Hacker Releases Tool So You Can Hide From Google

Jan 20, 2010

Hacker Releases Tool So You Can Hide From Google

Everything Google, with the exception of their business-quality services, is free. For that free service, you let Google monitor just about everything you do on the Internet. Now, a hacker who calls himself Moxie Marlinspike aims to make your tracks invisible to Google.

Of course, that's only for things that you don't have to login for. Services like Gmail or Google Voice, you have to login to access. But other services, like search, maps, translate, would all be hidden via a service he calls GoogleSharing.

GoogleSharing, announced Tuesday, mixes your behavior with those of other users, by using a custom proxy and a Firefox plug-in. You can access his site at GoogleSharing.net. Here's how it works:
The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Addon. The proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing "identities," each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers. The Firefox Addon watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Gmail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity.

This "GoogleShared" request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By "sharing" these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze.
Unlike most proxy servers, this service only redirects Google traffic. And while other services, such as Scroogle, hide your searches from Google, GoogleSharing goes further.

Of course, while you're hiding yourself from Google, you're exposing yourself to Marlinspike. To get around these fears, Marlinspike is also offering Googlesharing's code to anyone who wants to create their own GoogleSharing proxy.

As he says in his FAQ, "if you don't trust us, hopefully you can find someone that you do trust, or run a GoogleSharing proxy yourself."

source


 
 
 
free counters 
HTML Hit Counter