Not Anonymous anymore

Isn’t it annoying when you have a number in your phone that you don’t know who it belongs to? Maybe it’s in a text message or in the call log. You can simply pick up the phone and call to ask who it is..or what if there was a service to do that for you without soliciting from the other end?

Now that all people who have SIM cards are registered with their mobile service providers wouldn’t it make more sense to get value from this titanic database if there was a service to link a number with a name/location?

So how would the service work? Maybe it would be a simple query where you send the number via SMS to a short code and you get a response. Or use a USSD code to interact with a user through a menu to answer a few questions and then get a response through SMS.

However such a service would receive criticism due to the question of how do you maintain customer information confidentiality? This to me is the interesting bit. Either we create a program to read phone logs [missed and received] or messages [received] and we limit searches to only those numbers retrieved from the mentioned sources (logs and messages) as they are unsolicited.

The other would be for the service provider to query a person’s phone records to determine first whether the number in question indeed exists in the received calls/messages, then give an appropriate response. What do you think?

Remain anonymous online

Hurray! to all this cheap internet frenzy. You can now start living on the Internet. For those using dial up connections like modems, gone are the days when you had to take measures such as bookmarking regularly visited sites or disabling images in your browser to reduce browsing and downloaded content to preserve your hard earned money since you are charged per MB.

Hurray! to SIM card registration meaning all those scumbags plotting nefarious schemes to threaten and blackmail you or ask for impossible ransoms from unknown numbers are now gone. Wait a minute, yes, the privacy is gone too! Anyone with a "reason" to invade your privacy and enough "clout" real or perceived can now breeze in at your ISP (Internet Service Provider), henchmen in tow and inquire on your online behaviors then draw conclusions or use the information in other dangerous ways. Worse still it might be the chap at the server with all the rights, the one who always looks very distinguished in a suede jacket never mind it's to protect them from the biting cold in the server room/closet. Were it not an office environment, it may as well be a jungle jacket.

And why might anyone want to spy on you? Oh, the reasons are countless. It might be your competitors wanting to mitigate your rising onslaught in the market or you may have affiliates from the green-eyed tribe who don't want you attempting anything that might lead to your prosperity. "No we can't have that, can we?" they are always muttering to themselves and to each other. You might also be trying to access non-approved content without being found out by the IT team. The reasons are infinite.

The easiest way to remain anonymous online is to employ the use of anonymous proxies or the ssh protocol which requires some installation of this and that. But if you don't have the time or know how to do ssh, anonymous proxies will suffice. An anonymous proxy is a server which scrambles or garbles whatever you browse including search strings, your location and computer name or IP address so that the history you leave behind is not human readable and cannot be deduced in reasonable time rendering any monitoring activities akin to chasing the wind. And who are you to forbid the wind from blowing? The king of France is rumored to have attempted this feat in the days of yore. How it eventually went down is not clear but we can make a good guess. There are many free proxy servers for your indulgence out there and some good examples include hidemyass.com, nuip.net and so on you get it.

While such tactics may not protect you forever, it is a good start in frustrating the efforts of hostile parties and give you ample time to make good your endeavors before the "shit" hits the proverbial fan.