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

CIA Investors

[rsimmons]

Isn't it funny that one of Safeweb's main investors is a company controlled by the CIA called In-Q-Tel. Here is Safeweb's investors page.

Re:CIA Investors

[John Carmack]

I have a very interesting tale about this.

One of the suppliers to Armadillo Aerospace told me about an experiment that he tried. He was looking over the logs to his (very low traffic) site, and he wondered how an anonymized hit would show up in the logs. He went through Safeweb, and saw a properly obscured address in the logs.

One hour later, he also got a hit to the same page from cia.gov.

I'm sure this isn't standard practice for every access, but his site was probably on a hot list of some sort due to the aerospace content.

John Carmack

Aren't they mostly small services?

[Ratface]

AFAIK the majority of anonymiser services have gone underground to the extent that they tend not to want to advertise their services, working instead by word of mouth. Personally I wouldn't even want to be a user of an anonymising service where the operator/s weren't in some way known to be to be trustworthy.

There's possibly more safety in diversity when it comes to anonymising services. (Though that is debatable)

Alternatives?

[jacoplane]

Perhaps there are still some free alternatives. I haven't tried any of those listed though. Maybe someone can provide some feedback.

The other possibility of course is to use something like Freenet. Although nobody is totally anonymous on freenet, at least everyone is almost anonymous, which I feel is much better than the current situation. Of course, big-brother types will disagree and claim it is far too dangerous.

Corporation Oppression?

[robvasquez]

I suppose you whine that you can't call Bejing all day either!

Just because they put a 900mhz PC on your desk, your office shares a T3, and you've got nothing better to do, doesn't mean you can snerf all day.

New anonimizers all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

I developed an anonymous surfing service and it has been running for 3 months now. Most of my users are from Saudi Arabia, China and the United Arab Emirates and 99% of the bandwidth goes to porn. This is why the free services tend to disappear over time.

The company I developed this for is using it to create a name for its other fee-based products (secure storage and a public key exchange for encrypted email). There will always be free services as long as companies need to create a presence online.

I just wanted to add my two cents and am not trying to advertising for my service. Therefore I have not provided a link to the service.

Re:ssh

[sporty]

Search freshmeat for http tunnel. You can do some sick stuff, tunnelling ssh via http to your home machine to do a proxy. Thank God this doesn't require that much CPU for it :)

Re:noproxy

[Doomdark]

Just a guess; he's more worried about the school finding out his browsing habits (or blocking access to sites), than about web sites profiling him?

To work adequately the connection has to be encrypted (ssl should be ok here I guess), or the target-URL has to be encrypted. Otherwise it's trivial to still track usage, although, this has to be done manually (unless cgi-arg passing uses some existing de facto standard?).

You are right though, this won't work for the other big problem, snooping at the other end... And that's why safeweb (or similar) was really neat thing to have (even with those 7 days logs someone mentioned... as long as you realize it 's not all THAT anonymous).

Re:Hushmail and the law in the Republic of Ireland

[easter1916]

Phil Zimmermann of PGP fame relocated to Dublin when he joined Hushmail. I think it's also legally headquartered there because of the afore-mentioned encryption laws. Not sure about other locations...

you could set up your own proxy

[josepha48]

Try using proximotron (sp) it is a proxy that is used for filtering. It does however mask your user agent and things. Also using mozilla will allow you to prevent unwanted cookies. Basically between mozilla and proximitron (or another proxy) you could essentially mask who you are except your IP address. Things like user-agent and other headers going into and out of your machine are masked. Rejecting cookies and preventint companies like doublecluck from setting cookies or images on your machine also puts up a 'wall of fire' between you and the internet. Lastly I'd put up a firewall and reject all new connections from outside sources (unless your running a service like httpd or ftp or ssh). Many webservers for some reason like to make new connections to my machine after the transaction is done. This is a known issue, so my firewall rules just drop those packets to the floor and it does not hurt my system.

I guess without these types of services people will have to learn how to protect themselves on the web. Besides how long do you think many of these services can stay free on the web? I'm kinds supprised /. has not talked about charging to post yet....

Hey, who has the sig that says

[A_Non_Moose]

moderators should not be anonymouse (or anonmoose) and unaccountable for their moderation?

Most insightful sig I've ever read. Ironically it showed up about 2 weeks after a rant I had on the very subject. Brevity, I like that.

And, NO, this is not blatant flamebait...I'm much more subtle than that. :)

Oh, and as a rule when I have mod points from time to time; anything you read that makes you angry...reread it twice. Because flamebait will make you even angrier and sarcasm and biting satire will elude you the first time around and maybe the second.

Waandering back on topic:
Is anyone really suprised? I'm too lazy to look for it but there was an interview here or on macslash.com about a person that ran a anon service and the legal "hammering" they got was just astounding. The man stood his ground reguardless of the solid or shaky foundation he was on.

His reliance was on donations, and untraceable donations at that. Very interesting and I have not heard of this place going out of business mainly because of the "principal" of it all.

Now, that, my fellow /.'ers takes some brass ones.

As a business, I don't see how they can stand up for someone when "business ethics" is all too often a contradiction in terms.

Something to ponder, I suppose.

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

[GTRacer]

Are you sure? From CPB's own website:

Less than half of the industry's total income comes from tax-based sources such as federal, state, and local governments. Sixty-one percent of the income is from private sources such as businesses and memberships.

...and...

How much does the federal government contribute?
In 1999 Congress appropriated $250 million to CPB, approximately 11.6 percent of the industry's total income.

...or this...

By law, 95 percent of the funds allocated to CPB go directly to benefit viewers and listeners either through Community Service Grants to stations, programming grants to producers, or other station-related activities.

Are you telling me that NONE of this money makes it to any public radio stations? Where I live, the public TV and radio station share the same facilities.

But I could be wrong. I have been wrong before...

GTRacer
- Still missing Dan Hickman and "Metro".

Re:ssh

[LinuxHam]

A smart, fascist system administrator would block out ALL outgoing ports cept for http and maybe ftp, so your proxy trick doesnt go around all firewalls

You can setup an ssh listener on any port. Even the most anal organizations with allowed Internet access leave 80 (http) and 443 (https) open outbound.

If you want to host a web page at home, host it on 80 and set up an ssh listener on 443. That's also how to defeat the AOL IM block. They have listeners on almost every dad-gum port. 21, 23, 25, 80, 443, whatever. The login box isn't serving up any other services, so ALL the well-known ports can be routed to the authentication service. If you can get out on even ONE port, chances are they'll let you in on that port.

The only large organization I've heard of that does application proxying is AT&T. Man are they bandwidth *nazis*. The shell box my friend and I use have an ssh listener on 443, and AT&T actually manages to block his ssh outbound connections on 443. Occasionally they open 22, but its closed most of the time.

Anonymous browsing helps law enforcement

[DzugZug]

When I worked for the Attorney General's office, we used to investigate online fraud and would routinely use anonymizer.com and other services in order to view suspect web pages without *.gov showing up in their logs. If they see a few of those hits they quickly pack up, move to a new state, and buy a new domain.