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Safeweb Turns Off Free Service

Posted by timothy on from the no-more-no-more dept.

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?"

4 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. CIA Investors by rsimmons · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:CIA Investors by John+Carmack · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

  2. Aren't they mostly small services? by Ratface · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

    --

    A little planning goes a long way...
  3. Anonymous browsing helps law enforcement by DzugZug · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.