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Ask Slashdot: Choosing Anonymous Proxies?
bradley13 writes "There are lots of anonymous proxies out there, and anyone concerned about their privacy probably uses one for at least some of their web browsing. The Megaupload story highlights the fact that having servers in the USA is not a great idea. There are also other countries one may not want to trust. Oddly, very few proxy services mention where their equipment is located. What anonymous proxy services do you use? What criteria do you use to select them? How paranoid are you, and for what types of Internet usage?"
It's the only way to stay truly anonymous and secure on the internet. You cannot trust companies to provide you true anonymity and proxies, especially if money is involved.
Never trust anyone, and never expose to anyone who you are. That is the only way to stay secure on the internet.
I use this thing.
Selection criteria:
1. First google hit for [anonymous proxy]
2. It's been around since forever and I remember its url (but when I don't, see #1)
Yeah, not that scientific.
The most venerable lineage in this space is probably The Anonymizer, which was once hosted by CMU researchers, but it seems to have been bought and turned into a commercial desktop application.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
See: http://xkcd.com/908/
Except it's all pointing to one gnarly Tor endpoint
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
It is fine for most purposes, and if you are really worried about backtracking, login from an open WiFi, route through TOR out the exit node and through one or two of the numerous free online proxies. Slow as molasses in January, but there it is.
Many TOR nodes are run for malicious purposes (a few have resorted to 'wall of sheep' sort of tactics' to reinforce this fact). TOR gives you anonymity but NOT privacy.
I use Giganews' 'VyperVPN service. They have servers all over the world and you can select which country you want to use.
I've also used privatetunnels.com which is based in the Ukraine and that was a great service as well.
I do not trust Anonymous proxies. So I always host my own "anonymous" proxies myself. That is what I call secure!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I use Overplay for region-restricted web content. Very useful when watching British TV shows on the BBC iPlayer and Irish Gaelic sports like hurling and Gaelic football which saves me the trouble of having to go to a pub and pay $20 per game.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Google for "vpn services accepting bitcoin". Done. We learned from the spectacular failure of HideMyAss that you cannot pay for you proxy with credit card when the FBI comes looking.
I personally use open wifi connections, they are about as anonymous as you can get. I picked up a 10" google pad with GPS, installed the software and took a drive. They are all over the place, that is assuming you dont use the open one at the local bar, Denny's, McDonalds, Cigar club, Starbucks, etc, etc, etc.
If you look, you will find that open and available wifi connections are easy to find, completely anonymous, and fun. Fun because it is amazing what people will share on there local network with an open wifi connection ;)
How about a coffee shop's free Wifi using a spoofed MAC address while I'm sitting at the restaurant next door?
What degree of anonymity are you looking for? Exactly which of the HTTP request headers do you wish to be anonymized? Okay so your proxy is not passing on your IP address. So It's not passing on common proxy behaviours (like HTTP 1.0 requests). And there's no 'proxy' anywhere in the request. You're not even using TOR. Well done. Now check Panopticlick. You're not anonymous. Now exactly what kind of proxy where you looking for and what kind of anonymity were you looking for?
.
"Inside Cocoon we do not track where you go or what you do online... Only operational information, such as processing speed or what features are under greatest demand, may be used to ensure Cocoon provides the best possible performance and experience to our users."
There is the question of how enforceable this promise is, since Cocoon is ad-supported. It's in their privacy policy, however, so I presume that is legally binding on them. I like that Cocoon comes right out and say that they don't track anything, though. Does any other proxy do that?
Like always, the question you have to ask is "who am I hiding it from"?
.. so unless your transport itself is encrypted, it's game over if the exit op is malicious.
TOR works well, but is neither anonymous or private (meaning TOR traffic is easy to identify at entry, so the ISP will know you're doing it). At exit, the traffic is the same as it entered
Paid proxies are good for casual "don't want the boss seeing it", and many of these are plain HTTPS so they're harder to spot. Teathering your personal phone also works here.
If you're doing something illegal, the safest bet is probably long-range wifi (to somebody else's equipment) + proxy (tor, VPS with stolen CC, etc.) and even then you've got to move around a bit.
of thwarting FBI requests: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/08/exclusive-how-the-fbi-investigates-the-activities-of-anonymous.ars
1. People want to do illegal stuff and not get caught; and/or
2. People are overly paranoid.
Modern life is complicated enough without trying to get into trouble. Why bother? (Answer: people have a raging sense of entitlement. "Whine, I don't want to pay for stuff.")
It's not always about not paying for things. Some people have fetishes for... well, let us just say illegal things. In some places frontal nudity would count. Other places you're talking pictures featuring pyrohomonecropedobestiality.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I completely respect people's privacy, but when they insist on SO MUCH and total privacy, it even makes me wonder what they're up to. Personally, I use the "do not track" feature on firefox, which is probably useless and per the WSJ article on privacy, I added the Ghostery and Better Privacy add-ons to Firefox...they're supposed to further help. I'm not sure what I'd be doing to require a botnet or a truly anonymous proxy. Even when I thought about growing my own pot, I just used my regular browser and emailed friends about it over gmail. Probably not real bright. I'd like to know what you're all up to that requires such anonymity.
How do you verify the anonymity?
Because they haven't been caught yet. Duh.
It's either that, or face up to the fact that nobody's actually looking for you/you're not really all that terribly interesting.
Being paranoid, I cannot resolve the chain-of-trust for anonymous proxies. For all I know Big Brother, with his infinite budget, owns and operates all of these so called proxies anyway. Honeypots if you will. Not only are they well-positioned to see what you are trying to conceal but even collaborate among other owned nodes to see just how far you're willing to take it. So in the worst case you are drawing even more attention upon yourself. You cannot really know. Is it safer than not using a proxy at all? Possibly.
IPpredator.se and anonine.se. Both from the freedom loving land of Sweden. You get SSL and PPTP with 2048kb or 128kb encryption (IPredator supports PPTP only IIRC).
http://prq.se/?p=tunnel&intl=1
PRQ is based in Sweden, and has their own ASN (read: they are their own network, connected to multiple upstream backbones)
They offer all types of services in addition to VPNs: colo, dedicated hosting, and shared hosting.
Their tunnels offer a static IP and no ports blocked (for running servers if that's your thing), so you'll want to provide your own firewalling. They use straight OpenVPN too.
They have a strict privacy policy and appear to follow it.
This is the same ISP that hosts the pirate bay too, which should give you an idea how they handle requests from certain other countries due to the whining of certain media cartels...
I've been a customer for awhile now and quite happy.
I am even planning to colo with them in the next couple of months if all goes well. (Previous data center I've been with has changed company names like three times now in the past six months, and now plans to jack their pricing up)
Alright, you watch "48 Hours" or "Criminal minds" on TV and something you see about terrorism or murder piques your interest so gawd forbid you Google it. Whether it the "Anarchists Cookbook" or "How to hide murder by using succinylcholine", you have just made yourself a potential target of a law enforcement agency, and if gawd forbid again, anything bad happens in your household or neighborhood in the next 24 months, your browsing habits have just planted a smoking gun in your hand.
You don't even have to be the one who does the search. You leave you home PC logged in as you, and your eldest male-child does a search on how to "Terminate a butthead little brother" and you could be buggered.
Its not paranoia if Government Agencies have virtually unlimited resources to smoke your hinny like a Cohiba, at the first blush of illegal activity. Its also not particularly heart warming to discover that Prosecuting Attorneys have almost no interest in getting the right guy (that's the job of the police), just winning the case. The number of poor innocent bastards in prison in this country does not exactly inspire confidence in our legal system. Hell, Texas just executed what the entire planet now knows was almost certainly an innocent man just for political value.
You better believe that I find myself faced with two options in these modern times. They are; Willfully avoid any appearance or opportunity to be caught doing anything that might get me buggered, or Run silent and run deep. Anything else is Russian Roulette.
Pay for a proxy, but use a prepaid visa that is not registered in your name (hard to od but not impossible) then NEVER connect to that proxy from the same starbucks, mcdonalds, etc...
Yes this means you have to use hacker tactics for not getting caught. That is the price for living in a oppressive country.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The condos I used to live in came with free cable and Internet. When I called TWC to ask how to connect to the Internet, they told me to use the cable modem that was installed. When I said there was none, and after two weeks screwing around on the phone, I went into the local office, and asked there. She went through the billing, and found the old modem, and called someone and told them the old numbers, and gave me a new one. When I asked if they were using that modem to get free Internet at a different location, she laughed and said only for about 5 years now, but that will stop soon, as soon as they located which house it was in!
Cheers
http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-seriously-111007/
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
pyrohomonecropedobestiality.
I'm trying to figure out how this would work... fucking a fertilized-egg omelet with a strap-on...?
I live next door to CowboyNeal and use his unprotected wifi.
Tried it. Learned my lesson. The place is choked with CP. I'm talking actual rape here - not merely the kind of naked kiddie pictures that get you sent to a federal prison these days. This is stuff you NEVER see on the internet. The real, horrific, deal. There may be "safe" areas, but I couldn't find any, and I didn't exactly want to hang around to find out.
I want something like Freenet to exist. I believe we have the right to unregulated communication, individuals should just suck it up when they are offended rather then resorting to censorship and control. But Freenet appears to be used by criminals exclusively. I couldn't see any evidence of the kind of crypto-hippy idealism I expected.
I'm not going back anywhere near that cess-pit, and I'm not helping to enable it.
Not really. If you are using the main 'index' sites, they do their best to completely remove CP and other hard core offensive items, and categorize what is left. So it's quite easy to avoid viewing the "sites" you don't agree with.
Sure you might see that it exists, but you wont see the actual content that offends you. Not much different than real life.
---- Booth was a patriot ----