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?"

Comments

Gee, big surprise there, another free site down

[Brento]

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.

Re:Gee, big surprise there, another free site down

[Hanul]

pay and be anonymous at the same time? just tell me how.

yeah, pay cash and wear a mask.

Re:Gee, big surprise there, another free site down

[Asphalt]

SafeWeb did not solicit donations, or provide a pay-for-play service for individuals.

It was not any of the user's fault.

What are we supposed to do, put cash in an envelope, write "SafeWeb" on the front, and drop it in a mailbox?

If SafeWeb was cash-strapped, they could have notified users as such, and provided ways to contrinute and/or subscribe.

They didn't. Who are you going to blame?

If you're paying, it's not anonymous

[tony_gardner]

So you're sending your credit card details to an anonymising service. How long will you stay anonymous?

Re:If you're paying, it's not anonymous

[ethereal]

Contrariwise, no anonymizing service is going to be able to retain legal services to fend off attacks on anonymity without having some form of income. So either some wealthy benefactor pays for "free" anonymity because they believe in it, or else everyone has to chip in to preserve their own privacy.

Re:If you're paying, it's not anonymous

[swingkid]

Even if you're not paying, it's not really anonymous; they have your ip adress at the least.

Re:If you're paying, it's not anonymous

[Gkeeper80]

You don't have to be anonymous going in, only going out. They have your IP already, they might as well also have a username. As long as that info isn't sent through with the outgoing request you are still anonymous

Get over it, or take constructive action

[Tassach]

OK, so a bunch of anonymous email servers have gone down, either because they can't pay the bills or they are afraid of lawsuits. Get over it.

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.

Re:So?

[Quasar1999]

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?

Re:Hiding in crowds

[vscjoe]

There is a very simple mechanism by which lawyers will likely put an end to that: if you are part of a software "crowd" and someone in that crowd does something, you will be held at least in part responsible; the necessary connectivity information can probably be obtained from ISP logs and electronic wiretaps even if the source of any particular request cannot.

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.

Corporate Opression? Gimme a break!

[zarathustra93]

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 :-)

Its called Economics, Stupid.

[libertynews]

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

SSH to your house?

[brunes69]

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.

Anonymity versus Abuse

[chromatic]

Maybe someone from the Slash development team could elaborate on this.

Someone already has. Look for the section in blue.

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.

Re:Corporate Opression? Gimme a break!

[nullnvoid]

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.

Fundamentalist oppression needs a break!

[MadAhab]

I put up an anonymizing proxy somewhere and ran it for a year or so. Threw out the logs after analysis. But found out that most of my traffic was from United Arab Emirates. They used the site for surfing porn, which is blocked by their country. They also used it for reading news that I doubt they can easily get there.

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.