IT@TT - Online

Surfing On The Sly

A recent television advertisement for the Intel Datamini home computer showed a cat shopping online for its favourite fish. The message conveyed was clear. Anyone can use the Internet. In terms of simplicity and anonymity and ease of use, there is no other channel of communication that can match it. But if simplicity and ease of use have increased over time, what about anonymity. Are we just statistics on a hit-counter. Or is there more to it?

Every time you use Internet to browse, e-mail, chat or transfer file, you leave behind a electronic trail. This usually consists of your IP address and domain name. These tracks remain on sites you visit.

Did you know that by sending out a simple inquiry to Internet registries, anyone can find out the geographic location of your or your Internet Services Provider (ISP); your domain registration details including name and address of the owner; and the name and address of the computer through which your send and retrieve your mail.

This information is enough to find our your address, phone number and other personal details. So now, Internet snoops can determine not only whether you're a cat, but also what your favorite brand of cat food is. In addition to information leaks from online registration forms or cookies, you're also susceptible to surveillance. You are being tracked by entities ranging from governments to your company's IT department to hackers on a shared cable modem network. All of whom can learn a great deal from the Web sites you visit.

To combat this unwarranted intrusion, there are sites offering services that allow you to cover your surfing tracks and foil privacy-stealing code. The concept is simple. Instead of requesting a Web page directly from a site, you send your request to a proxy that fetches the page and passes it on to you.

SafeWeb is a free online service that defeats intrusion by re-routing your surfing. The target site sees only a request from SafeWeb. It can't tell where the page goes after that. And anyone watching your Net connections sees only communication between you and the SafeWeb server. For good measure, SafeWeb also scrambles your communications using Secure Socket Layer encryption.

To use SafeWeb, you navigate to its home page and enter the URL of the site you want to visit. The first anonymous page takes a while to download because SafeWeb adds a toolbar frame to your browser window that includes the SafeWeb menu buttons and a field for entering URLs.

SafeWeb works with Internet Explorer versions 4 and higher, as well as Netscape Communicator versions 4 and up, but it's not yet compatible with Netscape 6. (SafeWeb representatives say they are waiting for Netscape to work out the bugs in that new browser.)

Governments in countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, and Syria routinely block access to Internet sites they consider inappropriate for their citizens. To bypass the censors, SafeWeb created an application called Triangle Boy. Instead of directly accessing blacklisted Web sites (which often include SafeWeb), users connect to individuals in countries without Internet censorship who agree to run Triangle Boy on their PCs. Triangle Boy passes Web requests to SafeWeb, which returns the pages in encrypted form to the original requesters.

SafeWeb offers one or more advantages over competitors: It's free, it handles complex Web pages with dynamic code such as JavaScript and Flash, and it's a Web-based service that doesn't require software. SafeWeb's closest competitor is Anonymizer, a $50-per-year Web-based service that's been around since 1996.

Anonymizer.com is a pioneer of Internet privacy technologies. Though the site offers a free trial, it is essentially a paid service. You can opt for the " Anonymous Web Surfing" at $14.99 for 3 Months. This includes anonymous surfing, tracking, cookie and URL encryption. You could also try their "Anonymizer Secure Tunneling" package at $29.99 for 3 months. This service creates a virtually impregnable tunnel from your computer to the company servers. It includes all the features of Anonymous Web Surfing, as well as anonymous e-mail and newsgroup access. This package also allows you to publish your web site anonymously. The service is Web-based and requires no software installation or configuration on your computer.

Anonymize.net is the offering of a UK based firm. The site really grabs your attention by displaying what the Internet community knows about you. Click and your computer ID along with all the details of your location and service provider are displayed.

Not only does the site offer the usual anonymous browsing, FTP, email, chat, and other services, it even changes your IP address. This way, no one will be able to gather any information about you from your IP address.

Usually, when using a proxy to anonymise your browsing you leave a trail between your PC and a proxy. This trail can be easily intercepted and decoded with all details of your Internet journey. Moreover most of anonymising proxies cut off cookies, Java, etc. Quite often cookies and Java are necessary to browse web sites.

Anonymize.net is different because they are not a proxy. They use advanced, industry standard VPN technology. Using this technology, you are connected to the company server. This connection is secure and encrypted. Then the server assigns you a new permanent IP address and will route your connection to the Internet. This connection is bi-directional. It means that your PC (any server running on it) could be reached from the Internet under your new IP address.

Interestingly, the site is officially blocked from viewing in some Arab countries.

Do email us and let us know if these sites helped secure your Web journeys.

Yagna Balaji
[email protected]

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