anon.fail: your guide to online anonymity
[ anon.fail ] is an open-source not-for-profit project dedicated to educating users about digital privacy, security, and anonymity. Our mission is to provide practical, accessible guides that help individuals make informed decisions about their digital lives while maximizing personal freedom and autonomy in an increasingly surveilled world.
Topic Areas
Network Anonymity
Understanding how to browse the internet anonymously and protect your network traffic from surveillance. This includes comprehensive guides to the Tor network, VPN selection and configuration, and advanced techniques for traffic analysis resistance.
Available Guides:
Digital Currency Privacy
Exploring privacy-focused cryptocurrencies and techniques for financial anonymity. These guides cover the technology behind private digital currencies and practical methods for protecting financial privacy in an increasingly cashless world.
Available Guides:
Virtualization and Isolation
Using virtual machines and containerization to isolate activities and create secure computing environments. These techniques help compartmentalize different aspects of your digital life and protect against malware and system compromise.
Available Guides:
Communication Security
Coming Soon - Guides covering secure messaging, encrypted email, and anonymous communication methods. Learn how to communicate privately without exposing metadata or content to surveillance.
Available Guides:
Operational Security
Coming Soon - Best practices for maintaining privacy and security in daily computing activities. Covers threat modeling, secure workflows, and avoiding common mistakes that compromise anonymity.
Digital Forensics Defense
Coming Soon - Techniques for protecting against digital forensics and ensuring that sensitive data cannot be recovered from your devices, even if they are seized or compromised.
Getting Started
If you're new to digital privacy and security, we recommend starting with our Understanding Tor guide to learn about one of the most important privacy tools available today. This will give you a foundation for understanding how anonymity networks function and why they're crucial for online privacy.
For those interested in hosting private services, the Tor Hidden Service setup guide provides step-by-step instructions for creating websites that exist only on the Tor network, offering both client and server anonymity.
Users interested in financial privacy should explore our Monero guide, which explains how privacy-focused cryptocurrencies work and why they represent an important alternative to traditional, surveillance-friendly financial systems.
The security-conscious should review our QEMU/KVM guide to learn about using virtualization for isolating different computing activities and protecting against malware and system compromise.
Contributing
This project depends on community contributions to remain current and comprehensive. We welcome contributions in several forms:
Documentation: Help improve existing guides or create new ones covering additional privacy and security topics. All content should be practical, well-tested, and focused on free and open-source solutions.
Technical Review: Review guides for accuracy, test procedures on different systems, and suggest improvements based on your experience with these tools and techniques.
Translation: Help make these guides accessible to non-English speakers by translating content into other languages.
Feedback: Report errors, suggest new topics, or share your experiences using these guides. User feedback is essential for keeping the content relevant and useful.
To contribute, visit our project repository or contact us through the methods listed in our documentation. We particularly welcome contributions from subject matter experts in cryptography, network security, and digital rights advocacy.
Disclaimer
Privacy and anonymity tools require proper configuration and usage to be effective. No tool provides perfect security, and the techniques described here should be part of a comprehensive approach to digital security that includes good operational security practices and appropriate threat modeling.