Avoiding Detection

During the de-stressing session at a local bar after a stressful customer interaction yesterday, we hit upon the topic of avoiding detection. Avoiding detection while surfing adult content on the web. It was a interesting crowd with married men and singles in various stages of commitment.

• A friend is staying with his sister and brother-in-law. So, he clears the history after browsing. In his case, he got yelled at for clearing history. He still clears history. But now, he notes all the sites browsed on a notepad. After he clears history, he visits the previously browsed sites to make sure the history is intact.
• A friend was browsing adult sites from an internet cafe. After sending him a warning, the cafe administrator kicked him off from these sessions. In order to have his money's worth, he searched and found anonymizers. Anonymizers makes the internet surfing untraceable. He started using anonymizers while browsing from the cafe.
• A friend uses Firefox. Everyone else in the household uses various flavours of IE. So clearing history on Firefox goes undetected. This is very popular among married men. I was surprised to see a friend using this technique to escape the prying eyes of his roommates.
• Google Chrome has an incognito mode. In this mode, you can browse in stealth mode. The webpages opened are not logged in the browsing and download histories.
• A friend was editing the history to selectively wipe out certain visits. He was the geekiest of all and I was not able to figure out his explanation.

Sitting there and getting intoxicated, I told all of them about writing this as part of the blog. Most of them were afraid of giving away the secrets of avoiding detection. But I assured them. Human mind is creative. When restricted, we always find a better way to circumvent the restriction. Like my friend in the cafe with the anonymizer.