Thursday, April 05, 2007

Anonymous Browsing

Normally when you get ready to travel you think of travel documents, bills, transportation, visas, your travel budget .... and sometimes, as when you go to a place like Ethiopia you've to think of how to avoid the thought police.

I had been meaning to look up a list of proxy servers (in case they don't let you search for proxy servers, too! Who knows.) So I finally did. But in the midst of it all I started wondering why the feature wasn't integrated into a browser. The idea of typing some URL back and forth, tinyUrl-ing and translating did not sound too appealing. Computers are about being lazy. So let me be lazy!

My first searches resulted in the ANOBrowser, "the number one browser for secure surfing without providing your true IP address." And humanity has never heard of it? Hmm. So I checked with CNet critics, who said
"...we found many of the built-in proxies simply didn't work, while users can't add new ones. Nor does the program have the ability to check server availability and connection speed. Its tabbed browsing feature does work well, although this is now a standard option even in IE itself."
Concluding,
"Given the rich feature set of other modern browsers, we would have a hard time recommending this buggy alternative to anyone."
Great.

Then this, "anonymous browsing mozilla addon", on Golgul search was golden. Mozilla has an addon called SwitchProxy which,
"... lets you manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations
quickly and easily. You can also use it as an anonymizer to protect your
computer from prying eyes. NOTE: In Firefox you can use the toolbar
element to save space"
And as we all know, Firefox is the best browser there is.

And this was posted by email.

6 comments:

tobian said...

Fine! no fancy editing. :(

Anonymous said...

when travelling abroad, i often find that internet cafes do not have firefox and do not allow you to install firefox. so if i need to do something beyond just email, i plug in my ipod to the internet cafe pc and run my firefox off it.

yes tobian, i outgeek you ... i have loaded my ipod with a portable standalone version of firefox that has my key plugins and bookmarks. before my ipod, i used to load my essential software utilities on a cd and/or usb flash drive that i'd take on my travels. i hardly ever ever need them, but when i do they're an absolute godsend.

must remember to add this SwitchProxy plugin on the portable firefox.

tobian said...

Yonas, not bad, not bad. I had thought about keeping a flash drive and my laptop around, but not a CD of softwares. You're hardcore :) I was also unaware of the portable standalone version for Firefox. Nice.

Another thing I had read about a while back but was hardly interested in then ... Google has a encrypted access to their gmail accounts via https://mail.google.com . If you're the paranoid type ... ;-)

Unknown said...

lol at paranoid type!

Anonymous said...

another one for the list: tor

also checkout the other tools you can use with tor

Anonymous said...

I use VPN Service from http://www.thebestvpn.net when I travel abroad. It helps me to hide ip, surf anonymously and gives peace of mind when I use unknown/public Internet connection. All connections from my computer to the VPN server are encrypted.