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

Sweet Irony

[yatest5]

I totally dig the fact that the submitter of this story was 'anonymous coward'...!

Re:Sweet Irony

[sllort]

I totally dig the fact that the submitter of this story was 'anonymous coward'...!

I dig it too, because that's the real irony. Anonymous Cowards here aren't, because their IP addresses are still subject to subpoena, and there's a 2 week long window where Slashdot stores the IP address as an MD5 hash, which can be easily defeated. Think Church of Scientology.

The only way to make AC posts truly "anonymous" is to post through an anonymous HTTP proxy that instantly "forgets" the source IP address. This is what Safeweb provided, and now it's gone. The irony is that the Anonymous Coward who posted the story probably isn't Anonymous.

Of course, there are still other anonymizers, but Safeweb was the best known.

Re:Sweet Irony

[Mwongozi]

This is what Safeweb provided,

Actually, it didn't. SafeWeb kept logs for seven days.

noproxy

[DMDx86]

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.

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.

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

SilentSurf are

[Jon Chatow]

... avaliable from here and here.

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)

Hiding in crowds

[iamcadaver]

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.

JAP

[seite-f00f]

http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de is still beta but
working...

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.

anonymizing services? feh

[ajuda]

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.

ssh

[Spock the Vulcan]

You could do what I do - run squid+sshd at home, set up a tunnel with ssh port forwarding from your office to home:

ssh -C -L 3128:<home-ip>:3128 -N <home-ip>

and then set localhost:3128 as your proxy. Of course, this is assuming you have an always-on connection at home.

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

Re:Orangatango

[stevey]

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.

That's what us computery people call a Proxy, or Proxy Server ...

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.

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.

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.