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GoogleSharing, Now With No Trust Required
An anonymous reader writes "GoogleSharing, the popular Google anonymizing service created by well known privacy advocate and security researcher Moxie Marlinspike, has released a major new version today. The biggest change is leveraging Google's SSL search option to provide an anonymizing service which doesn't require you to trust either Google or GoogleSharing. This means that anyone who wishes to opt out of Google's data collection practices can now do so without having to trust the operator of the anonymizing service."
Let me refer you to the second sentence of the summary:
"The biggest change is leveraging Google's SSL search option to provide an anonymizing service which doesn't require you to trust either Google or GoogleSharing."
Kids today...
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A great day for liberty!
That is of course until someone in washington decides it's a security risk because terrorists could use it to plan their attacks. You know that will happen.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
From GoogleSharing's FAQ:
Why not use Anonymizer or any other anonymizing proxy service?
General purpose anonymizing proxies are designed for something else.
1. Most will mask your IP address, but not the identifying information in your HTTP headers. Google will still know who you are based on your Cookies, User Agent, etc...
2. If the proxy does attempt to anonymize HTTP headers, they will do it by completely stripping cookies from your request. Google does not like this, and will tag you as a SPAM bot (how convient for them to do), which will force you to type in a CAPTCHA every time you issue a Google search, and will prevent you from issuing Maps requests at all.
3. These types of proxies can be slow. It's not necessary to proxy all of your internet traffic if you're just trying to protect yourself from Google. Since GoogleSharing only proxies Google traffic, our bandwidth needs are much lower and thus our performance is much greater.
Let me refer you to the second sentence of the summary:
Look old man, if it was important, it would be in the FIRST sentence because that's how we kids do it these days even if it means run on sentences and now I'll get off of your lawn.
Let me refer you to the second sentence of the summary:
"The biggest change is leveraging Google's SSL search option to provide an anonymizing service which doesn't require you to trust either Google or GoogleSharing."
Wow.
You are right. That says I don't have trust google or googlesharing. ... assuming I trust the entity that makes that claim.
Oh. The entity making the claim that I don't need to trust GoogleSharing is GoogleSharing. Neat.
So if I don't trust googlesharing, why would my distrust be satisfied by the fact that they claim I don't need to trust them? That makes about as much sense as a fly asking the spider if he can take a nap on the web... the spider said he wasn't hungry... I guess there's nothing to worry about. :facepalm
Now, if you had instead referred me to the googlesharing FAQ:
http://googlesharing.net/faq.html#faq6
"If you're still worried, remember that the GoogleSharing addon and proxy code is publicly available. So it's possible for you to run a GoogleSharing proxy yourself, or to find someone who you do trust."
That's at least a step in the right direction. I can inspect and run the software on a server I do trust.*
And if I use the GoogleSharing servers, than I do still need to trust GoogleSharing to be running the software they claim to be running. I expect they are worthy of that trust but you still have to trust them unless you are running your own server after inspecting the source.*
** And you will need to find a bunch of people who trust YOU using your server for you to derive any privacy benefit from running your own server. Bit of a catch-22 there.
Oh gods... as one of the three people on the internet that knows the difference between "lose" and "loose," they'll have no problem tracking me down!!!