Freedom 2.0 for Linux: Masking User Identities
By: Brian Proffitt
Thursday, January 11, 2001 04:37:04 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/2883/1/
Turning into a Nym
There are few people in the world, I think, that would shy away from the chance of having a secret identity. Just think: to have the chance to move about doing things you might not normally do, all the while protected under the guise of a mild-mannered somebody-or-other.
In an age of ever increasing methods of finding out who you are and what you're doing has made it very difficult to maintain your own identity's privacy, let alone someone else's.
I tried out a new product this week, however, that does a pretty good job of keeping your identity safe and secure. No capes or masks required, either.
Freedom 2.0 from Zero Knowledge Systems, Inc. is a nifty little add-on for your browser and e-mail client that allows you to create pseudonym identities for yourself while you are out surfing on the Web. Under the guide of one of these identities, called nyms, you can surf to your heart's content knowing that what the Web sites full of cookies and trackers are seeing is the nym, not you.
Freedom 2.0 comes in two flavors: standard and enhanced. The standard version is free and gives you quite a few nice features, some for your browser and some for just general security.
The browser-specific features include a form filler, ad manager, and cookie manager. These are pretty self-explanatory in their proposed functions.
A more general security feature is the Keyword Alert, which warns you every time you are about to send a message out with your real name and address. And then there is the Personal Firewall, which gives a fair amount of security to your system, particularly if you have a dedicated connection like cable or DSL.
If you plunk down $49.95, you can get the enhanced version, which adds encrypted, untraceable e-mail and anonymous browsing, chat, and newsgroup access. This anonymity is the result of privately routing your Internet requests and commands through anywhere from one to three different servers, which can mask the origin point of your browser.
I was able to look at the enhanced version of Freedom 2.0, and I ran into some problems with the initial installation on my Linux box. For reasons that still boggle me, I had to switch to Red Hat 7 to look at another product right after the holidays. Freedom 2.0 for Linux is compatible with Red Hat 6.1 and 6.2 (as well as SuSE 7.0, Linux-Mandrake 7.1, and Caldera OpenLinux 2.4).
Note the lack of "and above" for the Red Hat requirement. That's because (I would discover later) that Freedom is not compliant with Red Hat 7.0 because of--you guessed it--the version of gcc that Red Hat so thoughtfully installed.
Instructions were available to compile the kernel on the Freedom Web site, so I could have gone that route, but I wanted to get back to SuSE anyway, so one half-day later, Freedom was nicely installed on my SuSE platform.
It should be noted here that to run Freedom, you have to be in GNOME as a non-root user.
Keeping the Good Cookies
The interface for both flavors of Freedom is called the Identity Palette, and
it's where you configure the settings for your personal level of security. Most
of the initial settings are created the first time you run Freedom. In Linux,
it's a good idea to have your browser up and running when you run the /usr/local/bin/freedom
command.
Once I established that I was installing the enhanced flavor, I was given a chance to enter a passphrase that would lock my computer down when necessary. After entering this, and my purchased activation code, I could create my first nym. Free users can have one nym, while users of the enhanced version can have up to five.
One nifty feature during the setup was the creation of a cryptography key based on how you move your mouse or click keys on your keyboard, thus assuring a very random key.
Freedom runs in the background every time you start your browser. You have to turn on the ad management, but once enabled, I found they worked flawlessly. I suspect some loopholes in the ad management net will pop up from time to time, since the ads must come from a known ad server to be blocked. If you do run across a new ad server, then you can quickly add it to Freedom's management list.
Cookie management can block all cookies, or just gather them up for one easy delete when you log off. This did raise a bit of a problem, because there are sites that I want to know who I am, such as AccuWeather or Linux Today, where my info is customized for me. Without cookies, there was no way for these sites to recognize me. I have seen other applications that do a better job of letting "good" cookies in, so hopefully Freedom will make their barriers a bit more porous, rather than the all-or-nothing approach they are taking now.
To test the e-mail anonymity, I sent a goof e-mail to a technically literate friend and in the goading message I dared him to track the sender down. I used the maximum security setting, and after a couple of hours of trying, my friend gave up. I owe him a lunch now, to make up for the baiting.
In all, I think Freedom is definitely on the right track for personal security use. The ad and cookie management tools need to be a little more adaptive, but for run-of-the-mill browsing, this is certainly a nice mask to wear.