Photo by Philip Chapman-Bell
Anonymous browsing is something of huge interest to the Internet users, who are very particular about their online privacy and security. There may be many reasons and situations, when you might be interested in using internet anonymously; for instance, you may be working on a public place and do not want to leave the traces or you may not like your family members or office colleagues to know what you have been doing online. Whatever be the reason, but still, it is an area, where a lot research is to be done.
How Anonymous Browsers Operate?
At present there are two dominant techniques used by various anonymous browsing tools. One is the use of JAP Networks, which was used hugely used earlier but later it ran into controversies after a backdoor had to be put into the product to allow interception of child pornographers on insistence of German Police.
The second technique is the use of Tor (The Onion Ring), which only allows anonymous browsing but also facilitates other applications like anonymous P2P, email, IM, and IRC chat. This technique is dominantly used in present day anonymous browsing tools.
Operator – A useful anonymous browser
OperaTor is small and relatively fast anonymous web browser, which combines the browsing platform of Opera, with privacy provided by Tor engines and the speed of browsing provided by Polipo.
You can download this 7MB application in your USB drive and carry it whenever you need to use a public computer for anonymous surfing.
In my testing, I was pleasantly surprised with the speed of browsing, which I was getting with this little tool. I had earlier used XBBrowser for anonymous browsing, but it was too slow, as compared to Operator. In fact, there was hardly any noticeable difference in the browsing speed as compared to my normal Opera browser. This is because of Polipo, the small caching web proxy, that comes bundled with Opera-Tor.
Since Operator allows only http and https protocols in anonymous mode, you should avoid Javascripts and Opera’s IRC functions running through it.
Some people complain that it has not yet released the source code of itself. But my view is that unless you are hard-core programmer and really need to tweak the source code, why should you worry about that. After all, trusted networks like CNet says OperaTor has been tested spyware free and Softpedia gave OperaTor its 100% Clean award. Major antivirus vendors, like GData, Kaspersky, McAfee and Microsoft, confirm that OperaTor contains no malicious software.
Overall, one of the best applications for anonymous browsing available today.
[This is a guest post by Silki Garg. She advises on how to eliminate spyware, online threats and malware detection, on her Internet Security Blog. A visit to her Blog is highly recommended. You’re sure to find something of interest.]
