Greetings,

I have four newbie security and privacy related questions I was hoping to get some help with:

1)If I want to do anonymous and private computing on the internet from my laptop in a Linux Console/Shell/Terminal window, is OpenSSH sufficient for this or should I use something like the TOR network or "Hide-My-Ass" (Pro VPN and/or Proxy) which both seem to typically be used from a graphical user interface?

2)Also; for privacy, I took a brief look at I2P and it looks like it also uses a GUI front end.

3)How can wireless MAC address randomization and uniform HTTP headers usage be addressed from a text-only environment like a terminal/Console?

4)How do I use serverless cables communication — the CMS standard-based stateless messaging protocol featuring repudiability and perfect forward secrecy from said text environment?

My uses of the internet are as follows:
*)send and receive e-mail using a text-only e-mail program
*)browse the web using a text-only browser
*)access Bulletin Board Systems (I'm just now learning that I should not be using Telnet =)

Thank you

Only question 1)

First, there is no 100% anonymity. Keep that in mind.

If you mean by "anonymity": "Spoof the IP address", tor can do it.

There are console browsers: lynx, links, elinks...

What you need is a browser which can connect to a socks5 proxy. Then it can speak to tor directly.

Or a browser which can speak to a http proxy. Than you need a software which can relay http to socks5. I would recommend polipo.

1. Install tor and polipo from the software center of your distribution. And a console browser of your choice.
2. Make sure polipo and tor are started
3. Configure polipo to relay all traffic to TCP port 9050, protocol SOCKS5
4. Configure your console browser to use as "proxy": SOCKS5 on TCP port 9050 (if it can), or HTTP on TCP port 8123
5. Test by loading a site like http://www.formyip.com/ipcountry.php. It should tell you some "random" country.

The details of all this will require internet search, but I hope I have provided some search clues.

Last but not least, is your requirement of "anonymity" worth all that hassle? Only you can decide that. Maybe one of the console browsers in standard configuration is enough. If a website provides SSL, make sure your browser uses it.

2 members found this post helpful.

If everything that you need to do is in the CLI, would it be possible to have a small SSH server sitting at home, and any time you want to get on the internet just SSH into it and all of your traffic is sent encrypted to your server, and the world sees that you're browsing from your server, not a laptop in McDonald's

yes see the links in my signature.