This is gonna be a huge growth industry. In the last week, there were many media reports concerning the NSA. The U.S. government is now collecting 1.7 billion communications a day. This includes, emails phone calls. etc. These are all searchable by keyword. Also a new data center has been "outed" in the state of Utah that can eavesdrop on many more communications of U.S. citizens, indicating the desired future direction of the U.S. spy machine - controlling and dominating U.S. citizens. If you want to keep your own money, or say whatever you want, you need this type of software (or stronger measures) to keep the U.S. from dominating you with its agenda.
As far as pirating music, important new legal rulings have held that an IP address is NOT enough to charge someone with pirating music and movies. Don't be the last guy on your block still paying for music and movies.
Ok, honesty is good! From your well-placed perspective, what are some of the best ways for an internet user to ensure his privacy?
Don't do anything stupid and you don't have anything to worry about. Half my customers use their boxes to watch porn & whatever else - when they click those links it is their own choice but I still see it all. I don't know what you mean by privacy - it is very easy to inspect and/or flag internet traffic. You are wearing a tin foil hat if you think the feds are out to get you. If you go to a flagged site you will get caught - then again flagged sites are like child-porn and/or terrorism or anti government, etc. If you are on flagged sites you should be caught - or know the lay of the land. What you are saying about "everyone is out to get me" is nonsense.
Finally get to ask someone in your position - even if it costs just one penny to keep track of IP addresses (and I assume it's much more), why even keep track of IP addresses at all? I believe search engine DuckDuckGo doesn't track IP addresses at all. (yes, they are small. Dont care. Just talking about IP adresses) They don't even want to know. Why track IP's?
I don't track IP's - but I use Kiwi Syslog Server so every IP that my firewall accepts/rejects is recorded... You need the logs for troubleshooting & also for security... If my client wants to access a feature from a laptop I need to open up that port to * or any IP address because he/she may be at a starbux or a Jamaca hotel... If he/she is only accessing from their home/office I will isolate their IP address and say "block all except allow port 12345 from IP 123456" Every request my firewall gets it takes a decision... the more specific i can make things the better since my guys that watch porn all day generate roughly 260k attempts per day that are blocked... Hope that helps - I do not track IP's... It just kind of happens in the syslogs...
No idea - I suppose you would need to go to one... Everyone over-thinks the internet. A website normally sits on a server and is accessed through port 80 (or 443 for https). Any one of us could build a web page and allow the public to access your port 80... perfect case in point - I have a website that is public. Anyone in the world can access my website - as long as you know the address whether that be a www.xxxxx or a 12.34.56.78 IP address.
Cocoon sounds like a nice idea, but keep in mind that when you use an anonymizing proxy server you are swimming with sharks, and if one of them does something illegal the entire server may be seized by law enforcement and scrutinized.