OmniMix - Pathway to Privacy
OmniMix - Pathway to Privacy
Principles
The Internet has become the most important medium for research and exchange of views on nearly
all imaginable topics. Its common availability and simplicity of use seduce the user to an uncritical interaction.
But it has to be realized, that every step taken in the Internet may leave traces, which might be - and are
resolutely - tracked and analyzed by those, who are interested in uncovering personal data, is it for gathering email
adresses due to marketing purposes, for scanning the personal background in the course of an application,
or even for more obscure private, political or business reasons.
Regarding the protocols used for the data exchange and the immense data storage capability,
even of the commonly accessible search engines, the data analysis doesn't at all have to take place instantaneously,
but perhaps years in the future, when reasons to do so become evident - to the examiner and you.
But how to prevent traces, which might be regretted later on? Dependent on the service you intend to use
- and the severity of your paranoia - different strategies have to be put into action.
Concerning electronic mail, the most obvious procedure would be to become firm in the usage of an encryption software like
GnuPG
to convert your postal card into a letter, so that really no one than the sender and the intended recipient/s will be
able to read the data that are exchanged. 'Really no one' means, that tools like GnuPG, where the source code is
freely available and can be reviewed by everyone, provide established mathematical algorithms unlikely
to be broken in the forseeable future, regardless of all the rumors that are spread to discourage the uninformed
people and prevent them from realizing their civil rights concerning privacy.
But not only the exchanged data are relevant. Irrespective of that information the decoverage of the interlocutors
may by itself already be of great importance to generate a sociogram of observed persons or groups, thinking e.g. of secret
negotiations or cooperations between companies. That's where networks of anonymous remailers like Mixmaster come into play.
The principle of those 'onion routers' is to anonymize the protocol dependent 'envelope' of your message by
suppressing personal data or replacing them with unspecific ones, and then to send it multilayer encrypted through
a chain of 'post offices' within its net, so that even the post offices resp. remailers themselves
aren't able to trace it back to the origin. For them it's absolutely impossible to figure out the route of the
message beyond the remailers it directly communicates with. The last remailer in the chain finally delivers the mail
to the recipient.
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To make this process somewhat clearer, here's a short example with a real world analogon:
Imagine you've got some transport cases, which are graduated in size and fit into each other like those well-known little wooden Russian dolls called 'Matryoshkas'. But that's not all what makes those cases special, as they originate from various post offices, already have enough stamps on them to pay the bill, and a recipient sticker with the address of the post office they belong to already filled in. Furthermore they are equipped with a catch, which, once closed, can only be reopened with a key no one else than the single issuing post office owns. Now, if you intend to make Marilyn, who - as everybody knows - prefers diamonds, anonymously happy, put the concerning jewellery box with her address on it into the smallest case. Then stick that case into a bigger one from a different post office and so on. Finally bring the resulting package to a post office of your choice. That's all you have to do! Delivering the present, each post office removes its own case and forwards the one uncovered by that to the address written on it. The employees won't be able to find out more than the mail service they got the parcel from, and the one that is next in the deliver chain. On the other hand someone waiting outside trying to trace the parcel must fail, as she won't be able to assign out- to ingoing cases correctly. They look different and beyond that are randomly mixed with boxes from other customers before being forwarded. Therefore, once the parcel passes the entry post office, you yourself are out of the game. But bear in mind: If you wrapped it up carelessly, the last postman might discover how precious your parcel is. So, whenever possible, take additional precautions against that risk, at best by trying to get a case belonging to the girl you admire. |
Features
OmniMix now offers you as a Windows user a convenient way to benefit from the Mixmaster remailer network. It works as a
switchbox between your mail resp. news client and the outer world and either sends your messages directly to the destination
or routes them through the Mixmaster remailer network in order to deliver them anonymously. If you need a replyable mail address,
OmniMix assists you in setting up an account at one of the existing nym servers and afterwards automatically transforms
outgoing and incoming messages accordingly.
If there's no necessity of anonymous communication, simply use OmniMix to add features your client software itself is lacking:
| · | Send and receive messages from external servers through secured connections (with SSL / TLS / Tor). |
| · | Add recipient related hashcash tokens to your messages to increase their chance to pass spam filters. |
| · | Protect your mail with automatic Whole Message Encryption (WME) and by doing so reduce the amount of information you reveal and your efforts for PGP en- resp. decryption to a minimum. |
| · | Outgoing mail (SMTP = Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) |
| · | Incoming mail (POP3 = Post Office Protocol - Version 3) |
| · | News messages (NNTP = Network News Transfer Protocol) |
Support
You're welcome to contact me directly by mail, preferably
PGP encrypted. If your questions resp. suggestions are of common interest,
you may use the alternative of posting to the corresponding newsgroup
alt.privacy.anon-server.
There you will also find competent advice on other topics of anonymous internet communication.
Downloads
| · | Tutorial about setting up QuickSilver, MesNews and Gravity with Stunnel, GnuPG and OmniMix, kindly contributed by an anonymous author |
QSMNOM_Help_1_2_4.rar |
Anon Links
As privacy is an important topic, as well as preserving it on the internet, there are a
lot of websites dealing with it. So regard this list only as an entry point.
| Anon Topics in General | |||
| · | Electronic Frontier Foundation | https://www.eff.org | |
| · | Privacy Link List at Cotse.net | https://www.cotse.net/resources.html | |
| Data Encryption | |||
| · | The GNU Privacy Guard - GnuPG | http://www.gnupg.org | |
| · | PGP Corporation | https://www.pgp.com | |
| · | The International PGP Home Page | http://www.pgpi.org | · | TrueCrypt - Drive Encryption Software | http://www.truecrypt.org |
| Anon Internet Communication | |||
| · | Remailer WiKi at Panta Rhei (Wayback Machine) | http://www.panta-rhei.eu.org/pantawiki | |
| · | Remailer Introduction at Dizum.com | https://ssl.dizum.com/help/remailer.html | |
| · | Mail2News Introduction at Dizum.com | https://ssl.dizum.com/help/mail2news.html | |
| · | Bananasplit Website | https://www.bananasplit.info | |
| · | Tor Website | https://www.torproject.org | |
| · | Noreply WiKi | http://wiki.noreply.org | |
| · | Anonyme eMail über Remailer (FAQ) | https://www.anon.gildemax.de | |
| · | Richard Christman's Quicksilver (Windows Client) | http://www.quicksilvermail.net | |
| · | Jack B. Nymble (Windows Client) | https://www.panta-rhei.eu.org/downloads/JBN |
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| · | Cotse News2Remail (Windows Proxy Server) | https://www.cotse.net/news2remail | |
| · | Hashcash | http://www.hashcash.org | |
| Mixmaster | |||
| · | Mixmaster Project at SourceForge.net | http://sourceforge.net/projects/mixmaster | |
| · | Mixmaster Remailer Stats at Bananasplit | http://pinger.bananasplit.info | |
| · | Cypherpunk / Mixmaster Remailer Stats at Frell | http://echolot.theremailer.net http://k54ids7luh523dbi.onion | |
| · | Mixmaster Remailer Stats at Panta Rhei | https://www.panta-rhei.eu.org/stats | |
| · | List of 'From' Header Modifications at Bananasplit | https://www.bananasplit.info/echolot/from.html | |
| · | Location of Remailer's Mail Servers at Deuxpi | Service discontinued without substitution | |
| · | Access Data of SMTP Servers (SSL/TLS) at NoReply | http://www.noreply.org/tls | |
| Newsgroups | |||
| · | General Privacy Topics | news://alt.privacy | |
| · | PGP Encryption and Related | news://alt.privacy.pgp | |
| · | Anonymous Internet Communication | news://alt.privacy.anon-server | |
| · | Anonymous Internet Communication - Server Availability | news://alt.privacy.anon-server.stats | |
| Diverse | |||
| · | Gerald E. Boyd's 'Accessing the Internet by E-mail' FAQ | http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/ | |
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Copyright © Christian Danner, 2009.
Homepage: www.danner-net.de E-Mail: om@danner-net.de |
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