Friday, January 21, 2005

JAP -- Anonymous Surfing on any platform

This has probably already made the press sometime in the past, but I myself just discovered it and it's neat.

Many websites collect lots of data regarding their visitors, most notably your IP address. This might sound trivial, but many people would like to remain anonymous or at least keep tight control over who has their personal information. I for one sometimes get creepy feelings when reading the 'Legal Terms' and 'Privacy Policy' on certain websites that want my personal data.

Now there is JAP, a cross-platform Java application that acts as a local proxy server for your browser. It redirects your browser traffic through a list of intermediate servers, so-called mixes. The idea is that you hide between the masses, no logs are kept and the path you take through the mixes (called a mix-cascade) is untraceable. The only thing you'll notice is a decrease in web-speed, so don't go downloading ISO images through JAP...

Setup is very simple: run it, point your browser's proxy settings at 127.0.0.1:4001 and off you go.
Just try it at http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html.

(this post made using JAP)

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