Web-based Anonymizer Discontinued 159
RobertB-DC writes "With no fanfare, and apparently no outcry from the privacy community, Anonymizer Inc. discontinued its web-based Private Surfing service effective June 20, 2007. No reason was given, either on the Anonymizer web site or on founder Lance Cottrell's privacy blog. Private Surfing customers are now required to download a anonymizing client that handles all TCP traffic, but the program is Windows-only (with Vista support still a work-in-progress). And of course it's closed-source, which means it has few advantages over several other alternatives."
Re:May I be the first... (Score:5, Informative)
Yet another alternative. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:May I be the first... (Score:3, Informative)
sureproxy.com!
[/blatant advertising]
Nothing to get excited about (Score:5, Informative)
We have not stopped providing privacy services. They are all now client based. It is the only way to ensure the security of our users. While the basic service is currently windows only (which is sad since I am a Mac person myself) our TNS product is completely functional from Mac or Linux (or Windows).
We are in no way downsizing our services. There were so few active users of our Private Surfing service, compared to our other services; it made no sense to try to keep a broken product limping along.
As far as security goes, since I see a few posts about that, it is simply a matter of personal choice. We deliver the best performance available. In almost 12 years of service no user has ever had his surfing activities compromised in any way. If we had some kind of law enforcement back door, it would hardly be a secret at this point. Alternatives require you to trust some exit point of unknown trustworthiness that may be actively modifying or monitoring content. There are advantages and disadvantages to all security models. In the real world and for most users, I think Anonymizer provides the best solution. Make up your own mind for your own circumstances.
Re:May I be the first... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:no loss (Score:2, Informative)
Better Alternatives (Score:2, Informative)
We've had better web proxy alternatives with fewer restrictions for years... BlastProxy [blastproxy.com] and ProxyStorm [www.proxystorm] are two web based anonymous proxies that I often use.
Other networks, such as Tor [eff.org] allow users, who are willing to install additional software components, browse anonymously. Although, nothing really beats the convienence of the web proxies!
Re:no loss (Score:2, Informative)
Re:May I be the first... (Score:5, Informative)
The reason Private Surfing was discontinued is because it was designed almost 10 years ago using Apache modules coded in C and some horrible Lex. All of our flagship products since then (Privacy Manager, Anonymizer 2004/2005, Total Privacy Suite and Anonymous Surfing) have been evolutions of that code base. Today our Anonymous Surfing server looks nothing like the old Private Surfing. PS was badly showing its age, and the reality of the situation was that it was becoming increasingly difficult to compile current versions of Apache with that old code. Every Apache security update provided more headaches for us. It didn't really work with any of the newer Web 2.0 AJAX stuff either. Javascript is extremely difficult to anonymize in a web based client and still continue to work. Gmail and Google Maps, just to name two, were completely unusable. This is also the case with any other web based proxy that I have ever seen.
Also, PS had very few subscribers, and an extremely low conversion rate for the free PS to any other product, even though free PS was very overloaded, slow, had rate limits, request count limits, blocking of many major websites (including Slashdot) and our pay services are very cheap. Total Net Shield is less than $9/month, and Anonymous Surfing is $2.50/month (seriously, how much of a tightwad do you have to be to put up with using the free version of PS every day and not pay for AS?). After all, Anonymizer is a business, and from the business side of the company it wasn't cost effective to continue maintaining PS any longer. We didn't kill it, so much as it died a slow lingering death of natural causes.
Contrary to popular belief, our products are not Windows only. Unfortunately, the Anonymous Surfing and Total Net Shield clients we produce are Windows based. However, Total Net Shield uses pure and simple SSH tunneling. That means any SSH compliant client (including the handy dandy (and bundled with your favorite Linux distribution, Mac OS X, Solaris and *BSD), and open source, OpenSSH) can be used with TNS. That also means that for people experienced with setting up SSH tunnels you can configure it to use any TCP port, or OpenSSH's built in SOCKS proxy. Nyms (disposable e-mail addresses) is fully web based. All of our enterprise level products (check our website if you're curious what this is) are platform independent and require no software installation.
We also have some benefits over TOR. Because we combine multi-layer proxies with multi-layer NAT our users can't be tracked by clock skews, there's no exit node snooping vulnerability (yes, technically we can see everything but all of our products are either not logged or logs are purged after 2 days), and we have a lot better speed/reliability than TOR.
One last thing, is that we the Anonymizer administrators are a part of this community. We work for Anonymizer because we're concerned about privacy, free speech, etc. We see and hear what's going on. Most of us read sites like slashdot, digg and del.icio.us every day. We don't always comment and sometimes we can't. But we're anonymously standing here right next to you.
Re:Nothing to get excited about (Score:4, Informative)