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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?"
I totally dig the fact that the submitter of this story was 'anonymous coward'...!
Noproxy still works. There is also a list of free services at antiproxy. I personlly run my own CGI Proxy on my home server while I am at school.
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?
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.
Just wear tinfoil on your head... it totally eliminates the corporate oppression! It really works! I used to be oppressed on a daily basis. But ever since I started where the tin foil hat, people avoid me like the plague! I've even seen people cross the street to avoid walking by me!
Finally! The power is mine!
... avaliable from here and here.
James F.
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...
There is still work being done with AT&T's crowds. Basically, the caveat is that you have'ta share the load if you wanna use the service. Good karma there.
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
Why not do it yourself? Its not all that hard to mask your IP, or pull a couple of the same tricks spammers use to spam people... anonymously at that...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de is still beta but
working...
So you're sending your credit card details to an anonymising service. How long will you stay anonymous?
I like to use sneakemail for hiding my true email address from the multitude of lists and webpages I sometimes use.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
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.
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"?
Why do we need anonymizing services (essentially hacks) when excellent substitutes are in the works? Projects like Freenet are providing new protocols which are specifically designed with anonymity in mind.
Megaproxy.com is another free service and one of the only ones I can find that runs behind https. Does anyone know of any other web based proxies that run behind https?
Orangatango provides a great method of surfing anonymously for extremely reasonable prices. I love their "MailBlox" email anonymizer.
Orangatango is based on a pretty cool idea: Rather than my computer negotiating a connection with every site I want to connect to, my computer negotiates a connection with Orangatango, and Orangatango does the rest. To the outside world, it looks as though Orangatango is making all of the requests. Maybe it's not a unique idea, but they have implemented it extremely well.
Yeah, I know that I have to give them my credit card and that makes my connection ultimately traceable through one means or another, but it's a far cry better than surfing directly through my ISP.
They have additional benefits other than just the anonymization as well. It really is "the web on your terms" as Orangatango claims. They're worth a look! Check them out.
Before you ask, I'll answer that no, I am not affiliated with Orangatango. The only reason that I know about them is that I applied for a development position at Orangatango a year ago. I've kept my eye on them (as well as my browser pointed at them) ever since.
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
Or better put, it effectively would end up being a 32 bit encryption key, which is VERY easy to break.
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!
are there any free services left for those suffering from corporate oppression?"
What a pile of crap! I understand invasion of privacy, but you are just paranoid!
Big brother is watching you, the illuminati can hear you through copper wires! If you are that paranoid, my friend, the best thing for you to do is move to siberia and become a hermit.
Quite frankly, no one is watching, and if they are (we're talking millions of transactions a second. Something no one would do for under $80k/year), you probably don't do anything that would attract their attention. Quit freaking out!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
egroups isn't dead; it was bought by Yahoo! and it's now groups.yahoo.com -- you can still set up free mailing lists there.
(All Python code, too, as are maps.yahoo.com and mail.yahoo.com)
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Gee, I wonder why all these companies are failing... Lets look at their business model, shall we?
Step 1. Provide a cool, useful service for free.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit.
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.
Mail money order to them in an envelope.
Don't put a return address on the envelope.
Fight Spammers!
Ah yes, I remember an enjoyable evening using anonymizer. Then a few days later I had the chance to look through our server logs and there it was:
...
www.anonymizer.com?url=barely18.com
www.anonymizer.com?url=teenvixens.com
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.
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...
The new USPS regulations prohibit the delivery of mail without a return address.
It's easier to just throw your money into a lake.
------
Let me give you the lowdown
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....
Only 'flamers' flame!
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.
are there any free services left for those suffering from corporate oppression?"
Let's put things in perspective. The women forced to wear bhurkas in Afghanistan are oppressed. The dissidents in the Gulag were oppressed. The Jews in the ghetto were oppressed. The African-americans forced into slavery two centuries ago were oppressed. You are not oppressed merely because you don't get automatic anonymity when you choose to disclose your public information to a corporation.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Real slimeballs huh? And in Dallas of all places!
But what the hell does this have to do with corporate oppression as it relates to "anonymous internet services"?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Months ago, when load started crashing Safeweb regularly, I wrote to ask them if they were still interested in continuing to operate, and I offered to buy their business model for a dollar.
Telling event: They wrote back declining the offer.
That's when I knew they were doomed.
--Blair
How about a word from one of the "Web Nazis."
I'm one of the lucky few that manages one of these oppressive machines, and well, unfortunately we need them.
I hear a lot of whining about folks not being able to surf what they want. When we check our logs, we see that they are trying to get to p0rn, ESPN.com or spend company time looking for other jobs. We have had several sexual harrasment suits as a result of people being caught surfing p0rn, and no company wants to deal with that mess. Yes, I agree sometimes it does get in the way, but it's not that hard to open up sites as required.
After all you're at work to do that, work. Sure surfing makes lunch a little more enjoyable, but deal with it. This is an HR issue, take it up with them if you have a problem.
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.
It was monday morning and my brain wasn't working too well to begin with. Then I logged in to spazdot and all remaining vestiges of rational thought evaporated. My apologies for the gross error of two centuries.
In any event, the oppression of slaves is in no way comparable to the oppression one receives at the hands of our corporate masters when they fail to offer us free anonymizer services.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Uh, because it's easier to hide it from the boss than from the wife?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
The United States Government wants us to burn our books...
Perhaps those of us in supposedly "free" countries need anonymizing services now more than ever!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
on the scale of politics, libertarians are very far on the "right wing"
Wrong. Economically, libertarians are right-wing, but socially, they're left-wing. Libertarians place themselves on the top wing, the other wings being left (liberal), right (conservative), and bottom (authoritarian). Where do you fall?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why must every time someone says anything pro-Christian or pro-religion they get modded down?
Amen brother!... As a rampant Darwin lovin' athiest I myself am prone to finding religion a little bit on the nose, *BUT* I defend to the hilt peoples right to have it.
It's all too easy to bait or bash ppl over having a particular religious or cultural bent, but at the end of the day , the discerning athiest really has to apply the the scientific method and say "Well, on the balance of odds and evidence, I'm pretty sure theres no God; But I could be wrong"
And presumably , as long as the religious guy ain't forcing religion down your neck, that means one has no right to reach down and yank it out of his.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
This is only valid if ssh is allowed from the site your trying to escape.
Then set up an SSH server listening on port 443 on the machine you want to send to, and tunnel through your proxy as if you were doing an SSL connection. Works fine for me, though YMMV depending on the fascistness of your sysadmin. Ugly source code here for anyone interested.
what spammers use:
-open mail relays. For http this would be things like proxy's (~=safeweb)
-throwaway accounts. You can use them as well. Note that that is not truly anonymous, they can stil track where you are coming from (ip+time+callerid)
the reg had nice acticle about this a short while ago. "Do-it-yourself Internet anonymity". they have a article about safeweb as well.
The new USPS regulations prohibit the delivery of mail without a return address.
What the hell are you talking about? I rarely put a return address on anything. Mailed a bunch of stuff out just the other day without return addresses and all got to their destinations just fine. I've yet to see anything about return addresses being required. Without some sort of proof, I've got to say, you've been misinformed...
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig