Anonymizer (company)
Encyclopedia
Anonymizer, Inc. is an Internet privacy
Internet privacy
Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, repurposing, providing to third-parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Privacy can entail both Personally Identifying Information or non-PII information such as a...

 company
Company
A company is a form of business organization. It is an association or collection of individual real persons and/or other companies, who each provide some form of capital. This group has a common purpose or focus and an aim of gaining profits. This collection, group or association of persons can be...

, founded in 1995 by Lance Cottrell
Lance Cottrell
Lance Cottrell develops Internet privacy systems. Cottrell launched the first commercial privacy service, Anonymizer.com, in 1995 while studying towards a PhD in Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego. Cottrell was the original coder for the Mixmaster anonymous remailer and...

, author of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer
Mixmaster anonymous remailer
Mixmaster is a Type II anonymous remailer which sends messages in fixed-size packets and reorders them, preventing anyone watching the messages go in and out of remailers from tracing them. Mixmaster was originally written by Lance Cottrell, and was maintained by Len Sassaman Peter Palfrader is the...

. Anonymizer was originally named Infonex Internet. The name was changed to Anonymizer in 1997 when the company acquired a web based privacy proxy of the same name developed by Justin Boyan at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 School of Computer Science. Boyan licensed the software to C2Net
C2Net
C2Net was an Internet cryptography company founded by Sameer Parekh, which was sold to Red Hat in 2000. It was best known for its Stronghold secure webserver software....

 for public beta testing before selling it to Infonex.

Anonymizer offers a variety of consumer information security services including:
  • VPN for multi-protocol proxy
  • client software for iPhone
    IPhone
    The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

     and iPad
    IPad
    The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...

  • anonymizer
    Anonymizer
    An anonymizer or an anonymous proxy is a tool that attempts to make activity on the Internet untraceable.It is a proxy server computer that acts as an intermediary and privacy shield between a client computer and the rest of the Internet...

     Proxy server
    Proxy server
    In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...

  • encrypted E-mail
    E-mail
    Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

     services
  • anti-spyware
  • anti-phishing
    Phishing
    Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...

     / anti-pharming
    Pharming
    Pharming is a hacker's attack aiming to redirect a website's traffic to another, bogus website. Pharming can be conducted either by changing the hosts file on a victim’s computer or by exploitation of a vulnerability in DNS server software. DNS servers are computers responsible for resolving...

  • enterprise class competitive intelligence tools


Their "Operation: Anti-Censorship" software, introduced in 2006, addresses internet censorship in the People's Republic of China
Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China
Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China is conducted under a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations. There are no specific laws or regulations which the censorship follows...

 by allowing Chinese Internet users to access blocked sites.

The company privacy policy regarding disclosure of customer information states that they will not tolerate the use of their service for protecting the anonymity of hackers. If somebody uses their service for illegal activities, they will disclose the customer's information to the authorities.

Upper Management

Bill Unrue-President

Bill was CEO and a Senior Board member of Anonymizer, Inc. until finding the perfect strategic M&A exit to Abraxas Corporation. Unrue’s efforts grew Anonymizer by paying attention to the early stage customers, helping to achieve a strategic refocus and standup an enterprise class network for global customers. His experience in moving smaller companies into larger markets has helped the company transition from a consumer direct subscription model to an enterprise class SAAS model. He attended the University of Washington in Seattle and received a Masters in Management from the Kellogg Graduate School of Business at Northwestern University.

The Term Anonymizer

The term "anonymizer" is often used to signify any internet based anonymization tool, even though it is a trademark of Anonymizer Inc.

Anonymizer Inc bought by Abraxas Corporation

In May 2008, Anonymizer was bought by Abraxas Corporation. Abraxas Corporation is a leading provider of risk mitigation technologies for the U.S national security community.
Anonymizer Press Releases
Streetinsider Press Releases

See also

  • Java Anon Proxy
    Java Anon Proxy
    Java Anon Proxy, also known as JAP or JonDonym, is a proxy system designed to allow browsing the Web with revocable pseudonymity. It was originally developed as part of a project of the Technische Universität Dresden, the Universität Regensburg and Privacy Commissioner of Schleswig-Holstein...

  • Proxy server
    Proxy server
    In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...

  • Pseudonymization
    Pseudonymization
    Pseudonymisation is a procedure by which the most identifying fields within a data record are replaced by one or more artificial identifier's. There can be a single pseudonym for a collection of replaced fields or a pseudonym per replaced field. The purpose is to render the data record less...

  • Tor (anonymity network)
    Tor (anonymity network)
    Tor is a system intended to enable online anonymity. Tor client software routes Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers in order to conceal a user's location or usage from someone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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