Introduction
 Trace

 Table of Contents
 Questions

Introduction

In GhostSurf's anonymous hubs window, you can double-click a hub to bring up the "Hub information" window, shown above. This window displays the speed of the hub, the number of days the hub has been valid, and the hub's Internet (IP) address. You can also use this window to compute the trace to the hub from your computer.

The Trace

The trace of a hub is the path that information takes from your computer to the hub. The path gives you some indication of how long it takes information to travel from your computer to the hub, and may also indicate something about the hub's location. In the window pictured above, the hub is located in New York City (note the nyc-ny extension in its name). There are 14 hops in between; the amount of time it takes information to reach each of them is displayed in the "Ave. RTT" column. The average round-trip time (RTT) is the amount of time, in milliseconds, it takes to send a packet of data to the computer and have it return.

All the hops between your computer and the hub can see your Internet address--the hub has not yet had a chance to remove it--but they are almost always high-speed routers that cannot afford to store any information about you.