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Indeed, you can take this a step further and assign each bucket its own VPN, with JS turned off to minimize fingerprintability. You can even setup multiple virt

Indeed, you can take this a step further and assign each bucket its own VPN, with JS turned off to minimize fingerprintability. You can even setup multiple virtual machines with multiple screen resolutions on each to further divide up your sessions, making your surfing modified beyond recognition. It might take a weekend or two to wrap your head around VMs and VPNs, but it's worth it. Also, if you're paranoid about your VPN provider spying on you, you can install HTTP nowhere: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/http-nowhere/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/http-nowhere/ to further compartmentalize the risk of spying. DNS, however is tricky to obfuscate, so I would recommend surfing under broad and generic domains, like TWITTER.com and places like REDDIT.com which often scrape and proxy the content from other sites so you don't need to visit those sites explicitly.

tscs37 10y ago
but is that in itself not another signature in a fingerprint?
- zerognowl 10y ago
  Not necessarily. The amount of bits needed to fingerprint somebody is substantially lowered doing this, and although you stand out by taking extra steps like this, it's substantially better than a large portion of the configurations you do see. Of course if your threat model is such that nation states are targeting you, either passively, or actively, then TOR is fitting in most cases, but TOR can prove to be overkill in most cases. For example, if I'm surfing a website which blocks TOR, I can use a JonDoFox[1] profile to visit a website with a VPN, and achieve better-than-most anonymity for my needs, albeit not as rigorous as what TOR provides, but at least my connection has rudimentary protection from passive eavesdropping. Keep in mind, VPNs are a countermeasure only and do not provide perfect privacy, but you can lessen the information gathered using the techniques I outlined. Surf under generic domains, and block traffic downloaded en clair [1] https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/en/jondofox.html https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/en/jondofox.html
  - tscs37 10y ago
    The problem is that even if the number of bits on the fingerprint shrink, you're also lowering the selection size. It's a tradeoff, you can overdo it and certainly end up less anonymous than before. A bigger fingerprint might make it easier to identify you but if there are more fingerprints, there might also be more fingerprints that are exactly the same, thus being drowned by the mass.

tscs37 10y ago

but is that in itself not another signature in a fingerprint?

zerognowl 10y ago
Not necessarily. The amount of bits needed to fingerprint somebody is substantially lowered doing this, and although you stand out by taking extra steps like this, it's substantially better than a large portion of the configurations you do see. Of course if your threat model is such that nation states are targeting you, either passively, or actively, then TOR is fitting in most cases, but TOR can prove to be overkill in most cases. For example, if I'm surfing a website which blocks TOR, I can use a JonDoFox[1] profile to visit a website with a VPN, and achieve better-than-most anonymity for my needs, albeit not as rigorous as what TOR provides, but at least my connection has rudimentary protection from passive eavesdropping. Keep in mind, VPNs are a countermeasure only and do not provide perfect privacy, but you can lessen the information gathered using the techniques I outlined. Surf under generic domains, and block traffic downloaded en clair [1] https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/en/jondofox.html https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/en/jondofox.html
- tscs37 10y ago
  The problem is that even if the number of bits on the fingerprint shrink, you're also lowering the selection size. It's a tradeoff, you can overdo it and certainly end up less anonymous than before. A bigger fingerprint might make it easier to identify you but if there are more fingerprints, there might also be more fingerprints that are exactly the same, thus being drowned by the mass.