Anonymous Internet Browsing

(Or How BT Mobile Broadband can make you feel like a criminal)

This post was inspired by the despicable means that BT use to try and prevent you from doing what you want on the internet whilst using one of their mobile dongles. Some people (myself included) don't like other's seeing what they do on the internet, this is how you get around it.

**DISCLAIMER**

This can be used to get around proxy services and servers that your friendly neighbourhood SysAdmin might have put in place for the safety of their network. If you get caught using this and violating your employer's acceptable use policy, on your own head be it.

A SysAdmin will probably beat on you with a spanner for just discussing this, Yes I am a SysAdmin and Yes I would.

So enough of that nonsense and thinly veiled threats, let's get down to getting you on the internet.

Go and download FirefoxPortable from portableapps.com
Install this to your USB Thumbdrive or to a location on your hard drive

Download TOR from www.torproject.org

when installing TOR/Vidalia, Select a "Base" install and expand out the Torbutton option, deselect "Add to Firefox"
Change the destination folder to be a folder on your USB Drive, I called mine Vidalia.
Don't run the Installed components just yet.

Go to the installed folder and browse to the Torbutton folder, right click on the torbutton-1.2.0-fx.xpi and select "open with..." point this to your portable firefox installation and run it, then restart firefox portable. Open up the add-ons options for Torbutton and ensure that "Use Privoxy" is enabled

When you want to browse anonymously, run Vidalia from your USB drive, open up firefox portable, and down in the bottom right, click on Tor Disabled to start Tor and browse to your hearts content, relatively safe in the knowledge that no one can see your browsing activity.

To add Flash to this, copy flashplayer.xpt and NPSFW32.dll from c:\windows\system32 into FirefoxPortable\App\DefaultData\plugins and restart firefox. This doesn't work with all flash video players but youTube works.