At first glance Incognito may seem suited only for the extremely paranoid, because of the totality of tools it offers to hide your online presence.

But those tools, each designed to mask a certain aspect of your online activity, have been around for quite a while. This 430MB-ish live CD has many faithful users, but I can't quote any on its usefulness since their identities couldn't be confirmed. Yes, Incognito is that good.

If you're looking for the ultimate way to encrypt absolutely all your internet communications and be untraceable on the internet, you're looking for Incognito. Find out how to get started by reading on...

Whether you're an anarchist, a covert operative or just someone who wants to exercise their digital rights and hide your online activity, with Incognito you can encrypt your IM conversations and emails, browse securely without the fear of cookies and the browser history revealing your secrets, and best of all, the traffic doesn't reflect in your router logs.

Apart from these methods that keep you safe from those around you, also on offer is Tor, which sits at the centre of Incognito to obscure your online traces. Tor bounces your internet traffic in such a manner that your IP address, which can be traced back to your physical location, is hidden from the outside world. With Tor, you can anonymise web browsing, instant messaging, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol.

The first thing you'll need to do is download the Incognito Live CD then reboot your PC with the disk in your drive. If you find your PC booting into its normal OS, make sure your BIOS is configured to boot from the CD/DVD drive before your hard drive.

By default, Incognito greets you with its documentation served via Firefox on a 1024x768 resolution, so the first thing you might have to do is correct the screen resolution. Select Configure Desktop from the right-click context menu on the desktop. Click Display in the side bar on the left-hand side of the window and choose an appropriate resolution from the drop-down list. Click OK when you're done.

With Firefox already running, you might want to experience browsing the web through Tor. You don't need to do anything, or provide any manner of configuration to anonymise your internet traffic because Tor is already running. To confirm this, hover the mouse over the red onion-shaped button in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Clicking this button launches Tork, the graphical anonymity manager.

Managing Tor with Tork

Being an anonymity manager, Tork is far more complex than just a graphical tool to manage Tor. For instance, the Anonymous Email entry under the Anonymous tab provides an interface to the Mixminion network, which lets you send and receive anonymous emails.

Since Incognito already offers tools to encrypt emails, both via Thunderbird and the webmail Firefox interface, most normal users need not bother with Mixminion. However, for those operating under - or in hiding because of - an official order, this offers an extra layer of invisibility, since emails are first routed through the Tor network and then via the Mixminion network.

Like the Tor network, Mixminion relies on volunteer-run servers to bounce your emails before they reach their destination. The individual servers, called mixes, receive messages, decrypt them and forward them to the next mix. Effectively, no single mix can determine either the sender or the recipient.