Changes at Anonymizer
It has been a while since the last major change to the product suite at Anonymizer. We have been thinking long and hard about how best to continue to improve the services we offer. Anyone who has been an Anonymizer customer or has ever read my blog knows of my staunch commitment to listening to our users and providing the highest quality offerings available.
Some of our products provide important capabilities, but are not unique or distinctive to Anonymizer. Lately our development team has been spread thin updating and improving a wide range of software services. I want to make sure we are focusing on our core Anonymizer tools and making them the best they can be. As part of this continuing effort, I wanted to let you know that we’ve decided to discontinue offering our Dial-Up, Digital Shredder Lite and Anti-Spyware features, effective September 15, 2008. Doing so will ensure that we can remain focused on our Anonymous Surfing, Total Net Shield, and Nyms services.
You can find the official word on this at our Anonymizer Support Center
https://www.anonymizer.com/support_center/. Subscribers can also call our dedicated customer support team at 888-270-0141 between the hours of 7:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. PST Monday-Friday.
Please leave your suggestions for how we can improve our core products either here, or better yet as feedback to our customer support center. The Internet makes for a rapidly changing landscape. Only with your suggestions can we continue to shape Anonymizer to meet your needs.
- Lance Cottrell
September 17th, 2008 at 2:03 am
This is a good decision!
October 20th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
I’ve been looking at Anonymizer for some time and have a couple comments/suggestions…
Hopefully you are working on a version that is compatible with Vista 32bit & Firefox 3.
When Anonymizer is combined with the NoScript plugin and a solid firewall (such as Outpost, Comodo, ZA, etc), Firefox becomes an extremely secure way of surfing the Internet. It’s extremly difficult for anyone to exactly locate you, track you, and, ultimately, hack your system.
Also, it would be a great addition to have Anonymizer block private header information, such as the Browser, OS, versions, etc, as an optional function. Tenebril’s Ghost Surf does this. Unfortunately, Tenebril produces very poor quality software. I prefer quality over features, but it would be best to have both worlds. ZA Suite can be manually configured, as long as one knows what they’re doing.
Thanks for this great product! Keep up the great work!
November 13th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Thanks for the great suggestions. I really appreciate this kind of feedback as we work on our next major version.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Hi. I’m currently evaluating anonymous surfing services, and I have a question about Anonymizer. I hope this is an okay place to ask; I didn’t readily find another point of contact for those who have not yet purchased a subscription.
Included in your privacy policy (http://www.anonymizer.com/company/legal/privacy_policy.html) is the following: “…Anonymizer keeps no record of Internet Protocol addresses visited ….”
It’s clear from that verbiage that no record of resolved DNS “friendly names” to IP addresses is maintained. But URLs are not mentioned. Are the URLs visited logged or otherwise kept?
Thank you. Would be helpful information.
|/|/J
axisiiad(at)yahoo.com
January 15th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Lance - regarding the above post: have there been any changes with Abraxis and the mining of our data? (I’m one of your first customers and a current TNS customer).
Also, it would be great if TNS could tunnel Yahoo Voice (part of Yahoo messenger).
In addition, if using a client like Outlook, if we could use our normal email account (address) vice the Anonymizer email address, that would be super.
Thanks!
January 20th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
In answer to the 2 posts above,
No, we do not log the URLs of the sites visited. We keep no information at all connecting users to their web activities.
Our acquisition by Abraxas has not changed our log (or non-logging) policies at all, nor have they asked us to do any data mining. I have been very pleased that they have taken no actions at all with respect to our consumer services.
In terms of the tunneling, VoIP is a problem because of latency and bandwidth effects. We are looking at how we would need to change the business model to support that.
What is the thinking around the Outlook tunneling. It does not seem that it would provide any privacy, just a secure connection for the connection from the computer to Anonymizer. What is your thinking here?
February 13th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Lance - regarding the Outlook issue above, my thinking is that TNS would provide encryption or secure connection even with ones standard email address, and thus preclude the need for a Digital ID Certificate for encrypting Outlook outside an Enterprise/Exchange (i.e. home/personal) environment.
February 15th, 2009 at 8:44 am
Ok, so you are looking at it to secure the local connection when accessing your overt email account?
February 21st, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Yes, although I’m not really sure what level of security that provides.
February 27th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Lance,
Great Job providing quality software. suffice to say I’m on auto-renewal!
My suggestions:
_I am not familiar with technical stuff, but if the problem of paypal is solvable, I really would like to see that happen since need to log-in from different countries on travel(had several bans).
_Apparently some sites (within US and outside) require some header data etc., which makes visiting them through TNS impossible. Perhaps this is the same thing with paypal? (e.g. try http://www.taxispyvideo.com 18+ )
Thanks for the best product in the market. Keep up the great work.
Houman
Iran, Tehran
_
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Thanks for the suggestion Houman. I will pass this site along to our engineers to take a look at.
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Jean, securing the local connection provides good protection against insecure local networks like hotels, and open WiFi. If your email provider supports SSL or TLS you are already in fairly good shape. Generally this is not one of the biggest risk areas for fraud or attacks but your personal situation might not be typical.
March 13th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Lance,
Will the digital shredder just stop working when it “expires”? If not, why? Couldn’t it just be “left alone”?
March 20th, 2009 at 6:04 am
The problem with leaving the shredder alone is that the programs it cleans up after keep changing. Very shortly it would be simply giving you a false sense of security. My experience is that bad security tools are worse than no security tools at all because one tends to let down one’s guard.
There are numerous free and commercial file shredders and cache cleaners. Perhaps some of you could share your favorites (as a Mac users I can’t speak to the relative values of various windows programs).
April 18th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
It would be nice if you could have the Anonymizer installed, but turned off, and an icon in the web browser to enable it for a certain site, tab or window.
Does that make since?
Also, would be nice for Microsoft Home Server compatibility.
April 28th, 2009 at 4:59 am
Great suggestion, thanks. We are in the process of developing a major new version of the Anonymizer client. This is exactly the kind of feedback that will help us make something that really works well for our customers.
Some time soon we should have a forum up and running specifically to discuss the design and features of our new product.
June 5th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Since I updated to Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bits, and using the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, I don’t seem to be able to use the anonymizer at all. What seems to be the problem? Before that, I was using Windows XP Pro with no problem whatsoever!
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:09 am
We are working to resolve that issue now. The problem is that the way Windows handles various protocols, and the way one needs to interface with the various browsers, changes with each release. It is a race to keep up. We are working on a major new release that will allow us to get off that treadmill and provide a service that will not need so much maintenance. That in turn will allow us to focus on some cool other projects to enhance Anonymizer.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Hello
not sure if I’m posting this to the correct place
I’m trialling anonymizer. I use firefox and its noscript add-on, and online armour. Many times now when I look for a site (anonymizer and nosript as example search) noscript blocks access. How do I stop this happening. I’m about to uninstall anonymizer, it is becoming so annoying
thanks
July 9th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
That is interesting, could you give an example of the specific error message? Your fastest response will be if you email support@anonymizer.com
July 10th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Playing devil’s advocate on the post regrading no logs/activity being recorded, how does the following in the ToU play out:
“we disclose personal information only when we have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable terms of use or other contract rights, including investigation of potential violations thereof…
I’ve read conflicting thought on various blogs, security forums and web pages regarding this. Doesn’t this statement render the “…Anonymizer keeps no record of Internet Protocol addresses visited ….” invalid?
I’d like your input on that.
July 11th, 2009 at 6:40 am
Great question. It is a subtle point. We can’t help but have certain personal information as part of the subscription process. We have all the billing and credit card information required to process your payments and renewals. What we don’t have is any way to tie that back to your web surfing activities, about which we don’t have records.
I am specific about web surfing because our TNS email and Nyms are a slightly different case. Because we need to receive the email and deliver it to your account, we can’t avoid knowing which email account belongs to which user.
August 6th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
As a long-time user of Anonymizer (most recently, Anonymous Surfing), I’m disappointed that 1) AS has not yet been updated to work with Firefox 3.x and 2) you suggest uninstalling Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
The security enhancements for these products have caused huge problems for the basic architecture of the existing products. Rather than trying to play catch-up and probably producing a solution that would still be problematic, we have decided to go with a wholesale re-design of the Anonymizer architecture. You should expect to see this announced in the fall. I hope you will be patient and stick with us until we can get the new service in place. It will be a big improvement over the existing system in many different ways.
August 18th, 2009 at 1:22 am
I have the anonymizer and I have evaluated total net shield.
The problem with both services (especially anonymizer) is speed. To go from a super fast connection to a 2 mbit (total net) is just not good enough. You should go with the flow — more bandwidth.
Another thing that bothers me is that TOTAL net shield is not TOTAL. If you use a bit torrent client, it does not hide anything.
Where is the TOTAL NET SHIELD — for real. That is what I need not a 50 % netshield.
August 18th, 2009 at 7:47 am
With multiple gigabits of bandwidth at Anonymizer, that is not the problem. The current issue is the havoc that some of the OS and browser updates have wreaked on our solutions. You will see a completely new solution coming this fall which should be exactly what you are looking for.
September 1st, 2009 at 5:45 pm
r.e. Comment #24: I’m certainly not jumping ship, yet. Y’all have always provided a solid product and I can only assume the future won’t change that!
September 4th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Good to hear that there are some upcoming improvements to allow use of Firefox and other browsers. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been frustrated with the inability to use the most current browser along with the excellent protection given by Anonymizer. For a long time, I kept Firefox 2.xx as my primary browswer because of this fact.
September 18th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Any ETA for the Firefox 3.x compatible version?
September 19th, 2009 at 7:42 am
I use Firefox v3.0.14, turn on Anonymizer, and http://www.ipchicken.com indicates the anonymized IP address.
What exactly in Anonymizer is not compatible with FireFox v3?
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:50 am
Currently Firefox 3.0.14 is only compatible for use with Anonymous Surfing on very specific systems. Using Windows default settings, computers with Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems that do not support Hardware-based DEP are able to use Anonymous Surfing with Firefox 3.0.14. As this scenario describes such a small percentage of our customers and the incompatibility, when present, causes the Firefox browser to crash we have found that it is better to inform customers of the incompatibility that occurs in the vast majority of our customer base.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:58 am
Again, any ETA for the Firefox 3.x compatible version?
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Should be November for a update that will address all outstanding issues.
December 18th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
November?
December 18th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Too bad you’re censoring questions and comments. AS was a good product, but with too many questions (e.g., compatibility with FF 3.x) unanswered, you’ve just lost another customer.
December 19th, 2009 at 8:02 am
We fell behind schedule in the development of the new releases. They are now in testing and I will be posting about them very soon.
December 19th, 2009 at 8:07 am
We don’t censor comments. Because of the amount of comment spam we do moderate posts so it may take a while for a post to appear. We will be releasing a completely re-architected version of our tools in the next couple of weeks. It will have full support for all browsers and much more. I hope you will give it a try when you get the email or see me post about it here.
December 19th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Over the past month or so, I’ve posted a number of questions/comments, which never appeared, hence my 12/19 8:45pm comment. I’m a firm believer in good communication, which means a post that you’ve fallen behind provides more information than no post, at all.
December 19th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Hurm….. sorry to hear that. I don’t recall seeing other posts, but possibly they were accidentally marked as spam by the automated system. My new-years resolution is to be more active on this blog. Events have a way of throwing me off my intended path unfortunately.