Surfing the Web Anonymously

Whenever you surf the web it is possible to find out information about you even when you do not want to publicize who you are. This is a fact, even if your computer contains no virus or malware software. The information that can be tracked easily include IP address, country, computer system being using, browser, browser history, and other related information. It gets even worse. People can get your computer's name and even find out your name. Also, cookies can track your habits as you move from one computer to another.

How do people get this basic information about you?

When you visit one website to another web site, information about you can be recovered. Basically, information is intercepted and used by others to follow your Internet activities.

How do you stop this from happening?

First of all, it is possible to surf the web anonymously and thereby stop leaving a trail for others to find. Note that this is not fool-proof, but it makes it much harder for people to know who you are. There are some sophisticated products called anonymous proxy servers that help in protecting you. These anonymous proxy servers replace user’s Internet address for its own. This has the effect of hiding your IP address and making it much harder for people to track you.


How do I get an anonymous proxy server?

There are many vendors who sell anonymous proxy servers. There are also free proxy servers available to you. Two such products are ShadowSurf and Guardster. They provide various services for anonymous and secure access to the web, some are paid and some are free as well. They provide anonymous surfing at their site for free. Go to it and you will find a box to enter a URL that you want no one to track. There are many others, but here are two that are frequently used.

Another wonderful product, given the recent news about the Google search engine filtering its findings for the Chinese government, is Anonymizer. This company pressed that it is developing a new anti-censorship solution that will enable Chinese citizens to safely access the entire Internet filter-free

Does an anonymous proxy server make you 100% safe?

No. Still, you are much better off if you use such technology.

What other things should I be concerned about when trying to keep my private information private?

Three other items come to mind when trying to keep your information private. First, you can use an encrypted connection to hide your surfing. Secondly, delete cookies after each session. Third, you can configure your browser to remove JavaScript, Java, and active content. This actually leads to limitations, so you need to think about the cost/benefit of this course of action.

The Future World of Computers and Networking

Can you imagine the future world of Modern Technology? It’s totally amazing that the Web World is 20 years old now. Children ask us what we all did before the Internet by which they mean the browser based world of Google, E-bay, You Tube and Club Penguin.

How did we communicate when there were no computers and modern means of communication? Well, I remember that we used to write lots of letters to friends and relatives to stay in touch and were thrilled when someone wrote back. Also it was too expensive to make long distance phone calls in those days. I also spent a lot of time in the library and in book stores looking for books, magazines, research papers etc. for want of information.
Now, after Personal Computer revolution and World Wide Web transformation, it definitely feels like the golden days that my grandparents lived in. Now-a-days we blog, post, comment, Google, Instant Message, Twitter, Web conference, share screens, capture group chats. We can turnaround our ideas in minutes, feel Real presence, Global distribution, Shared authoring in real time.

What about the Future?

I do not think we have to look very far to find what lies ahead in the next five years because it’s already here in primitive form. It’s user friendly IM, VoIP, desktop and Tele presence video conferencing, real-time co-authoring, Web-centric productivity and collaboration tools, much better search through company information and data, virtual world meeting spaces, unified conferencing. Remote team members as connected to you as those a single floor away, meeting centric collaboration platforms, content derived expertise identification, tag clouds at the heart of semantically drive search, analytical graphs at the heart of expertise location, and of course all services available from a mobile Internet device. More and more online shops are defining new ways of shopping.

Windows Backup Software- Protect Your Computer From Data Loss

Using Windows backup software for protecting yourself from data loss can be confusing at the first moment. How often should a backup be created? Should one create a full Windows backup or just some files? How would one get his data back if computer crashes? Is it possible to create a hard drive backup? Today I will provide you a complete Windows backup solution for keeping your files safe. The common dangers that make it necessary to backup a computer are given below:
1. Hard drive crash: Sometimes hard drives die. This can cause data loses, non-booting operating system and many other issues. In case of hard drive crash one would need to buy a new one and somehow migrate with all his data from an old disk to this new one – that is the job for Windows backup software.
2. System crash: This happens more often than most users think. They have their machines working now and it seems that it would be like this always. But sometimes you need just to reboot the machine to get BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) instead of Windows logo. And not always such issues have fast and simple solution – it may be that you’ll have to reinstall Windows completely with all the applications you have… and also you may loose some or even all of your data!
3. Operating system works slowly and produces many bugs: This is also a common issue. Every Windows user knows that system works best right after the installation – when it is ‘fresh’. Later system becomes less productive because of registry changes, disk fragmentation, computer worms and viruses, different adware and spyware programs working in the background etc. Fixing the system would take a lot of time and would not return the system to the initial state. That’s why at some moment we may decide to restore our previously created Windows backup.
4. Accidental file deletion: That is the most harmless situation. In most cases you can just recover accidentally deleted files from the recycle bin. But what if recycle bin was already cleared? This is another way in which Windows backup software may become useful.

Strategy to be used in such cases:

First of all you’ll need to format your hard drive and reinstall the operating system with all the applications that you use. Install some Windows backup software also. If you have important data on your computer – copy it temporarily to external drive or network share. Reinstalling operating system and applications can take much time but as they say - “For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.”
Once you have a fresh Windows installation with all the applications you need to create a full Windows backup and save it on some external location like USB hard drive. When that is done you’ll have a Windows backup with all the programs that can be restored at any moment returning you to a fresh installation. But what about data? Everyday you create, download and modify lots of files. If you restore the Windows backup we’ll get fresh system but will loose all files! To get around this you’ll need to schedule an incremental backup of your data folders right after the full Windows backup was made.
Incremental backup is different from full one – it will only add modified data to the backup saving you a lot of disk space.You can schedule the data incremental backup to run every evening saving all the folders that you use for storing your data. Then at every given day you would have a complete Windows backup and a bunch of data backups that store all your data. If something happens with the operating system or your drive you can just restore the full Windows backup first and then restore your data backup to the clean system and get back and running in an hour with minimum data loses. You can also restore the files from data backup without restoring full Windows backup – that would protect you against accidental deletion of important data. Using the recommendations above you can save yourself a lot of time and protect your data. The only last thing you have to do is choose the right Windows backup software.