Anonymizer--Any feedback good or bad?

[anoj]

http://www.anonymizer.com/

Does anybody have any experience/feedback as to whether this is a legit program relative to user's privacy/spyware/effectiveness/stability/functionality, etc?
The SSH tunneling feature sounds good along with the theoretical surfing privacy.

[superman]

It is a good program to use for privacy. It will effectively hide your activities from your ISP, and other possible spying activity, unless of course you have a keylogger installed on your computer. But, one thing I don't really like about it is they know who you are, either by your credit card or just because they know your true ip address and they keep logs (for a limited time) of all user activities that COULD be passed on to a third party (big brother is watching).

[LockBox]

{QUOTE-> It is a good program to use for privacy. It will effectively hide your activities from your ISP, and other possible spying activity, unless of course you have a keylogger installed on your computer. But, one thing I don't really like about it is they know who you are, either by your credit card or just because they know your true ip address and they keep logs (for a limited time) of all user activities that COULD be passed on to a third party (big brother is watching). <-QUOTE}
It will only truly hide you from your ISP if you buy their tunneling service. Otherwise it just hides your IP address. Other options are www.metropipe.net - www.findnot.com - www.privacy.li - and if you are a power user and can configure things yourself, COTSE is a great service. www.cotse.net . If you go with one of these services a good idea would be to use TOR to get to them. You sign in from your computer to TOR and its anonymous system and then tunnel to the service. Then, even the service doesn't know who you are. Use money order to pay, or a prepaid VISA gift card.
Gerard

[superman]

Gerard,

I don't believe your correct in your assessment of the basic Anonymizer service. It does encrypt the data between your computer and the Anonymizer site (and vice versa), so therefore your ISP cannot read the data unless they can crack 128 bit encryption- good luck to them with that ;) .

[LockBox]

I didn't realize that Anonymizer had increased the basic service to a SSL connection. In that case, yes, you would be hidden from the ISP. However, it would be much slower than a pure VPN or tunneling method. Thanks for the info superman.

[LockBox]

Well, I just looked at the basic Anonymizer and now I think it's just an SSL connection between your computer and the sites you visit. I don't believe it is a SSL connection through Anonymizer's servers. For that, you would need their 'Total Net Shield'. Basic Anonymizer 2004 appears to be SSL only with the sites you visit, prevents your ISP from seeing what you do while at that site, but they can see everywhere you go. In other words, they see your connection with whatever.com, but cannot see any activity beyond that until you surf to another site.

[Paranoid2000]

{QUOTE-> Well, I just looked at the basic Anonymizer and now I think it's just an SSL connection between your computer and the sites you visit. I don't believe it is a SSL connection through Anonymizer's servers. <-QUOTE}This would not work though with websites only offering HTTP connections - and even for those that did allow HTTPS this would trigger a browser certificate warning since Anonymizer's SSL certificate would not match that of the requested destination website. It seems more likely therefore that the SSL session is with Anonymizer's server which then sends data in the clear to the destination website. This certainly is an improvement to their basic service, though the likes of Tor and JAP do still offer advantages due to having multiple servers.