Free2Surf Proxy Blog

Comcast is currently experimenting with new camera technologies that will be able to recognize who is in your living room. Apparently this information would be used for things such as recommendations (based on your viewing history) and blocking inappropriate content when it ‘detects’ that children are in the room… Oh yeah, and it’ll serve up some totally sweet advertisements, catered specifically to you. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? No? You can read more here.

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HushMail, is an email service that was known above all else for it’s privacy. They market themselves by claiming “not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer.” This service has been around for a long time, and as far as I know, it was respected and trusted for providing private email services. Not anymore. According to this article, Hushmail has cooperated with government agencies by granting them access to over 12 CDs worth of e-mails from three Hushmail accounts. Sounds pretty secure to me… What do you think?

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There hasn’t been a whole lot going on in the ‘proxy world’ as of late. I noticed that on September 11th, a new version of the Glype Proxy script was released. Version 0.4 beta has some new features, including a “massively revamped javascript parser”, as well as a new plugin feature which will allow for compatibility with sites such as YouTube, and more. You can read the details of the release here, or you can grab a copy of the script here. This script seems to be increasing in popularity, especially as word spreads that some schools have blocked PHProxy proxified pages altogether. More to come on this as more information is available.

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No, not free porn for Australian families… It’s the other way around.

Australian internet users: Guess what? You don’t have to make decisions regarding what websites you’re going to view anymore - The government will do it for you! John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, will be spending $189 million in his quest to clean up the web. In doing so, he’ll be blocking access to “pornography, violence, and sexual predators” as well as “terror sites”. You can read more about John Howard’s internet porn crusade here. I would tend to think that Australian web surfers would still be able to access whatever they wanted by using web-based proxy sites. This is unfortunate, but we’ll have to wait and see how it pans out.

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When it comes to freely available web-based proxy scripts, Glype Proxy may not be the most well known. But it’s an “up and comer” so to speak, and definitely worth keeping an eye on. Glype Proxy 0.3b was released on August 6th, and it comes with some new features - namely, server side caching. What this means is that files that are commonly requested by users of your proxy site will be saved on the server. The script also comes with am improved setup wizard, and other notable features include IP banning, access controls, and a “curse word” filter. The script can be downloaded here. Please remember that this is still in beta, so there may be some bugs, in which case you should report to the script’s support forum. Feel free to post your Glype proxies in the comments of this post!

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If you’re one of those people that is paranoid about who has access to your information, you may already be familiar with CIPAV (The Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier). If not, it’s basically spyware that was developed by the FBI. It captures sensitive information such as a user’s IP address, MAC address, open ports, running programs, operating system, last visited URL, and more.

You may wonder how the FBI could get away with developing and deploying such a program. It was ruled that the information gathered by CIPAV is “the legal equivalent of dialed phone numbers”, and therefore the government can obtain this information without needing to show probable cause or obtain a wiretap warrant. Shocking, isn’t it?

While most of us may not have a whole lot to hide from the FBI, we all deserve privacy. This article will explain to you how to “detect and deter” CIPAV and other similiar programs. If the FBI can develop and deploy garbage like this without us knowing, we should be able to protect ourselves from it.

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Protect your privacy with… A foot pedal?

The StealthSwitch “hides in the shadows and just a light tap of your toes will let it work its magic. Based on your preferences, it can hide the current window, hide all windows, or hide all windows except for specified windows. Not just minimize, mind you, but totally erase from your screen. The Stealth Switch can also mute the sound, hide the taskbar, hide the desktop icons, and password protect the restore function.” Another foot tap, and you’re back to whatever you were doing before.

If nothing else, it’s an interesting and unique approach to privacy. But I wouldn’t risk bringing something like this to the workplace… If you’re interested, you can get one here!

If you’re legitimately interested in privacy while surfing at work, a better bet would probably be using an anonymous surfing site, or maybe checking out some of these Firefox extensions.

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AT&T has recently announced that it will develop technology that will attempt to keep pirated matrial off of it’s network… From the looks of this article, though, that will entail deep packet inspection and monitoring.

Users who are not comfortable with this type of surveillance can just get a new ISP, right? Not necessarily:

“In addition to running a massive network of its own, AT&T runs a good chunk of the backbone infrastructure in the US. It’s a rare bit of traffic that can make it to its destination without passing on to an AT&T-owned network. If the company deploys its anti-piracy technology to all data passing through its networks, AT&T’s “solution” could affect most US Internet users.”

Scary stuff.

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If you are even the least bit familiar with web-based proxy sites, you know that there is no shortage of them. A simple Google search will reveal thousands of them. If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many of them, the answer is simple: money. People create these sites and put ads on them in order to make a profit.

The ad program that is most commonly used on proxy sites is Google’s AdSense. For those of you out there that use AdSense on your site(s), this article may be of interest to you. It summarizes an experiment where less adsense ads on a site resulted in more money in the long run. This happens because if less ads are shown, higher bidding advertisements will appear in those ad spots. The opposite of this is also true, where if you show more ads, lower bidding ads will appear on your page, resulting in a lower CPC - It’s worth a shot, right?

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The Pirate Bay, arguably one of the most popular torrent sites on the web, has launched a new image hosting service: bayimg. There are tons of image hosting services out there, so what makes this one so special? Well, for one, it’s uncensored. In a time where censorship seems to be rampant, that’s a pretty important feature. They also have a 100MB file size limit, which is more than anyone should ever need for one image. In addition, they allow .rar and .zip archives. Read more about The Pirate Bay’s bayimg project here, or check the site out for yourself!

And yeah, the censorship is worse than you think.

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