BIOS: Technology Means Business

Internet Anonym is a software package designed to protect your PC's identity when online. Designed for home users and small businesses, Internet Anonym lets you browse the Internet anonymously without leaving traces of your activities for hackers or companies to exploit. It's incredibly easy to use and relatively effective, so should be considered by anyone looking to suppress intrusive Web pages, stop pop-up windows and delete Internet traces. As an added bonus, it even comes with a Shredder utility for cleaning unwanted data from your computer.

Pros: Easy to use; effective; low cost
Cons: Can block legitimate FTP and Web sites; problems with Opera

Concerns about Internet privacy is rising. As more and more Web sites are monitoring your online activities for marketing purposes using cookies and IP addresses, often without your knowledge, now is the perfect time to take steps to protect your computer's privacy when online. This is exactly what Internet Anonym Pro is designed to do - provide anonymous surfing and trace destruction within a single, easy-to-use application. Note, however, that it's designed to complement your anti-virus and firewall products and not replace them.

Network operators and Web sites regularly use IP addresses and cookies to create profiles of their visitors. Your computer also saves the Web pages you have visited, logs your activity on online exchanges, and saves your search queries. You may also be surprised to know that your computer also saves cache files of documents you have edited, programs you have used and music you have listened to.

Internet Anonym Pro is one way to protect your integrity against snoopers. It works by camouflaging your IP address every second (user definable) when you're online. This means that your computer will register on Web sites as being in America one moment and then in Australia the next, for instance. The camouflage identity is lent to you by a proxy server automatically provided by Steganos. Internet Anonym Pro even provides a graphical interface that pinpoints your current camouflage location on a world map, including IP address and server name. As well as concealing your IP address, Internet Anonym Pro can also be used to reject ActiveX objects, JavaScript and pop-up windows, and password protect your Internet Bookmarks and Favorites.

Unfortunately, we did encounter a few problems where Internet Anonym Pro blocked access to regular FTP and Web sites, including all Web sites accessed using our preferred browser, Opera 7.21. Unlike most decent firewall software, Internet Anonym Pro doesn't offer much in the way of configuration settings, and it's really just a case of turning the software on or off. The only way we were able to access our test FTP servers and Web sites using Opera was to uninstall the software, which isn't good. Hopefully Steganos will address these issues shortly with a free downloadable patch.

Internet Trace Destructor 6.5 is also supplied with the software, which is used to eliminate traces of your Internet activity. For example, it deletes recently used documents, recently searched files, recently used applications, cookies, history and cache files (Internet Explorer, AOL, Office, Kazaa, Opera, Mozilla, ICQ and more). Windows XP users can also use the XP Privacy tool to ensure that there is no unwanted transfer of data to Microsoft, such as deactivating Windows Media Player data transfers, deactivating error reporting and deactivating time synchronisation, amongst other settings.

You also get a Shredder utility which helps you to clean your hard disk by removing any remnants of data that were previously deleted by other means. The Shredder now lets you employ the 'Gutmann Method', which overwrites unwanted data 35 times. Unfortunately, this process is very slow and can take hours depending on the size of your hard disk.

Links:
Internet Anonym Pro 6.0 Web site