Posted: 5/28/2009 7:02:27 AM EDT
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Recently, a friend of mine told me about a tool called JanusVM, a combination of Internet anonymity tools (TOR, PRIVoxy, Squid, and VPN) that runs in a virtual machine. You basically run the VM in a VMWare player, connect a VPN connection from your PC to the VM, and open your web browser. Like a lot of anonymity tools, it isn't very fast. It is, however, about as anonymous as you can get on the internet. I went to a web site that displayed my current IP address as well as your geographic location and found I was supposedly surfing from Paris, France. One page reload later and I was in Northern California, and then followed by Denmark, all without ever leaving my chair. According to the web site's very brief write up, the DNS requests are so scrambled that even your internet service provider can't tell where you're surfing. That made me wonder if I could use this tool to get around my web filtering firewall as well. I tested my machine to make sure I was blocked out by our firewall by trying to visit Facebook, which is a big no no site around here. Sure enough, it's blocked. Then I closed my web browser, established the VPN connection to the JanusVM, and re-launched my web browser. Bullseye! I had Facebook access. Not only was I anonymous, I'd also defeated my own web filtering software and firewall.
While this is a great tool, here are a few things to keep in mind. 1. I haven't tested it on any other system, so YMMV. 2. You need a network with at least one available IP address for the VM. It can be an internal IP, but it still needs one. This keeps it from working with Verizon broadband cards. If someone out there gets it to work with one, I'd LOVE to hear about it! 3. Anonymity is not the same as privacy, or even security. Don't count on this tool to protect your internet logins and passwords. Hackers have been known to sniff incoming and outgoing traffic on TOR nodes for unencrypted passwords. They may not know where they came from, but they can still read them. If they can figure out where they were headed, you're in trouble. 4. Your workplace or branch of the military may frown on anyone trying to circumvent their firewalls and web filters, so use this information at your own risk. 5. I haven't tried their appliance version, and don't really feel a need either. Why pay $150 when you can set this up and run it for free? |