I am going to look into Hidemyass once I get home. I’m not very certain of the VPN aspect of the service because I am used to using a SSH connection. From my understanding, a VPN is all or nothing. You can’t surf in Internet Explorer on your ISP connection and surf in Firefox with the VPN at the same time. This may be a problem as I would like to only use the proxy for certain applications (P2P) and then leave everything else, such as web browsing and IM, open to my regular connection.
I already use Tor but it has very limited bandwidth and is completely useless with P2P.
I would like to make a correction to yordan.
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Nothing such, unfortunately, or fortunately. Tor simply acts as a privoxy : your IP packet are coming from the tor privoxy, which is a computer located randomly in India, after this in Spain, after this in Japan, after this in USA.
You see this if you have a look at
http://showmyip.com/This IP address is the most obvious info most of website need (for instance for "single visitors" purposes).
However this is not the only info hidden inside the IP packets from and to your computer.
And some infos cannot be removed. For instance your computer sends everything needed in order that the packet containing the info you are asking for comes back to your computer.
If you really change your computer's identity, you ask a question to the remote host, and the answer arrives to another computer, not to yours!
The whole purpose of Tor is to make the connections between the Tor nodes anonymous. Running straight HTTP will not show any personally identifiable information except for perhaps a few HTTP headers. In most cases, the Tor software will actually chance the HTTP headers to a standard format such as IE version 6. The danger with Tor is JavaScript, DNS and perhaps Flash.
JavaScript is a problem because it can run arbitrary code on your computer which can sidestep any Tor protection. As an example, a website can embed JavaScript which makes its own connection or sends the real IP back to the server. This is fixed by turning off all scripting in your browser. I recommend No Script (http://noscript.net/) for Firefox which you should use even if you don’t use Tor. The second problem is DNS because the DNS request usually goes to your ISP’s DNS servers. If an attacker is listening to your traffic at the ISP level, they cannot see the traffic but they can see the DNS request. This is fixed by using Torbutton for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2275) which is included in the Vidalia bundle.
If you really lock down your browser and take the appropriate precautions, Tor is completely anonymous. The downside is that you shouldn’t expect to get anywhere fast and any site that has scripting and Flash may not work.
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Also my speed was too low, maybe depend the host where are you connected.
