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Comment by georgefox | Hacker News Reader

A few of these articles are suggesting that uploads be performed from public places (e.g., Starbucks) for the sake of anonymity/deniability. But it would seem that performing these actions in public would potentially reveal your identity, actions, and secret codename to any eyes or cameras around. As a question of general curiosity about anonymity, how does one weigh the benefits of using an open internet access point with the more literal visibility that using a public access point might entail?

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When I wake my computer after a session of normal use and connect it to an open network, it immediately starts sending out messages to a bunch of different entities (google, dropbox, evernote, etc, etc) that can be rather easily traced back to that access point. IMHO this should be an even bigger concern than identifying a public wifi user through surveillance images, and it's a point that articles like this one routinely ignore, or gloss over:

> "Use as much caution and good sense as you can about distancing yourself from equipment and network locations you might be connected to."

Possibly an audience who has never heard of Tor before (the target for this piece) needs some more concrete advice about this than "use caution and good sense."

Hmm, yeah. The linked video from the Globe and Mail says to avoid surfing the web during the procedure, but avoiding explicitly going to Facebook and Twitter (their examples, IIRC) won't stop all identifiable network traffic from your device. I suppose that's where the suggestion of using a boot-from-USB OS might come in.

I consider myself to be quite savvy and I'd have zero confidence in my ability to reliably shut down all identifiable traffic, except by setting up a tool that blocks all traffic (like Little Snitch[1]) and then making an exception for Tor traffic.

And then there's the fact that most people's MAC addresses are ultimately tied to their identities in a way that a powerful actor could recover it without too much difficulty.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443858

A never-used $200 "burner" laptop might be a wise investment in this case.

Yes, purchased anonymously on craigslist for cash. And with a changed MAC address just in case.

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