Interesting Gmail Feature
January 17th, 2005 | by Mike G |
I experimented recently with Tor. It’s a great application which, in conjunction with an app like Privoxy, conceals [to a degree] your IP address by routing your traffic along a network of other users of Tor.
The off-shoot of this is that from request to request it appears that the generated traffic is coming from various IP addresses other than your own, which can be a real boon to privacy. Even applications such as email notifiers can use the Tor/Privoxy connection.
A day after I had Tor up and working, I tried to log into Gmail in the morning and was informed that my account had been “locked down” because the Gmail staff saw activity that led them to believe my account was under some kind of attack.
It turns out they were paying attention to the IP where the Gmail Notification Agent originated from, and from their point of view, it looked as if every few minutes various IPs were successfully accessing my account, so they locked it down.
Fairly elementary, but I had no idea that kind of surveillance would be in place.
