zks freedom websecure trial (now for Linux!)

[Ian Goldberg]

In article <20011128232318.A7944200 at exeter.ac.uk>,
Adam Back  <adam at cypherspace.org> wrote:
>I noticed some discussion of the SafeWeb cancellation of free
>services here.
>
>ZKS announced yesterday freedom websecure, which is an anonymous web
>browsing system with more robust redirection and script blocking than
>systems that rely on html re-writing.  There is a free trial offered
>for a couple of months.
>
>	http://www.freedom.net/products/websecure/
>
>Unfortunately it only works as shipped with IE on windows in this
>version.

But there's an unofficial, open-source Linux client also available:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/websecure4linux/

An excerpt from the README:

---8<---8<---8<---
                            WebSecure4Linux

This is a really simple, quick-and-dirty Linux client for the
Freedom(r) WebSecure service from Zero-Knowledge Systems.
(See http://www.freedom.net/products/websecure/ for more info.)

Note that you will need to sign up for the service by obtaining a
WebSecure activation code and creating a user account and password before
this client will operate.  Trial activation codes, available until the
end of January 2002, can be obtained from:

                   http://www.freedom.net/trial.html

Activation codes are sent to your e-mail address. (Once your account has
been created, you might want to skip the client download.  Unless, of
course, you also run Windows.)


*** IMPORTANT ***
This is not supported by Zero-Knowledge Systems AT ALL; it's completely
unofficial.  You can try to get support at the SourceForge project
page: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/websecure4linux/

Right now, it supports http, and on linux 2.4, https as well.  It
shouldn't be hard to get the latter to work on 2.2 as well.

This program is covered by the GPL; see the file "COPYING" for details.


Some extra notes:

It's not feature-complete.  It doesn't manage your cookies, for example.
[The tricky bit is just that this code forks *a lot*, and you'd need to
put all the cookie info in persistent files, and put good locks around
all accesses to them.]

It's not speedy.  Your performance will suck.  It's written in perl,
and forks for each web connection.

It's not supported.  If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

---8<---8<---8<---

Have fun!

   - Ian