Ping: Paranoid 2000 { Safe Passage }

You seem to know your stuff with these kinds of things. Are you familiar with software called SAFE PASSAGE? It is a personalized VPN client that {somehow} will allow you to be about as anonymous as they come. As I understand it all you need is this Safe Passage and an SSH account. You tunnel to your ssh account and {somehow} surf from there and all looks as if it's coming from there and not your own IP. Am I right in seeing this as running your own personal Anonymous Browsing service? You would need to purchase web hosting for $49 a year or so, this software for $30 and with that, is it better than paying for a VPN or SSH anonymous browsing service? Wouldn't the web host know where you are connecting from? Is this really different from connecting to the net thru Cotse or something via Putty? I'm just not sure how this works, but I just read something that seems to say it is somehow different. Can you help?
http://vast-range.com/
http://www.vastrange.com/faq.php3

Thanks in advance. I have enjoyed reading your enlightening posts.

 

I've not previously heard of Safe Passage but any such software (using an encrypted connection to a proxy server) should serve to hide your real IP address from websites you visit and obsure your online activities from your ISP (they would see encrypted traffic going to the proxy server only). To this extent it is pretty much identical to commercial anonymizing services like Cotse, Anonymizer, etc.

The weakness in this setup is the server you connect to - if it keeps logs then you are at the mercy of the administrator if someone tries to track you down. A stronger system therefore is where the administrator does not know where you came from and this can only be provided by "mixes" (where your traffic goes through multiple servers) - with such a mix every server admin has to co-operate to trace a user.

In this respect, JAP would score better since it offers the option of a mix (and the client and server code is open-source so any compromises can be detected). Tor is better still since it has more servers in several countries (and you normally go through 3 servers rather than JAP's 2). However there are plenty of other threads here covering these options in more detail.

 

Unless you could connect to their server via something like JAP then their logs would become worthless as far as you are concerned because you would never actually connect.

 

If you were using JAP, what would be the point in connecting to a commercial anonymizing service? Network performance would not benefit (since it would be limited by the slowest link - in this case most likely the heavily loaded JAP servers) and anonymity would not benefit since the commercial service would need to be able to identify you (to ensure only authorised users were given access), most likely via a username/password.

 

You are right,

I guess there is no real way to get 100% anonymity using a commercial service is there?