2-privacy.com

There are lots of reasons folks have for wanting to surf anonymously, ranging from simple paranoia to possibly being murdered by a malevolent foreign government. Whatever the reasons, commercial services that offer anonymity are doing real well. However one of the best services JAP [1], is totally free. In fact JAP is perhaps a little too good. That’s why the German Police insisted in 2004 that a backdoor be put into the product to allow interception of child pornographers. This was done but subsequently removed as a result of court action by JAP.

An alternative to JAP is a system called Tor [2]. It not only allows anonymous browsing but anonymous P2P, email, IM, and IRC chat as well. Given the US Navy origin of Tor, the suspicion arises that this system may indeed have a permanent backdoor. However the source code is now publicly available so that suspicion can perhaps be set aside. More worrying was a raid by German police in September 2006 involving the seizing of some Tor servers in that country. Again, pedophiles were the supposed target but who really knows.

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TorPark is a special portable version of Firefox that incorporates the free Tor anonymizing service that allows you to surf anonymously by relaying your connection through a chain of special Tor servers. It created quite a sensation when it was released last year as it provided users with an easy way to surf anonymously without going through the hassle of configuring complex network settings. It could also be run from a USB flash drive which made it ideal for use on public terminals. A new version has just been released based on Firefox V2.0.0.2 rather than V1.5 used in the original. (more…)

We just had “interesting” experience with the site www.hosts-file.net. They publish the hosts file with the list of more than 45k sites. This list can be merged with users hosts file to prevent them from visiting these sites.
Here are some examples of what they block:

www.adaware.com - lavasoft page which leads to one of the most popular free spyware remover AdAware.
www.authorize.net - one of the biggest credit card processing centers
www.looksmart.com - well known Search engine for commercial results
www.kanoodle.com - another search engine for paid results.
www.linkshare.com - an affiliate network
www.registryline.com - known rentals site
www.noblepoker.com - well know online poker room
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