Has anyone been using an anonymizing service they heartily recommend that is reliable, fast, not ad-supported, not intrusive, and not likely to disappear in the next 6 months? I toyed with one or two, and was less than thrilled. My motivation is getting tired of web companies that consider surfing habits of private citizens as something they have the right to track, store, and perform demographics on to serve up tailored advertising and other usages upon. Our surfing should be free of doubleclick and the many thousands of other tracking sites that load up your PC with cookies and other annoying habit checkers. If I ran things, leaders of these kinds of companies would be put into a giant cookie dough machine...
"I toyed with one or two, and was less than thrilled." why were you not thrilled and what where their names? Thanks.
Most of those services disable DEP and other protection of IE and are more dangerous than the good they do. Use a "reliable" proxy server. That is all they are anyway.
The safest thing is probably driving to a nearby appartment complex and use an unsecured wifi connection.... There are always a few around and they are also fast. Proxy servers slow you down...
The TOR project is anonymous, but sadly not fast. It also needs additional resources, please donate bandwidth and/or money! This is what political opposition in places like China or Venezuela use. http://www.torproject.org/
You are not very clear of what your are afraid of or what you want to do. Which services have you used and why you did not like them? First of all, you must understand how the internet works. Everything that comes to your computer comes through your ISP. This you must understand. Funny, not too many understand it. If you worry about websites tracking your surfing habbits, just do not leave any personal information when you visit them and clear cookies using a free program like ccleaner. com. That will do it. But I suspect this is not the issue here. If someone wants to visit adult websites without nobody knowing that, this is much harder. Remember the rule above that everything goes through your ISP. Every bit of information, regardless if you are connecting through an anonymous proxy. They can track you down unless you are using secure tunneling with encryption. Or better, go to an internet store or cafe. However, do not visit any other sites you normally visit because with data mining they can figure out with high probability from the patterns of visits how you are. Or worse, do not send any email using web email you use at home. Also keep in mind that secure tunneling is secure only up to the government agencies that always have the encryption key by law. If anyone thinks they can be secure using an encypted anonymous proxy from home they are dreaming. I hope I helped.
This is not an encrypted service. If you use it, the only thing that happens is that where you connect they do not see your real IP but only the IP of the final connection server. But your local ISP in China or Venezuela sees everything you do, type, reading, sending, etc. Why are people so unimformed, I do not understand this. I wonder how many activists ended up in jail because they believed these false claims.