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.

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]

Hulu is a service that provides access to advertising-supported videos from TV and movie studios. Officially, it's only available to viewers in the United States, because Hulu only has the rights to distribute those videos in the US, and only has the advertising partnerships in place to make money from US views.

But the internet being what it is, a relatively small number of people have been using tricks to get around the geolocation restrictions, using proxy tools like Hotspot Shield for ages. This week, Hulu tightened its grip and started blocking access to anyone using anonymous proxy tools. In other words, Hotspot Shield ain't going to let you watch Hulu from the UK anymore.

I certainly hope this means Hulu plans to roll out international service soon, because the alternative for many users will be to turn to downloading movies and TV shows from BitTorrent or other services.

[via NewTeeVee]

If you frequently find yourself browsing on a low-bandwidth connection, you can potentially speed up your browsing experience by using the compressing proxy server at Toonel.net. The concept is simple: install their application on your computer (versions are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun Solaris, and even Windows Mobile and Symbian), then set your proxy settings to point to your localhost IP address on port 8080 (127.0.0.1:8080). Once you do, all of your web traffic is routed through Toonel.net's server, which compresses it before it gets to you.

The compression used is lossless, which is required to ensure the pages show up as expected, though there are image-specific options that allow you to change the compression that is applied to JPEG and GIF images. This is likely only worthwhile on a very slow network, since it takes the server a bit of time to recompress images before your browser can download them, but could be handy on a struggling network.

I wouldn't recommend running Toonel.net full-time, or even at all if you're always on a broadband connection, but if you find yourself struggling with a lack of bandwidth, this is a great trick to have in your back pocket.

[via TechRadar]

So you've tested Google Chrome and decided that you like it. You say you'd switch, but there's no adblocker? Fortunately for you, there are several free, tiny filtering proxy applications available that can do the job.

The best part is, they'll help block ads in any browser - including Chrome.

Before I get into a list, it's important to know that several of these apps haven't been updated in ages. However, content filtering is a pretty straightforward operation, so even the old ones work just fine - and you can always tweak the blocking rules yourself.

CyberGuard WebWasher Classic is another great option. It's small, fast, and very customizable. It's got additional capabilities to block popups, scripts, referrers, cookies, and prefixes. New filters are incredibly easy to set up, and there's no noticeable lag in load times. Of the apps I tested, WebWasher was my favorite.

Proxomitron has a god awful GUI, but it works well enough that its appearance can be overlooked (you can create your own bitmaps if you really hate it). It offers extremely flexible bloxing rules, and the default set is extrmely effective. Blocked ads are replaced with [red text in brackets], and pages load times weren't adversely affected.

Just a week after Digsby widened its private beta by giving away 5,000 invites to Download Squad readers, the development team has already issued 4 new builds of the chat, email, and social networking client. Probably the most significant new feature is support for proxy settings to help users get around corporate firewalls.

There are a ton of other bug fixes and minor new features as well, including:

• A fix for "connection lost" issue when logging in
• A fix for MSN Messenger IMs not being sent
• A fix for Digsby getting stuck while loading skins during the login
• A fix for freezes while logging into Yahoo! Messenger
• Ctrl + Backapsace now deletes one word at a time in the input box

If you already have a Digsby account, you can either download the latest client from the Digsby home page or just fire up Digsby on your PC if it's already installed. The client will download all the updates automatically. While the lack of proxy support was one of the main complaints we heard from users last week, there's one other issue we'd love to see Digsby work on: The program's large memory footprint. Digsby can easily use 70MB or more at launch. Considering how many functions the service has, that might not seem like a lot, but similar applications like Pidgin use just a small fraction of the RAM that Digsby does.

The box is open.

That's the tagline that greets you when you visit globalPandora, which touts itself as a way that people that are not located in the United States can access the free music streaming service Pandora without having to futz with a web proxy service. Though they don't explain how this magical trick is accomplished, it's likely that Global Pandora is simply acting as an invisible proxy and delivering up the Pandora interface.

First things first: It works, at least from here in Canada. We haven't been able to verify from other non-U.S. locations, but since Pandora is most definitely blocked here in the Great White North, we feel pretty comfortable that it will work elsewhere.

Now, enjoy it while it lasts, because it's extremely unlikely that globalPandora will be allowed to exist for much longer. On the other hand, now that it's been done once, it's pretty likely that once it is shut down, globalPandora clones will pop up to replace it. Music - and all data, really - that is free somewhere will eventually be free everywhere.

[via gHacks]

Psiphon is a new open source project from the University of Toronto that aims to give people unfettered access to censored web sites, particularly those blocked by oppressive governments. Basically it works by allowing people with uncensored internet access to act as proxies for those without. Unlike with Tor, the "psiphonite" (i.e. the person in the censored country--memo to U of T: this awful terminology is likely to scare away novices) doesn't need to install any software--they just connect to the psiphonode's unique address. Psiphon isn't based on a central server, and psiphonodes' addresses are distributed organically, i.e. by word of mouth. This means Psiphon isn't anonymous like Tor, but it is secure and encrypted. Currently the psiphonode server software is available for Windows and Linux, with Mac support promised soon. For more information check out the Psiphon FAQ.

[Thanks, Ramesh!]

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]

This one definitely falls into the at-your-own-risk category: A beta version of Windows Live Messenger 8, nee MSN Messenger, has been available for download from Microsoft.com for some time now, but without an invitation to the private beta test it has been impossible to use, until now. The trick is to use a recently-released "proxy patch" to fool the MSN network into thinking you're running version 7.5, thus allowing you to log on without being part of the private beta. Pretty clever, but dont' blame me if it messes up your system. Once again, try it at your own risk.