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Any Lavabit users (or anyone, really) is welcome to check out https://www.cotse.net/ as an alternative privacy service.

http://www.cotse.net/

I have no bank or other financial service accounts, pay for everything in cash, have no telephone, don't share any information about myself and keep to myself most of the time. When people ask me for any personally-identifying information, I decline to provide it. When a business insists on such information, I simply go to their competition. It's not an easy life but it's damned well private and secure. COTSE helps quite a bit, too. Of course, not having a wife, family or other privacy-stealing bits in my life makes it a little easier.

My name is Ascii and you don't know me.

COTSE Privacy Service

If you don't believe me, check it out for yourself.

They won't let me get it in here any other way so I'll just do it here:

Cotse.Net Privacy Service

Take that mods! Btw, this is where you mod me down for being off-topic or otherwise a bad /. citizen. :p

I can mention I've been looking around for ssh tunnel services and shell account providers. And not surprising that I am able to find global privacy services that are claiming to allow high bandwidth encrypted tunneling services with allowance for P2P and Usenet levels of traffic. It may be like a 2nd ISP bill on top of the original connection, but it helps to ensure that you're not the sucker in case the MAFIAA gets a hold of your IP, and some of them let you pick and choose the continent which your proxy resides... I'll drop a couple links I bookmarked recently when COTSE had their outage (thank you assholes at Verizon)...

COTSE
TriLightZone
List of Shell providers
Secure-Tunnel
Electronic Privacy Info Center Tools list
Spyware Warrior Resources Links

Anyways there's tons of stuff out there if you look, people can just put up SSH servers running on port 80 and encrypt everything and then what are the ISPs gonna do? Degrade all encrypted traffic like that Canadian ISP did? Ah the battles continue...

Fwiw, I use Firefox because I can change the UA to whatever I like ... not just three preselected options as with Opera. At the moment I'm using Googlebot's UA just to be a [censored]. But I have about 40 different ones based on my own personal moods. Try that with Opera - oh, you can't. Nevermind. If website authors would just stick to the standards and web browser authors would stick to the standards these submoronic browser issues would fade faster than a fart in a stiff wind. https://www.cotse.net/ - which, btw, is functional with EVERY browser including Lynx!

Cotse have recently been experimenting with some fun in the realm of tunnelling of the SSH kind. Unfortunately they don't have a lot of available documentation on it but scrolling down the notes on the login page should give you a fair idea of what's going on. It's neat and secure and could, with the proxy they've set up, enable an unusually private way of accessing internet services. Other ISPs take note..

Governor Imposes Stay on MATRIX

Governor ends Utah's roles in database

Matrix FOIA Request to Utah State Police

The MATRIX

Privacy Watch: Matrix

Matrix Updates

Matrix Raises a Stir

So basically what they are saying is that I can't even have an opinion. If I really wanted to just get round it then I would either connect via another ISP, unless they are a total monopoly or use a service such as Cotse

Rus

www.cotse.net already has filters, whitelists, blacklists, gold lists, spam assassin, everything you can think of to help eliminate spam. If it's not there and you can think of it, I bet their people are already thinking about it.

Take a look: http://www.cotse.net/servicedetails.html