On Thursday, 8 December 2016 10:51:17 AM AEDT Rohan McLeod via luv-talk wrote:

just wonder what is the established wisdom regarding:

"Pre-emptive masking of browser history at ISP"

Since Snowden blew the whistle on illegal spying the use of HTTPS has greatly increased. Your search history at Google isn't available to your local government unless Google cooperates with them. If a Google search redirects you to a major news site like the New York Times it wouldn't reveal much if they used HTTPS, but they however choose not to do that and additionally have 77 cookies from different advertising sites, Facebook, Google, and others when you view one of their pages. https://panopticlick.eff.org/ If you view web sites with Tor then their ability to track you is greatly reduced. Tor with your regular browser can still be identified, visit the above site to discover how easily it can be done. Tor with torbrowser (package torbrowser-launcher in Debian, it works in Jessie but is broken in Unstable) is very hard to track. Tor with your regular browser is adequate to stop the basic snooping as described in the article you cited. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ If you want to protect against very basic snooping while still getting good transfer speeds (Tor slows throughput and increases latency) then a VPN such as the above is a good option. They block SMTP (for obvious reasons) and would not be suitable for serious crimes such as wholesale drug dealing. But for using Bittorrent to download movies and to escape casual surveillance by your own government they are good. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/