, or snooping my network traffic. I am also considering to crypt ALL messages coming and going through my lan. I read about IPSec but I am quite clueless on how to setup it on my linux and windows boxes. I succeeded in encrypting today my entire hdd and successfully used TOR, however sometimes it is kind of slow. Nevertheless, it's not like im downloading movies, so i guess it works ...
Regarding IPSec, I could not find a good info on how to set it up.
Regarding TOR, I am currently reading about onion routing and RFC 793.
I also browsed some CISCO stuff, and I found the info really helpfull. I already got some interesting ideas.

Without providing any details, the same thing could be said about pretty much any software. Besides, last time I looked at the Tor website they seemed to make it pretty clear that you shouldn't rely on Tor if, like, your life depended on it. Having said that, Tor is indeed a dangerous tool when used inappropriately. Perhaps this is what your IRC friends were referring to. Users need to understand that Tor is only designed to provide anonymity (not security). Apparently, there's tons of people who believe that Tor magically provides them with end-to-end encryption when surfing the Web.

Personally, whenever I use Tor with a HTTP (without SSL) connection, I not only make sure I don't transfer any personal information, I also make sure I use a bolted-down NoScript and a disposable user account. I think it's important for all Tor users to assume that their exit nodes *will* inject malicious code whenever possible.