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Safeweb Turns Off Free Service
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Seems like Safeweb was the last one to cancel providing free anonymizing service. Rest in peace, Safeweb, I loved you a lot. With Anonymouse down and Anonymizer.com restricted, are there any free services left for those suffering from corporate oppression?"
Seems like Safeweb was the last one to cancel providing free anonymizing service. Rest in peace, Safeweb, I loved you a lot.
Hmm, you loved it a lot, but you're not willing to pay, eh? Sounds like the tombstone of every other dot-com. What's the surprise here? When people realize that you have to pay to play, maybe the dot-com economy will change. News flash, folks, if there's something good, and you love it, you need to chip in and contribute. If you don't, as they say on public radio, nobody else will.
What's your damage, Heather?
So you're sending your credit card details to an anonymising service. How long will you stay anonymous?
If you feel that strongly that the world needs anonymous, untraceable email, stop whining and do somthing about it. Set up a server, host it somewhere, and let people know where it is and how to use it. If you can figure out how to make it make enough money to cover expenses, more power to ya! Free services are great, if someone else is paying the bill. It's a different story when you're the one signing the checks. If you really believe this kind of service should be free for everyone, put your money where your mouth is and underwrite the venture, otherwise shut the F*** up.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
If you are sitting behind a corporate firewall, then why do you need the ability to post anonymously? Why aren't you doing your job (whatever it may be), and if you must say negative things about your employeer (which is the only reason I can think anyone would want to post anonymously while behind a corporate firewall), why not do it from home?
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the legal system or Ashcroft wouldn't try to claim that you should be suspected of terrorist activities simply because you are using software like AT&T's crowds software. Since that kind of software doesn't ship with every PC and requires at least a bit of skill and effort to install, you will be part of a small minority if you do.
Good god, if you want to surf for pr0n, do it at home. What is so hard about that? While at work, you should be doing your job and not spending your whole time surfing the internet. I know this isn't a popular opinion, but chances are that your employer has hired you to do something other than surf. This isn't the man trying to smack you down afterall :-)
Life costs money. It ain't free. Bandwidth costs money, as do computers, support people and lawyers. If you have no income you cannot maintain a service, no matter how 'popular' it is. If something is useful to you, then you ought to be willing to support it monitarily. Otherwise it is going to go away.
TANSTAAFL
Remember Lexington Green!
Gimme a friggn break! I bet you want all software to be free too, huh?
Anonymizer.com costs $49.96 for a year. That's $4.16 per month. Then there's anonymisers.com that costs $25 per year, half that of anonymizer.com! And you're all bent out of shape about there being no more TOTALLY free proxy services? You weren't breast fed were you?
Look, it's a service. The internet can't be all free. (That goes for software too) Anyway, you use a credit card, right? So you pay interest. Well that's the fee you pay to use that service. Get used to it. It's costs money to host a web site, especially if it attracts a lot of bandwidth usage. Well, who's going to pay the bills? You are, that's who!
Yeah, I remember the good old days of the eWildWest.com.net.org when WE ruled the net. I remember Tymenet, BITNET and X.25 and how fun it was to explore this big crazy whirlygig. But our eBaby.com is all grown up now... and so we should grow up with it. Change is bound to happen. And change means more opportunities. [hint, hint]
All you slashdolts talk so liberal... about free software and Microsoft did this bad thing, and the govt wants to initiate online body cavity searches and waaaaa! But in reality you sound more like a bunch of old white plantation owners that can't believe they just lost the war.
Flame on.
Mk.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned this, since I've ben doingit forever. Anyone with broadband (cable/dsl) has a fast enough connection to simple SSH to their house, and forward ports over the conneciton. Thus, I have my web browser proxy set to 127.0.0.1:8000, whihc is forwarded to my home PC proxy over the SSH connection.
Given the lengths to which a very few people will go to ruin something for everyone else, I'm not surprised several free services aren't fighting to keep their non-paying customers.
how to invest, a novice's guide
It's not that black and white, I'm afraid.
As a contractor, I often work at a client site, and often those sites have what I consider to be some excessive filtering/blocking rules. For example, at my current client, all web-based email accounts are blocked-- and contractors are not, as a general rule, given email accounts on the client's corporate domain.
Now, awareness of the dangers of email attachments is commendable, but I should also note that this same client standardizes on MS Outlook as an email client, and as such has twice been taken out by Nimda-- in spite of the blocking of services like Yahoo mail and Hotmail.
So, by using a proxy like Safeweb, am I subverting the client's security policies? Perhaps. But by blocking my email access somewhat arbitrarily, are they hindering my effectiveness as an outide contractor? Absolutely.
Who's right? Depends on who you ask. But, I believe that all concerned parties sometimes have motivations that are at least a little bit more complex than surfing porn on company time.
So if all it means is that some rich Arabs can get easy access to porn, so what. It might just mean that someone from a religiously repressive and sexually repressed society learns that if you look at porn, it doesn't make you blind, it doesn't turn you into a rapist, and if your spouse/SO shares your tastes, it could even enhance your sex life. And the 5% of the time they were reading news sites might just give them a wider view of the world. All of which might make their country, eventually, more tolerant. So you can whine all you want, but sometimes the inability to surf porn is the man smacking people down, and sometimes the ability to surf porn is a sign that freedom exists, regardless of whether exercising that freedom at any given time is wise or tasteful.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
A T1, or just about any other dedicated line, costs the same amount of money whether you use it for news, files, or tits. If you use it for nothing, it costs the same as if you use it for beaver.
So no, it doesn't cost them anything additional -- unless they use frame relay, or have some hopelessly overloaded connection already, and AnalAngels is adding to a major bottleneck.
God forbid your company treat consultants with any repect and favour.