SolveYourProblem
eLearning Series
Internet Security
Should
You Use An Internet Anonymizer?
Anonymizers
are nifty pieces of software that
let an Internet surfer visit web sites without having information
gathered on them, such as which sites they visited. Anonymizers
disable pop ups and cookies, and serve to conceal the IP address
of the surfer. Most of them use a proxy server to process each
HTTP request. When the user clicks a link or types a URL into
a browser, the anonymizer retrieves and displays the information
from its own server. The requesting server will receive information
from the service and not the surfer, who remains anonymous.
Reasons for using anonymizers are to protect
the user’s privacy and to bypass the blocking applications that would prevent
access to various web sites or parts of web sites that the
user wishes to visit. The U.S. Naval Research Labs and Lucent’s
Bell Labs have pioneered the anonymous web surfing, and several
commercial services are available.
Some of the services available pass the requests made through
a series of encrypting loops, others use personal encryption
software, and some run without encryption of any kind, but
a variety are available depending on a web surfer’s needs. The
popularity of anonymous web surfing services and software are similar to the way caller ID developed with telephone systems,
followed immediately by call blockers that made anonymous telephone
calls popular. Many of the anonymous sites work even better
than caller ID and call blocker because they allow an individual
to take on a totally different identity. The persona chosen
is interfaced with and covers over the persona of the web surfer,
providing total information anonymity. The web site you visit
will never know you were there.
One of the popular uses for this type of thing is for competing
businesses to check up on each other without the competition
knowing they were there. Another use would be to check on web
sites that are political in nature. Some political web sites
can be extreme in their views. Many people are interested in
what they have to say, but don’t want to take the chance of
getting on someone’s mailing list and receiving Spam, especially
from someone they may think is a nut. Using an anonymizer gives
them that option.
The first anonymizer on the Internet was called Anonymizer.com,
and it was developed in 1997 by Lance Cottrell while engaged
in Ph.D. studies in astrophysics at the University of California,
San Diego. He was a well known privacy advocate who also developed
a widely used remailer called Mixmaster. Cottrell also established
the Kosovo Privacy Project to let people use anonymizer services
to report from the war zone in Kosovo in the late 1990’s without
fear of retaliation. Many other anonymizers have followed him,
many of them very popular, and many free.
A
web surfer can visit every site anonymously by making an
anonymizer the computer’s home page, and visiting all web sites
from there. Bookmarks and favorites can be anonymized by prefixing
the URL’s with the anonymizer site’s address. If you visit
a web page through your anonymizer and bookmark it then it
will be anonymized when you visit it in the future. A person
can also visit web sites that require passwords without revealing
any other information.
While anonymizers protect your identity during normal web
surfing, they do have a few limitations. Anonymizers cannot
usually process secure protocols, such as https: Also plug-ins
may get around them. If you access a site that invokes a plug-in
it may or may not establish direct connections with your computer
that are, or are not anonymized. Also, while all anonymizer
sites claim that they don’t keep logs of your surfing, some
sites keep a log of all addresses accessed. However, they don’t
keep a log of your connection with the site. Also Java is not
totally compatible with anonymizer applications. Active X is
able to access your computer after you initially sign up for
it, so anonymizers will not necessarily stop Active X applications.
However, for most standard uses anonymizers will provide the
privacy protection that the average web surfer needs and desires,
and will work well for most people. # # # # #
SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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