Anonymous blog

Anonymous Blogging is an electronic form of annonymous blogging.

Anonymous blogging in contrast to the conventional blogging practice is all about expressing thoughts and opinions without revealing one’s identity. Unlike fake blog, anonymous blogs are written by real people on factual stand points, and hence most are seen as a credible source, even though they may be biased. The purpose of the anonymous blog is to give an insiders view on a view point, situation, location or organisation, without giving away the identity of the writer.

Thanks to their insider authenticity and transparency, which are important in social networking and blogging, unlike fake blogs anonymous blogs are not illegal in most countries, but the blog contents are still subject to at least the bloggers own resdient country laws, if not other jurisdictions.

Anonymous bloggers begin by setting up fake email addresses for their blog and registering it with a made-up name (pseudonym), just one way to hide the bloggers true identity. But since the reasons of anonymous blogging touched the notion of controversies, anonymous blogging has been facing a lot of technical challenges. Tracing identities is possible through a number of ways and anonymous bloggers are continuously finding new ways to protect the identities. Presently it is not only about choosing a pen name to start a blog, anonymous bloggers have to use a lot of ways to prevent their IPs to be traced.

Background

Main article: Blogging

Blogging started off as a platform that allowed people to share ideas and opinions with the world. As a result bloggers also got to be famous as the traffic and visibility of their blogs increases with time. This traffic phenomenon lead in 2004 to the creation of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory:

Normal Person + Anonimity + Audience = Fuckwad!

As the concept of blogging grew with time so did the reasons and disciplines of blogging. After threats were made to blogger Kathy Sierra, Tim O'Reilly called for the creation of the Blogger's Code of Conduct. The idea of the code was first reported by BBC News, who quoted O'Reilly saying, "I do think we need some code of conduct around what is acceptable behaviour, I would hope that it doesn't come through any kind of regulation it would come through self-regulation." In 2005, O'Reilly, Robert Scoble and others came up with a list of seven proposed ideas.

However, many authentic bloggers did not want people to know who they are and what they are doing, either because they are too shy or they want to pursue safe ways of blogging. One of the more popular reasons why bloggers choose to be anonymous is because the topic they want to discuss and share their opinions on is of a controversial nature and they want their identities to be hidden. Being part of the blogosphere throws a lot of questions at anonymous bloggers regarding their purpose of blogging but the truth is that the purpose of blogging is now evolving and anonymous blogging is one of the ways to have control over identity protection.

Benefits of Anonymous Blogging

The concept of anonymous blogging is an attraction for a lot of people. People choose to blog for a number of reasons in which lies the benefits of anonymous blogging. The idea to go anonymous can be supported by a number of reasons. It is simply a safe way of communicating with the blog community without fearing what others might think and say. Whatever the topic of the blog, bloggers benefit greatly from hiding their identities like:

• Writing about whatever they want because they know nobody knows them and will not question them directly about what they wrote.
• Getting a fresh start to blogging to know whether it will fail or succeed while protecting the true identity
• Separating the blogging and personal life to let a different side out
• Maintaining a number of different unrelated blogs showing different sides of their personalities
• Getting opinions about the problems they are facing in life without letting people know who they actually are
• Sharing a secret that they are too shy to let out if they are known by their readers
• Not censoring anything in their writing for which their friends and acquaintances will haunt them about
• Not having to worry about the judgments people can put on the beliefs and opinions of a blogger
• Sharing controversies and scandals that might be going on in their workplace or some sensitive area that they know of
• No pressure of worrying about being questioned, disagreed with or made fun of
• Being able to use anonymous blogging for making money like writing review about certain products or pursuing affiliate marketing

Anonymous blogging has been an enchanting and inviting concept for many people who want to adopt blogging as part of their life. The only problem that bloggers are now facing with this concept is being able to protect their identities and getting through the web technicalities that allow a lot of ways to track users.

Types of anonymous blogs

Much as a blog can be on any subject, any anonymous blog can be on any subject. But most fall into the following major categories:

• Political:
• Revolutionary:
• Reporter:
• Company insider:

How Your Online Identity is Tracked

According to many blog experts bloggers cannot have full anonymity because the world of internet can allow knowing someone better than they know themselves in many ways. While surfing through the web a lot of personal information is left on the virtual space that can be accessed without permission and even available for the public to search. Browsers, search engines and social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace) are the prime sources through which the personal information can be retrieved. However there are tools that pose threat to anonymous blogger’s identity that are used for tracking. This includes the following:

• Cookies: Cookies are small pieces of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser while a user is browsing a website. When the user browses the same website in the future, the data stored in the cookie can be retrieved by the website to notify the website of the user's previous activity. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember the state of the website or activity the user had taken in the past. This can include clicking particular buttons, logging in, or a record of which pages were visited by the user even months or years ago. Although cookies cannot carry viruses, and cannot install malware on the host computer; tracking cookies and especially third-party tracking cookies are commonly used as way to compile long-term records of individuals' browsing histories. In itself a major privacy concern that has prompted European and US law makers to take action, cookies can be revealed to find out a blogger’s identity if not disabled.
• IP Addresses: an Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification; and location addressing. Its role has been characterized as follows: "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there." IP addresses are binary numbers, but they are usually stored in text files and displayed in human-readable notations, such as 172.16.254.1 (for IPv4), and 2001:db8:0:1234:0:567:8:1 (for IPv6). Due to the enormous growth of the Internet and the predicted depletion of available addresses, a new addressing system (IPv6), using 128 bits for the address, was developed in 1995, standardized as RFC 2460 in 1998, and its deployment has been ongoing since the mid-2000s. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) manages the IP address space allocations globally and delegates five regional Internet registries (RIRs) to allocate IP address blocks to local Internet registries (Internet service providers) and other entities. They hence fully revealing location of the device, making IP addresses are one of the most popular ways to track and reveal identities as well as physical location. Anonymous bloggers need to take help from a lot of tools to hide their IP addresses from being tracked easily. Typical of the attitude of internet companies, Google will only reveal an IP address identity on being served a valid court order, as they did in 2007 when the anonymous Skanks in NYC blog attacked Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old who had modeled for Australian Vogue, Georgio Armani and Versace.
• Google Analytics & Reverse ID Lookup: Google Analytics (GA) is used by many bloggers to keep track of the stats of their blogs. But GA is now threatening most bloggers through its Reverse ID Lookup tool which allow tracking what other sites or blogs the blogger maintains. Normally bloggers use the same Google ID to track their page views for every blog or site they maintain. With GA it is only a matter of minutes when a lot of information about the anonymous blogger can be retrieved. In November 2011, technologist Andy Baio used GA to trackdown an anonymous flamethrower to his self-identified blog in under a minute. Reverse lookups are now being offered by many free analytics services as well which can unmask a lot of blog’s IP addresses and domain registrations.

Technical Challenges Faced by Anonymous Bloggers

Mostly identities are revealed because bloggers are not very technically upfront. Anonymous blogging is not restricted to just having unreal names and emails anymore. There are a lot of aspects to consider in order to protect identities from being leaked through any source. For anonymous bloggers to remain totally and genuinely anonymous they must be totally invisible which is impossible. The biggest challenge that anonymous bloggers face is how to create delays in tracking them.

Bloggers have to ensure that there is no direct link to their real identity and the blog they maintain via the sources or tools that they are using to connect to the World Wide Web. This is specially important for the new bloggers who are not familiar with the breaking-in mechanisms of the virtual world. As the technology is evolving the browsers and connections used by users allow a lot of ways to protect privacy. But along with this evolution there are lot of consequences that hinder the conventional use of the web.

Logging in from different IP addresses whenever it is time to post something on the blog is one way of making bloggers invisible. The concept of Onion Routing has gained much publicity being used by Wikileaks to publish government secrets. While this may seem a fruitful idea it also slows down the routing process and at times restricts user from viewing certain web pages. Mainly all the techniques used to protect identities relate to hiding the IP address tracking. The browsers being used are equipped with major security holes that can comprise the online identity security of the bloggers.

Techniques to Stay Anonymous Online

Where there may not be a 100% guarantee on the idea of never being discovered, there are number of ways to pursue anonymity. A few steps surely do provide piece of mind from uninvited interference for anonymous bloggers and protecting their identities:

1. It is important to set up a separate account for every blog maintained
2. Using a separate email address to register the blog is important. It is also considered a good option to use temporary email addresses for posting to the blog. These emails expire after 24 hours
3. Anonymous blogging platforms are the most viable options to consider for staying anonymous online
4. Making sure that privacy settings are applied on the browser and also through the internet service provider to protect the IP address from being tracked
5. Using the incognito mode on the browser can help maintain firewalls and proxy servers and also deletes the browsing history by disabling cookies
6. Using a different host for the anonymous blog so that the IP assigned is totally separate from the one being used for real identity
7. For tools like Google Analytics it is better to have a separate account to track different domains being maintained and much better to avoid such tools totally that are used to store identities
8. Domain privacy must be ensured as identities can be revealed through domain payments being made online. It is a better idea to use either a free hosting service or pre-paid hosting service in which online payments can be avoided
9. Installing Onion Routing software for not being able to track easily is essential as it helps in routing web requests through different network tunnels
10. Avoid used social networking controls in the blog sites like Facebook or Twitter or even the RSS feed.

An Anonymous blogging platforms

As anonymous blogging is on an upsurge various platforms are being introduced that offer protection of identities for the bloggers. Anonyme.com is one such anonymous blogging platform that is catering to this particular need of bloggers. The platform provides guarantee in the privacy and safety of bloggers and their blog post through a safe environment of blogging.

The technique used by Anonyme is encryption to block the tracking of IP addresses. The servers are encrypted which makes it impossible for the outside interferers to intrude into the privacy of bloggers. Bloggers can create accounts at Anonyme without sharing any of their personal information or even email addresses. This is one way of staying purely anonymous and puts the blogger in charge of what to reveal and what to hide. This does not restrict the readers of the blog to post comments on the blog posts. The two way communication between the anonymous blogger and the reader is constant and bloggers can even use their mobile devices to send posts without their IPs getting tracked.

As new ways of staying anonymous are being introduced such anonymous blogging platforms offer a convenient way to communicate specially for new bloggers. Those who are not technology savvy can leverage significantly through platforms like Anonyme.com because there are no technical details involved. Users simply create their anonymous account and start blogging. The platform provides identity security on its own without letting the user worry about how to apply different measures of protection. Anonyme is a considerable option for anonymous bloggers wanting to blog for their own reasons.

See also

• Blogging
• Fake blog

External links

• Anonyme.com