When it comes to anonymous browsing on a desktop PC, getting set up is pretty straightforward. The widely used Tor Network provides a software bundle to install on your machine which allows you to connect via a virtual proxy to their network, which reroutes your traffic between constantly varying nodes. This makes it impossible for you to be traced as you go about your business on the web and it also makes it exceptionally difficult for anyone snooping on network traffic to determine which sites you are visiting.

Mobile anonymity is historically a lot harder to achieve, however if you're an Android user, there's now a nice simple solution.

It was only a matter of time before the P2P community came up with some workable options for anonymizing our activities. Sure, Tor has been able to do it for quite some time, but torrenting is very taxing on the network and transfers can be painfully slow. Recently, however, three new services have appeared that could provide the privacy protection we've been waiting for.

iPredator VPN - We've known this one was coming for a while. The beta launch date got pushed back quite a bit, but that little courtroom skirmish may have slowed things down a little. In a blog post yesterday, the iPredator team announced that the first 3,000 beta invites have been sent out. If you're in the queue, don't start drooling just yet. There are 179,999 others names lined up.

Furk (pictured) - Find a torrent, paste it into Furk, and you're provided a direct download link. Even with the free account, I still averaged about 275k/s, which isn't much slower than what I typically manage on a straight torrent download (thanks to my ISP). Download links are also passed to you with SSL encryption. Just don't use it to download stuff like what's in the capture - it's there for illustration purposes only, of course...

Paid accounts are just under 10 Euros a month or 24/three months.

BitBlinder - Jay posted about this service the other day. The open source project aims to anonymize not only torrent downloads but also your web browsing. How does it work? Think of your Internet traffic as the fruit in a smoothie. Now take all your friends' fruit, chuck it all into a blender, and press 'liquify'. Pour it into a glass, and all you see is smoothie - you can't tell what's your fruit and what belongs to your friends.

As with iPredator you may be waiting a while to get your invite and download link.

There are a few widely-accepted ways to anonymize your browsing or torrent activity, but they all have their drawbacks. TOR is free, but it's poor etiquette to use it for torrents and put a strain on the bandwidth of the nice folks who run TOR servers. Not to mention that it's incredibly, stupefyingly slow. You could get a VPN, but that'll cost you. So, what's the solution to making your torrents free and anonymous, without a huge drag on your transfer speeds? A new open source project called BitBlinder might be the ticket.

BitBlinder is sort of like a private tracker for your anonymous data. A private tracker requires you to upload a certain percentage of data compared to what you download, in order to keep using it. BitBlinder works the same way, requiring each person on the network to anonymize a certain amount of data for others in order to have their own data anonymized for free. To keep your IP address safe, it's passed through several peers before it reaches your target website, but each computer only receives the address of the next peer in the chain, not the address the request is coming from. That way, you don't know who anyone else is, and nobody else knows who you are, which makes it difficult for anyone to track what each person on the network is doing.

BitBlinder isn't just good for torrents, though. It can also be used to hide your browsing activity and get around blocked sites at work or school. BitBlinder comes with an anonymous browser, built on Firefox. It's worth noting that BitBlinder will be a bit slower than browsing without anonymity, but still faster than TOR. It's planned as a cross-platform project, but the Mac version isn't ready quite yet. Registration is required, and there are currently a limited number of slots available.

[via TorrentFreak]

Sometimes you want humans to be able to read some information -- like your email address, for example -- while disguising it from bots that might be automatically collecting it. One way to do it is by displaying the info as an image, instead of as text, like Facebook does with email addresses. HideText gives you a quick way to do that.

HideText has two modes for converting text to images. One is a plain text box, with a choice of only two fonts and a few sizes, but you can enter whatever text you want, and it will get the job done. The other is an email-specific mode that includes your provider's logo as part of the image. It works with most major email services, like Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN. Either way you use it, you end up with your text concealed from Googlebots and things that could potentially be more malicious, like spammers.

There are plenty of ways to utilize the Tor network for a little added browsing privacy - like OperaTor, for example.

If you'd prefer a single anonymity solution that can handle any browser, portable or not, give PortableTor a try.

It's Tor, Vidalia (a GUI frontend for Tor), and Privoxy in a single, portable package. All you need to do is launch PortableTor and edit your browser's proxy settings to point at 127.0.0.1:8118 (the port can be changed).

Even if you're not going to run it from a USB flash drive, this is still an uncomplicated way to anonymize your desktop browsing as well. All three apps use a combined total of about 26mb of memory, the bulk of which is consumed by Vidalia.

The Sourceforge project page also list several Firefox addons that you may want to add for extra browsing security, like NoScript and No-Referrer.

PortableTor is a free download for Windows only.

If you're looking for a little anonymity and security when signing up for download links or invite codes, a disposable email service is a good option. Instead of providing one of your working email addresses, just grab a meaningless temporary one from any of these sites and keep your identity hidden.

These five sites all provide RSS feeds for your address, which is handy. No need to return to the site after registration, just subcribe with your favorite newsreader.

MailCatch - Choose your own address or roll the dice. MailCatch also provides an iGoogle gadget and creates a subdomain (using your address) for quick access to your web inbox. MailCatch also provides temporary forwards, and they've got an FAQ and forums.

MyTrashMail - Offers password protected temporary accounts in addition to the traditional public variety. Note that the Firefox "toolbar" they offer requires you have the Google toolbar installed first. FAQ and about links are prominently displayed.

Google is known for its quick reactions to copyright claims, taking down videos from YouTube and Google video at the request of original copyright holders -- especially big players like TV networks. Recently, Paulo Ordoveza found one of his videos was the victim of one of these claims, and it was taken down from Google Video. The strange thing is that he had recorded his piece -- a time-lapse of some clouds -- back in 2006, way before it was used by Arianna Huffington's 23/6 Media as part of the infamous "Anonymous Message to Scientology" video.

Paulo says the video is coming back up, but this incident still raises a bigger issue about the effectiveness of Google's automated copyright enforcement scheme, which uses "a program that analyzes similarities in audio or video between user videos and a library of reference content provided to us by copyright owners. When a video matches a reference file, that video is automatically disabled." Is a system like this adequate when it comes to independent authors who want to make a video freely available for use, avoiding any kind of aggressive copyright enforcement?

For the record, Paulo never had a problem with 23/6's use of the video, and he's a fan of Anonymous. 23/6 also never asked that the original video come down. You can compare the two videos for yourself: here's the original, and here's the Anonymous Message.

CORRECTION: Paulo writes in to correct a few things here. The original Anonymous Message was not done by 23/6, who actually made a later parody of that video. Also, the correct link for the clouds from 2006 is here. Thanks, Paulo!

[via BoingBoing]

You're all intelligent people, so we probably don't have to tell you that your boss (or at least that guy in the IT department who always gives you the stink eye) not only can, but probably does keep track of your web browsing habits. While you might think that means you should just avoid job hunting sites and web pages you wouldn't want your mom to see you looking at, a recent New York court case upholds your boss's right to fire you for just spending too much time dawdling on sites that have nothing to do with your job.

In this case, an employee of the New York City school district was fired in 2006 for spending too much time checking out travel web sites like Lonely Planet, China Advisor, and Escape Artists. Apparently the guy was warned, and a few days later his boss had taken a look at some 300 web sites he had visited anyway.

The specifics might not apply wherever you are. But the message is pretty clear: find a way to anonymize your web surfing. Or umm, refrain from mixing business and pleasure.

[via Gothamist]

Remember back in July when Ask.com told us the company would "soon" be launching a tool that would let you automatically erase your search history to protect your privacy? Yeah, well soon is finally here, 5 months later.

The world's fourth most popular search engine has officially launched AskEraser, the most aggressive search engine anonymizing tool we're aware of. All you have to do is click the little AskEraser button at the top right side of the screen. A window will pop up asking if you'd like to turn on AskEraser. Once enabled, Ask will no longer keep records of your search terms or place cookies on your computer.

AskEraser works with the service's web, image, video, maps, news, blog, and local search engines. The feature is not retroactive. If Ask.com already has your search history, it won't disappear just because you turn AskEraser on today. But the site will "forget" your data after 18 months.

Now for the funny part. AskEraser will remain on until you click the AskEraser button again to turn it off, no matter how many times you visit the web site. How does the search engine remember your preferences? By placing a cookie on your computer that lasts for two years. Yeah, it's kind of ironic, but the alternative would be requiring you to click the button every time you visit the site.

[via Search Engine Land]

Ask is doing it, Google's doing it, so of course Microsoft doesn't want to be left out of this new privacy sensation that's sweeping the nation. Of course, while Google announced a policy to limit how long it holds onto personally identifiable search data and Ask launched a service to let users delete their private data immediately after a search, Microsoft is calling for a new set of standards. No firm announcements of a new privacy policy here.

But it's not a bad idea. Microsoft and Ask have issued a joint call to develop a global privacy standard for data collection, use, and protection. They're looking to start a dialog with other industry leaders to develop privacy principles that protect users while making use of anonymous data to improve online search and advertising services.

While the press release has an altruistic tone, it also comes at a time when the European Union is pressuring Microsoft to change its privacy policy.

[via The Technology Free Press]

I'm a big fan of services that help me keep spam out of my inbox, and I'm an even bigger fan of services that make it dead easy like 2 Prong. Like many, many other services 2 Prong gives you disposable email addresses that you can use when registering for web sites that require a valid email address and clicking on an emailed validation link. What makes 2 Prong special is that it reduces this to a two-step process that's just as easy than using your own email address. All you do is visit 2prong.com and it will give you an email address (it even copies it to your clipboard for you, which may be an annoyance for some users). Then you fill out the registration form on the site you want access to and, by the power of Grayskull Ajax, the activation email will pop up on the 2 Prong page as soon as it's received. You don't even have to register with 2 Prong or give it your real email address, unlike similar services. On top of that, 2 Prong intends to provide continually changing domain names so that sites can't get wise to their game. Very cool, very easy.

[Via Lifehacker]

A group called Packet Storm has published a paper detailing how the true IP addresses of Tor users can be discovered by the party that controls their traffic's exit node. In case all of that was Greek to you, let's back up: Tor is system that anonymizes internet traffic by routing it through a network of Tor nodes. The aim is to make it impossible to know where traffic originated, and Tor has become popular lately among the privacy minded, especially with the debut of Torpark, a version of Firefox with Tor's anonymizing features built in. Unfortunately, Packet Storm's paper shows that if you control the last node in the chain, it's possible to determine the traffic's originating IP using a combination Flash and cookie attack. The paper's author recommends turning off Flash, ActiveX, Java, and JavaScript if you use Tor and don't want your IP sniffed out. Tor's developers have yet to make an official statement about the exploit.

[Via Netscape]

The Onion Router (TOR) provides anonymous web-surfing and privacy online and is a free download. The German authorities seized several TOR servers in in effort to crack down on a child porn ring. While I despise and oppose anyone involved in the despicable practice of child porn, I do feel for those whose servers were taken, since it seems that they are not to blame for this, but others using the TOR-circuit to hide their identity. It should not be assumed that anyone trying to "hide" their identity is a criminal, which the German authorities haven't done...yet. We'll see how this case plays out, but it looks as if the police will not press charges to server owners and users, unless they find conclusive evidence against a certain person.

[Via Slashdot]

Sweden's Pirate Party, a political party dedicated to intellectual property reform, has announced the launch of Relakks, a service that anonymizes your internet use. There's not much to tell about the service itself--it works via encrypted VPN, which is easy to set up in Windows and OS X, and costs either 5 Euros (about US$6.40) per month or 50 Euros (about $64) per year. The Pirate Party has a statement about the new service on its web site. Currently the service doesn't offer static IPs but it's planned for the future.

[Via Boing Boing]