Once upon a time, we imagined a cypherpunk future, where speech was free and the internet was the great frontier of autonomous anonymity.

It turns out, though, that we leave fingerprints on everything we touch. And many of the conveniences and indeed basic user experience we've come to expect leave plenty of markers of who we are for anyone who might be listening. This makes it easy for hacker news to remember who I am, and easy for advertisers to target ads, and governments to track individuals.

So yeah, tools exist, sort of, but require a lot of inconvenience. We've seen instances of ISPs inserting their own cookies on headers of outgoing customer traffic, meaning there are still times when your precautions don't matter at all. When I've thought about totally anonymous internet usage, my guess is that you need to go buy a fresh laptop with cash, and then only use it on large public networks, with good encryption...