Anonymous Browsing

Anonymous browsing requires a sandwich of tools to serve various purposes. This is because a computer does lots of different things that might give away its identity: perhaps through a bit of unencrypted traffic, or a native MAC address, or a nearby router, or a single login from an unobfuscated IP address, or a DNS request that wasn't sent through the right tunnel.

Think of anonymous browsing like launching a rocket. If you are successful, you can accomplish the (truly amazing) feat of being anonymous. You have the opportunity to step outside of your identity. But to successfully launch a rocket, you need to know all the different things that can go wrong (i.e., you've learned about all the other rockets that have exploded and figured out what they did wrong), and you have to take countermeasures, and make sure everything is secured properly, and all systems are go.

Cuz when you launchin a rocket, you ain't fuckin around.

Lists

Tools

Tails - a distribution of Linux dedicated to keeping you anonymous.

Whonix - another Linux distribution dedicated to keeping you anonymous.

Tor - Tor is a tool for anonymization. All it does is anonymize your traffic. It does not do anything to protect it by default. Tor is not an encryption tool.

Privoxy - acts as a content firewall, parsing and filtering HTTP content, searching/replacing, blocking ads/images/scripts, etc.

Stunnel - stunnel is a way of building encrypted HTTPS tunnels to carry arbitrary traffic through arbitrary ports. Can't get SSH through that pesky firewall? Wrap the request in SSL, run it through port 443 (HTTPS port), and you're on your way!

SSH - ah, yes, good ol' SSH. You can tunnel lots of stuff through SSH, which is protected with an SSL encryption layer. SSH tunnels are particularly versatile.

OpenVPN - you can use OpenVPN to build VPN networks, but there can be some gotchas to watch out for. Example: DNS requests may not be sent through the VPN, by default, which would make the use of a VPN to mask your location useless.

Proxychains - a program allowing you to run other programs through a proxy. This means you could, for example, run Nmap through a proxy server