No matter what you do to avoid privacy threats, you are still at the mercy of your ISP.
Depending on which ISP you choose, you will ultimately be connecting to a larger ISP. I am using a dial-up connection to Verizon. I do it through my V3 cellphone, using a USB connection. The system works as a cellphone transmission, like a landline modem it keeps a line alive and sends and recieves on the network as needed. In the image on the top, instead of a wall jack and telephone line - its a cellphone tower.
Verizon is a medium ISP, it still plugs into a major ISP, like Qwest or UUNET by a NAP. Verizon would be considered my POP, Point of Presence.
check this link out for various maps of datacenters and NAPsAn Internet point of presence is an access point to the Internet. It is a physical location that houses servers, routers, ATM switches and digital/analog call aggregators. It may be either part of the facilities of a telecommunications provider that the Internet service provider (ISP) rents or a location separate from the telecommunications provider. ISPs typically have multiple POPs, sometimes numbering in the thousands. POPs are also located at Internet exchange points and colocation centres
A colocation centre (collocation center) ("colo") is also called a NAT, Network Access Point. The Colo center is a sort of data center where multiple customers locate network, server and storage gear and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications and other network service provider(s) with a minimum of cost and complexity.
Increasingly, organizations are recognizing the benefits of colocating their mission-critical equipment within a data centre. Colocation is becoming popular because of the time and cost savings a company can realize as result of using shared data centre infrastructure. Significant benefits of scale (large power and mechanical systems) result in large colocation facilities, typically 4500 to 9500 square metres (roughly 50000 to 100000 square feet).
http://www.dyntex.com/our_network/index.html#map
or this one for your country
http://www.datacentermap.com/
Connections to these datacenters can be by Metropolitian Area Networks, as well as by the actual Internet Backbone, this is sort of like your freeways and highways the cars drive on.
Network Operations Centers are responsible for:
primary and backup locations
network monitoring
statistics and log gathering
direct but secure access
The size of datacenters is controlled by making the network layout Modular - with datacenters only serving information clients would want - location based. Example - searching for Restaurants in Texas, would likely only return results for restaurants in the texas area - because the DB used is influenced by the POP. This is the reason I like to use other search engines besides Google, the search engines are biased to location.
The search engine would first use its own database, before searching else where for your topic of search.
http://c0vertl.tripod.com/search.htm
The above link is a collection of various search engines, located all over the world, and not reliant on say, google's own bias for its customers.
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I am using ethereal to sniff my traffic from my laptop to the ISP, The results of the ethereal capture are posted in the code section, with comments.
ISP Sniff 1
In the packet capture you can see my Yahoo YIM trying to reach out to home server, and you can see the ISP use my computer name "nomad".
You can see the modem making contact with the LAN, using MAC addressing to identify itself. DHCP also usually relies on MAC addresses to manage the unique assignment of IP addresses to devices. This should be called the Link Configuration packets.
My interface
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : WAN (PPP/SLIP) Interface
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-53-45-00-00-00
(I am running out of time tonight, can anyone explain why the Physical address only refers to xx-53-45-xx-xx-xx in the ipconfig, and the packets display Destination: 20:53:45:4e:44:04??? )
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre
http://www.dmoz.org/Business/Telecommun ... location//
http://www.datacentermap.com/
http://ws.edu.isoc.org/data/2005/413634 ... d1-6up.pdf
