Anonymous SSH at the Library
by carbide
At the Rutgers' libraries they have computers that you can access without a username and password.
You just go up to a computer, plop down, and start surfing. They are very restrictive however; you cannot easily save files or do pretty much anything else except accessing the Internet and browsing the library catalog.
At my current library the system is the same, which gave me the idea of using a library's computers for accessing other computers completely anonymously.
Right from the computer you can sign up for a Hushmail account at: www.hushmail.com which does not ask for a name or address.
Then using that email address, sign up for a free SSH account. There are good lists maintained at either:
I chose Garo's shells at: jaguar.garofil.be, because it only required an email address, and from how it seemed the account won't be left there after a while. When new accounts are created the older accounts get deleted (they explain it better on the site).
Now, to access this new SSH account, I use a Java web applet called MindTerm at: www.appgate.com/products/80_MindTerm/110_MindTerm_Download/index.php. This page does not host the SSH applet, it allows one to put up an SSH applet on their web server. However the app is hosted online at: rumkin.com/tools/ssh. Now you can log into your free SSH account using a free SSH applet.
Let's take a step back and see where we are: sitting at a computer anonymously, logged into a remote SSH server anonymously, and using an anonymous SSH client.
The only way I can think of that someone would be able to track what you are doing is if there is a camera at the library, and they can tell which computer you are using, and they know what the IP address is. But someone at a remote location is not likely to have this information.
Other things that can be used to trace you are fingerprints left on the keyboard and mouse.
What to do with this information is left up to the reader. Anonymous activities can either be used for good or evil. Information is not the thing that is wrong or right, it's what each of us decides to do with that information.