Recently my little sister had here internet shut-off for supposedly downloading illegal files. Now to be clear, my little sister wouldn't do something like that (she wouldn't even know how). But evidently the internet provider,Cox, decided she was doing something inappropriate and was therefore taking it out on her. Stupid, ignorant, and totally uncool.
I travel a lot and in most of the hotels I have to share an internet connection with a couple hundred of my closest strangers.
These two situations are why I use a secure tunnel which secures my web-surfing and makes it more or less anonymous. For my own choice I use a private SSH provider and the VanDyke Entunnel software package. However there are several new alternatives on the market.
For the Google-lovers, there is the Google Secure Access (Beta) which can be found at http://wifi.google.com/download.html. This primarily allows people living in San Franscisco to surf using a secure connection through googles servers.
For those who want to deal with a company for whom this is their sole business, you might try MySecureISP which you can find at www.mysecureisp.com. Similar service, but works anywhere, costs $6 a month. If you require full-time secure internet access via a plethora of providers, they might be a good fit for you.
If you want to be on the bleeding edge and are really concerned about being anonymous and so forth, then you can jump on the JAP bandwagon from http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html. This is really neat technology that is still a work in-progress. However it offers high-degrees of secure browsing and a variety of experiences. Plus you get to support education, further the privacy movement, blah, blah, blah. Check it out.
Lastly, if Dave ever gets off his rear-end there will be another addition which you can all check out. Feel free to post a comment to let him know you want him to stop slacking off and finish the thing already!
