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Frequently Asked Questions(FAQ)

Q: How does Anonyproz OpenVPN work?


A:The Internet is for the most part an open, unencrypted network, i.e. Internet servers do with some exceptions (e.g. secure order forms for the transmission of Credit Card data) usually not encrypt connections. Anonyproz OpenVPN, however, encrypts and anonymizes your existing Internet connection on your side, regardless whether the Internet server you connect to supports encryption — a mechanism that suffices to increase your privacy and anonymity.

Without Anonyproz OpenVPN, whenever you connect to the Internet, everything you read or write, transfer or receive is basically unencrypted and in plain text. The Internet is constructed in a way that data are transferred from your PC, laptop or notebook over multiple other computers to their destination which could be your friend's PC or a web server. Each computer in this chain is called a „hop,” because the data are figuratively „hopping” from one computer to the next until they reach the desired destination.

Over how many hops data are routed depends on the distance between sender and recipient and the routing setup, but connections are on average carried over about one to two dozens of hops. At each of these computers or hops, everything you send or receive — the web sites you request, your emails, your chats, the files you transfer, etc. — can be read and stored. Your transferred information could also be read and stored if somebody would wiretap the cables or connections between any of these computers, e.g. the line at your own home. The most convenient location to observe you and to store everything you do on the Internet is, of course, your ISP (Internet Service Provider), because all data you send to the Internet and receive from it have to pass through your ISP. In the last years and months, many countries passed legislation which obliges your ISP to record your connection data and to store it for several months to several years. ISP's in some countries are obliged to hand these data over to law enforcement or secret service agencies without review by an independent judge.

Here is where Anonyproz OpenVPN can help you. If you sign up for our service, you will get access to our encryption and anonymization servers. Instead of connecting directly to a web site or to your friend, the Anonyproz OpenVPN software on your computer will create a high security encrypted connection to one of our servers first. All data you choose will then automatically be encrypted by your PC and sent through this encrypted connection to our anonymization server. Our server will accept the data and in addition will strip the data from information that could personally identify you.

Data, texts, photos, emails, movies, or web site requests you send over the Internet carry for example a unique number, called IP address, which identifies you. You can compare it to a telephone number. Every computer which is connected to the Internet, including yours, has a unique IP address which identifies it. These data sometimes also contain other personal information, such as the browser you use and its version, your operating system, or software plug ins you have installed. If somebody investigates these pieces of data he knows they were transferred by your machine or sent to you.

Our anonymization server decrypts the data it received and replaces your personally identifying information (such as your IP address) with its own identity. Then it sends the data to the destination, e.g. the web site you wanted to access. The web site and all hops (computers) between it and our anonymization server will no longer know to whom the data really belong. They will think our server made the request, and the web server will thus transmit the requested content of the web site back to our server, where our server will encrypt the data again and send it to your PC.

 

Let's look at an example: Let's assume you are John Doe in Australia and wish to send a search term to Google in America. The traditional Internet access is unencrypted und not anonymous. You enter the Google URL into your browser, enter your search term and click on the „Search” button. Your search term and site request is sent to the Google server in America which also receives your IP address which was assigned to you by your ISP and is linked to your name John Doe which your ISP has in his database. Google replies to your request by sending the requested data back to your IP address (your PC, laptop or notebook). Consequently, your ISP knows what you are doing, Google knows what you are doing, and every computer on the route — the 20 or so „hops” — in case they would bother to look it up, would know what you are doing, too.

With Anonyproz OpenVPN, however, the situation drastically changes. Your computer first establishes an encrypted connection to one of our anonymization servers, let's say in USA. All the data, photos, emails, search terms, chats, and web site requests you want are routed from now on over this encrypted connection. Your ISP — and everyone on the route between you and our anonymization server — do no longer have a clue what you are doing and which sites you are accessing. All they know is that you have established an encrypted connection to a server somewhere in the world (USA in this case). Be aware that this is nothing suspicious or uncommon. Encrypted connections to servers are established all the time when people do online banking, online shopping, access computers remotely to maintain them, establish VPN business networks, or use SSH to exchange sensitive information securely. So contrary to what many people may think, encrypted connections are something that are established millions of times every day, and the mere fact that you have an encrypted connection to a server doesn't make you "suspicious" that you would do something illegal or would have something to hide. It's simply your right to shield yourself against unauthorized readers.

Once our anonymization server receives your request informing it you want to contact Google, it will strip your personal data — such as your IP address — from the request, replace these data with its own IP address and with some additional faked information, and will send your request to Google. Because the packets carry now the IP address of our server in USA, Google will serve the page to our server in USA. Once received, our server will encrypt the page and send it back to you. This way your ISP and everyone located before our encryption server will not see at all what you are doing, on which sites you are surfing, and what you are sending or receiving: because the data are encrypted. Google und everybody who tries to pry on you on the route after our anonymization server will see which data are transferred — but not who originally requested them, who entered the search term, who will finally receive Google's reply, for whom the data are destined and to whom they are belonging. They will only see the IP address of our anonymization server in USA and it appears as if somebody in USA had sent the request. This server is, of course, used by dozens or even hundreds of our anonymous subscribers, thus it could have been anyone who transmitted the data. There is no way that Google could find out it was you.

Q: What kind of encryption are you using? Can it be cracked?
A:We are using 4096 bit OpenVPN, 4096 bit SSH-2 (Secure Shell 2), and 4096 bit SSL/TLS respectively, network and a tunneling protocols that allow data to be exchanged over a secure channel between your PC and our server. They are based on public-key cryptography to authenticate the remote computer and provides improved security through Diffie-Hellman key exchange and strong integrity checking via MACs. We are using AES-256 encryption to protect the confidentiality of the data. The cipher was developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. The algorithm has been analyzed extensively and is now used worldwide. As of 2007, no attacks that attack the underlying cipher itself have ever been found.



Q: How many servers and IP addresses will I get? And where are they located?
A:At the moment you will get access to more than two dozens of different servers, everyone of which provides a different public IP address, i.e. more than two dozens of IP addresses in total. Our servers are currently located in the United States, Malaysia and UK. However, in the future we will add more servers in other continents.

Q: What is the speed of your servers? Will the connection be slower?
A:We currently sustain a multitude of servers with a bandwidth of 10 mbps to 1,000 mbps each. Most of our servers are high-speed servers with an unshared and dedicated bandwidth of 100 mbps to 1 gbps with plenty or unlimited traffic, well capable to carry broadband traffic.

Q: Are there traffic limits?
A:We currently do not impose strict traffic limits on our servers apart from „fair and reasonable use.” Please consult our Terms and Conditions for more details.



Q: Can I use Anonyproz OpenVPN from any computer?
A:Yes, in fact, you can. Our preconfigured Open source OpenVPN client GUI is currently only available for the Windows operating systems. Please find the installation instructions and usage details in the members' area.

 

Q: What protocols and data can I encrypt and anonymize with Anonyproz OpenVPN?
A:You can encrypt and anonymize all protocols and data you can send through OpenVPN ; everything the TCP/IP protocol can carry: HTTP, FTP, Gopher, SSL, SSH, Bit torrent, ED2K; as well as browsers, FTP clients, P2P clients, IRC, Instant Messengers, and servers of all sorts. You can also choose to encrypt and anonymize some data, only anonymize others, and leave again other data completely decrypted and unanonymized. Anonyproz OpenVPN offers you ultimate flexibility and control over which content you want to encrypt and anonymize.

It is even possible to encrypt and anonymize data produced by software that has no native proxy support. Please consult the help files in our members' area.

Q: Can I get a free trial?
A:Anonyproz OpenVPN can count itself lucky to possess an excellent goodwill and reputation. Many of our long-term members who tried several other SSH and VPN providers before, are telling us that our privacy service is in several aspects — from speed over our information policy to support — the best they have ever used, that they are very happy they found us and that they would never use another privacy service again. There are also several independent reviews on the net which give us the best grades.

Unfortunately, we cannot issue free trial accounts, however, because several more of Anonyproz OpenVPN's advantages are that you can pay absolutely anonymously, that we do not store any of your data — including your IP address — and that we permit the usage of any free e-mail provider in the world. This means that dishonest people could use our network and resources and waste our bandwidth and traffic forever — by signing up again and again for ever new free trial accounts with ever new free e-mail addresses. If you wish to try our services first, we would recommend you to sign up initially for a one or three month(s) account only. It doesn't cost you more than a haircut, but will give you the chance to test our services and support extensively as a member with all rights and privileges.

Q: How can I pay for your services?
A:We offer various payment options for your convenience: PayPal, credit cards (American Express, Discover, Master Card, Visa), eCheck,Google Checkout,Liberty Reserve, Perfect Money and Pecunix. With Liberty Reserve, Pecunix and Perfect Money you have the possibilities to pay truly anonymously. Please get our contact and account details on our order page.

Q: How do I know that you will not steal my credit card data and bank login?
A:Because we are honest people, and even if we wanted, we couldn't see, read or access these data. Whenever you enter your bank login and password, submit your credit card data to a merchant, access financial accounts like PayPal or Liberty Reserve, or transmit any other sensitive information to a web site, those services encrypt the connection to you with SSL already. The content of the connection is unreadable for us because we do neither have your nor your partner server's private key. These keys are not transmitted, hence not even we could view the content and data exchange of such communications. All what will happen, if you use Anonyproz OpenVPNwith such already encrypted communications is that your real IP is suppressed, and that an extra layer of security is added, because the already SSL encrypted transfer is once more VPN or SSH encrypted by us.

Q: Do you offer dynamic IP's or dedicated static IP's?
A:No, we offer neither, as this would decrease the security, anonymity and safety of you and our members enormously. We assign each and everyone of our members who connects to a particular server via NAT (network address translation) the same external IP address all other members use. This has the advantage that your incoming and outgoing traffic can ex post never clearly and unambiguously be assigned or attributed to you. If you had a dynamic IP or a dedicated static IP which only you use, the situation would look entirely different. But as long as dozens if not hundreds of our members who are connected to a server at a certain time span use the same external IP address, it is impossible to say who transferred which data.

Assigning everybody the same IP address increases thus your security enormously. If we were to assign you a dedicated dynamic or static IP address, as some other "privacy" providers do, your traffic and what you do or did, could be traced or reconstructed and attributed to you at any point in time.


Q: I'm already a Anonyproz OpenVPN Member. How can I extend my account?
A:Simply use our membercenter and pay your pending invoice with your desired payment method as usual.


Q: My question is not answered here. Where can I get more answers?
A:Simply use our Knowledgebase to find more answers to your questions.

 

 

 

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