Labs

When you surf the Net you reveal a lot about yourself; your IP address (your PC's unique identifier online), your ISP and even your location. That's the kind of information that could help someone to fake your identity online.

Steganos claims its Internet Anonym software is the thing to protect you and your PC from those who employ Internet snooping techniques to get hold of personal information. It does this by hiding your IP address, and other identifying details, from prying eyes.

Internet Anonym works by redirecting your Web traffic through publicly available proxy servers. A proxy server is a computer that sits between your PC and the rest of the Net. As far as the rest of the world is concerned it's the proxy

ADVERTISEMENT

server, not you, that's requesting any Web site you browse to.

The software doesn't just use one server, though - it switches every few seconds to a different proxy, moving around the world as it does so. In fact, if you're interested, you can watch as you become a user in France or the US - the software switches between fake identities every few seconds or so.

Unfortunately, surfing anonymously like this has one major drawback. With Anonym's 'Camouflage' feature switched on, we found that Web pages were a lot slower to load.

As well as hiding your identity online, Anonym also has some other useful tools. It can encrypt your favourites list, so not everyone has to see which Web sites you visit regularly. It comes with a decent ad blocking facility.

Most irritatingly there's no way of allowing blocked features, for instance ActiveX content, pop-up ads or cookies, to run on friendly sites that you trust; you have to go to a sub-menu and switch off the features by hand. And that's not all. Anonym lacks an anti-spyware tool, there's no facility for removing traces of where you've been (URL history files and so on) and no secure delete features either.

Anonym is pretty limited and it slows down your Internet connection. It may be cheap, but a low price doesn't always mean good value.