Thoughts in proxy services.

[Trei, Peter]

[Ryan replied on the list to a private email I sent him. I'm
sending the original letter to provide context for his reply.]

Peter Trei

> ----------
> From: 	Trei, Peter
> Sent: 	Wednesday, November 21, 2001 10:15 AM
> To: 	'Ryan Lackey'
> Subject: 	RE: "quitting havenco", not quite!
> 
> 
> 
> ----------
> From: 	Ryan Lackey[SMTP:ryan at havenco.com]
> Sent: 	Tuesday, November 20, 2001 5:48 PM
> To: 	Trei, Peter
> Cc: 	'cypherpunks at lne.com'
> Subject: 	Re: "quitting havenco", not quite!
> 
> > Ryan and the other HavenCo folks deserve *massive* kudos for this. 
> > (now, when is the HavenCo remailer going online? :-)
> 
> The remailer has been up since 16 September 2001, and was announced to
> this list among others.  http://remailer.havenco.com/
> 
> Oops! (more kudos to you!)
> 
> Followed by: (I have them for myself now, not commercial-grade yet)
> * Anonymizing proxy on Sealand, cover general traffic as well as
>   havenco-destination traffic.  Free and no ads to havenco-destination
>   sites; free and ads and rate-limiting to elsewhere, or subscription.
> 
> Now that Safeweb is down, this would be really nice. A suggestion:
> 
> Protecting traffic between the end-user and the proxy is as and 
> sometimes more important to the user as protecting the target
> user from the target web site.
> 
> Safeweb did this pretty well, using SSL between the user and
> safeweb, and rewriting the URLs as encrypted strings. (There was
> a javascript frame on the end users browser, but I'm sure you 
> know all that). Protecting the target URLs from observation is
> almost as important as protecting the content.
> 
> Thus, once Safeweb was going, an observer on the firewall 
> could find nothing except the volume of traffic between the 
> user and safeweb.
> 
> Of course, safeweb went tits-up, so their economic model (they
> were ad-supported) is questionable.
> 
> There are a couple other systems out there that are similar;
> www.the-cloak.com for one.
> 
> I've a small list of links on this, if it would be helpful. For 
> example: http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/
> 
> Peter