Anonymous searching and other theoretically non-trackable tasks may soon be a thing of the past. A PhD student at the University of California has found a way to
identify specific hardware, even if its behind a firewall or has a changing IP address. The technique involved Уclock skewФ a variation in speed that relatively constant on each machine, and quite different. That information can be used to track a laptop say, as it moves across the world and reconnects to the Internet at different places. (The Уwhere it isФ information does not seem to be part of this work.) The discovery has definite implications for homeland security and crime fighting.