Dan Goodin reports:
A recently launched anonymization service suffered a setback last week when Gandi.net, a France-based registrar that bills itself as a “no bullshit company,” revoked its secure sockets layer certificate without warning.
Last week’s move against GoogleSharing caused its 30,000 users to instantly lose service, according to Moxie Marlinspike, the hacker who announced the anonymization proxy in mid January. It took him four days to get the site operational again, and by then, the vast majority of those users had stopped using the service.
[…]
GoogleSharing prevents Google from tracking searches and websites visited by specific individuals by mixing together requests from many different users so it’s impossible to tell where the queries originate. A Firefox plugin redirects Google-bound traffic to a proxy, where requests are stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the details of a different GoogleSharing user. The Google response is them proxied back to the originating user.
“GoogleSharing thrives by being totally transparent to the end user,” Marlinspike wrote in an email. “They install the addon and never have to think about it again. They don’t have to do anything special or visit any special websites. By causing a four day interruption, they’ve likely killed the majority of our user base.”
Read more in The Register.