After finding that the New Zealand customs department were reading my emails i decided to encrypt alot of my outgoing data. I caught them out when they held up a package of mine, and then delivered it to the wrong address. When i rang to enquire where the package was they said it was delivered, and gave me the address it went to. Needless to say it was not mine. The VERY interesting part was that the address was one that i had sold something to on trademe.co.nz (NZ ebay) and the only place the address was ever mentioned was in my email to the buyer. BUSTED !!

Eventually the manager of customs admitted that they were running a sting on trademe users looking for parallel imports. I agreed with the premise, but felt naked & violated. I decided to protect myself against this online rape in the future.

SSH Socks Proxy 

You happen to be in a public wifi network and you don't really feel much like sending your data across in plain text. Ahh you say, I'm glad i paid for that online linux shell account! You open a terminal and issue:

ssh -D 9988 This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Your enter you required password and you are connected. The '-D' switch means you have your SSH acting like a socks proxy. Now you open you internet browser, for me it was opera, and change the network settings to use a SOCKS proxy. The host is localhost or 127.0.0.1 and the port is 9988. Now you can surf protected and your IP address should be that of the linux shell you logged into.