Is there a way I can hide my IP address for free?

Question

The only reason I was wanting to know was I am concerned about single dating sites, if they could find out where I live at.

Answer 1

Remember that the to some extent, you have to expose your computer's IP address - because if you conceal it *totally*, you won't be able to communicate with any other computers.

In addition, keep in mind that although it's possible to do some primitive cloaking of your true address, it's only sufficient to conceal it from somebody who isn't all *that* interested in tracking you down. If the somebody is determined to find it and possibly armed with subpoenas, life becomes a lot more interesting. At that point, your best bet is to hope your lawyer can file a 'John Doe' motion to quash the subpoena so your ISP doesn't roll and spill the beans. This sort of tactic has been used in lawsuits filed by the RIAA - but end up costing thousands of dollars to pull it off

You're probably better off simply avoiding becoming the subject of such attention in the first place...

Answer 2

The complete stealth of your PC is not an easy task to fulfill, while being undetectable by most scanner (by using traditional firewalls, like the one provided with windows XP), hiding, or strictly speaking, rerouting packets (a small bunch of data), is even harder.
However, there are a number of techniques used to make a complete (actually, not very complete) stealth possible.

* First: Browse the internet anonymously:
You can browse the internet (with a web browser) while somewhat hiding your real IP, that is done through the use of what is called a Proxy. You can use a proxy to reroute your packets, that is to make the proxy server do the real connection to the website server you want to browse, then it sends you what the web server has return, this has the effect of browsing the internet as if you were using the proxy's own computer.
You can setup a proxy in Internet Explorer from "Tools" --> "Internet Options" --> "Connections" --> "LAN Settings"
and you can find a long list of free proxy servers around the world from: www.proxy4free.com/page1.html
Note that some of these servers may not work, so you'll have to find one the works.
To see the effect of these proxy servers, try visiting www.ipnow.org before setting up a proxy sever to see some information about yourself, then after setting up one, try visiting it again to see the magic for yourself!

*Second: Using SOCKS servers:
Using proxy servers limits you to port 80 or 8080 (the standard port for browsing, HTTP). So establishing direct connections on different ports will still make you detectable and traceable. For that specific problem, SOCKS servers were introduced. You can establish direct connections from your PC to any other machine while still making yourself undetectable.
But to be frank, I've never tried one of those, so unfortunately, I have no idea on how to do it. I think searching for that is worthwhile.

I hope that helped.
Best Regards

Answer 3

humm get zonealarm? hide from who?

Answer 4

You can try:

proxify.com
anonymouse.org
iphide.com

There are others.