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GhostSurf Review PLEASE NOTE -- THIS PAGE IS OBSOLETE -- CHECK THE NEW PAGE FOR UPDATED INFORMATION. IT HAS BEEN LEFT POSTED FOR: 1) THOSE WHO WANT A REFERENCE TO GHOST SURF PRO - NOW DISCONTINUED 2) THOSE WHO MAY HAVE BOOKMARKED THE PAGE. Sadly, the world is full of just too many nosy people. Some have the best intentions, some just want to make money, others are trying to rob you blind, but the one thing they have in common is that they’re all a pain in ass! With all this talk about invasion of privacy, every time you sit down and browse the internet you feel like you have about 18 people hanging over your shoulder wondering what you’re looking at, where you’re going and what you’re going to buy. Ghost Surf takes care of all that. The installation is fairly easy but if you want a few hints, check out the installation page. You may want to download GhostSurf now, install it and follow along. First and foremost, Ghost Surf is NOT a firewall program. Internet hackers using auto bot programs to look for open ports is a completely different problem. If you’re worried about that, get a router that uses Network Address Translation or go to the Shields Up site and read up on the latest Firewall program. What we’re talking about here is a bit more personal. Let me explain: When you surf web sites, 3 things happen that you may not be aware of that can cause potential problems: 1) IP Address a) When you send a request to a web site, the IP address of your computer goes with it. b) Your ISP gets a nice list of the web sites you’ve been going to and judging from the recent record company lawsuits, they don’t have any problem sharing that information. If you're going through a proxy server at work, your IT department - and then your boss - gets to look at where you're going. 2) Cookies a) Some web sites put malicious cookies on your PC to gather personal information. 3) Data Storage a) Your PC keeps a history of all of the web sites you’ve visited recently which is available on the browser’s address bar or on the hard drive. b) Your PC also keeps the most recently viewed pages cached on your hard drive. c) Your PC also keeps track of recently accessed documents, programs and pictures. Tracks of where you’ve been are all over the place! Here’s how Ghost Surf solves that. Hiding your IP Address with Anonymous Hubs Think of your IP Address as the internet address of your computer. Ghost Surf blocks this by sending your request to a web site to a series of anonymous hubs which in turn passes the request along to the destination with your IP Address deleted. With this feature activated, the web site thinks the request is coming from the anonymous hub. Your ISP or an employer watching your network connection will think you’re just endlessly looking at the same site which is the anonymous hub. Please don’t take this an invitation for illegal or unethical activities. Put bluntly, Ghost Surf is here to help you avoid the many prying eyes that want a piece of your privacy and is not a tool to help you launch a career in crime. If you’re suspected of criminal behavior, an ISP, Government agency or even an employer could tap your Internet connection and actually read everything that goes back and forth. This method is too time consuming and expensive to do to everyone. The huge amount of web traffic handled by an ISP or an IT department usually limits the amount of spying to the creation of a log of the websites you visit. Ghost Surf will change that list of websites to a list of visits to an anonymous hub and protect your privacy. During setup, these hubs are automatically set up but you can check and refresh them with the following procedure. 1) Right click on the "eye" icon in your taskbar. 
Which brings up this menu: 
2) Select "Tools" then "Anonymous Hubs" 
This will automatically test to see if the hubs are operating. 3) To refresh the hubs, right click on the "eye" in the taskbar and select "scheduler" for this menu: 
4) In the tasks box, select "Setup Anonymous Hubs", right click on it and the select the "Run Task Now" option. 
Now that the you know how to refresh the hubs, we'll see how to turn the options on and off for different web sites. Cookies and how to protect personal information With all the bad press Cookies have gotten, you’d think that Satan himself made them up to curse the internet. Are they that bad? Well, yes and no. Cookies are small bits of information stored on your PC so a web site can identify you. This can be very useful. Say you go to Amazon.com and put 20 things in your cart, don’t have time to place your order, and turn your PC off. When you go back to that site from that computer, your cart is as you left it because a cookie on your PC points to a database created on the Amazon site. Since cookies never store personal information on it like charge card numbers, they are a big help on shopping sites. Other sites aren’t that nice. Some cookies are placed without your knowledge and root around to see what other web sites you’ve been going to as well as how often. When first using GhostSurf, what really amazed me was all of the cookies put on my system by images on some of the popular news websites. I know some people who deal with this by turning off the cookies on the web browser but this is as bad as turning off javascript. The functionality of your browser is severely reduced to the point that some sites just stop working. Ghost Surf has a solution. 1) Right click on the "eye" in your taskbar. 2) Select "Privacy Center" to bring up this window. This is where you can decide to hide personal information and your IP address from a website. 
The "Visited Websites" contains a list of recently visited sites. 3) To change the default settings for all new sites, click the appropriate checkboxes at the bottom of the screen. 4) To change the settings for websites you have already visited, select the site form the "Visited Websites" box, right click on it, and select one of the options from the following menu. 
GhostSurf also has a function called GhostBlock that allows you to block all suspicious sites while allowing cookies for sites that you trust. GhostSurf will then filter outgoing web traffic and strip it of personal information. GhostSurf also blocks some know ad sites immediately. They are listed in the “knownadsites.txt” file in the folder that GhostSurf is installed in. GhostBlock can be found in the menu that appears after right clicking on the "eye" in the taskbar and has a very descriptive help menu. Deleting records Your PC seems to hide records of everything all over the place and there’s always someone who feels obligated to mind YOUR business and snoop around in those records. You can delete this information yourself but it’s spread around all over the place and there’s always something you miss. GhostSurf’s GhostWipe feature allows you to erase all or none of the following: web history, temporary web files, cookies, address bar, recycle bin, recent documents, recent programs, recent pictures, MS Office recent documents, and even GhostSurf’s internal list of websites. Deleted files can be recovered as is shown by some of the other programs on this site. GhostSurf, however, goes beyond normal deletion and uses a variation of the secure file deletion technique published by Department of Defense, Manual 5220.22 M. This requires that the file be overwritten with 0's, then 1's, and then random data; and further stipulates that, for top secret data, the disk on which the file is written must be degaussed, and then destroyed. Obviously, GhostSurf doesn’t degauss or destroy your disk but it does write over the file with 0’s, 1’s and then random data. It then uses a technique that uses the defragment API in Windows NT, 2000 and XP which provides additional protection. GhostWipe can be accessed by right clicking on the taskbar "eye" icon, selecting "tools" and then "GhostWipe". 
Select the items you want to erase and click the "Run Now" button. You can automate this function in the Scheduler so it will delete the items of your choice automatically. This feature is in the same window where you refreshed the anonymous hubs. By default, the erase options are turned off while the hub refresh is automatically done every day. Spyware Detection Another great feature of GhostSurf is that it will detect and remove SpyWare. Right click on the "eye" in the taskbar, select "tools" then select "SpySweep". 
Select where you want to scan and click "go". Conclusion and registration GhostSurf has everything you want in a program: it's not intrusive, easy to use, has lots of features, and most important it really works. After you configure it, you can turn it on and forget about it as it does it work in the background. If you want proof that your IP address is being hidden, go to the Shields Up site with GhostSurf OFF and you'll notice that the web page will show your IP address. Close the web site, turn GhostSurf on and try Shield Up again. The page will be different now because they can't read your IP address. They can't do a test probe on your ports because they now don't know who you are! If you want to find out what GhostSurf is allowing on your PC and what it's blocking, open the GhostBlock and TraceViewer windows. These options are full of features that show the full extent of the protection GhostSurf offers. GhostSurf also works well with WebVacuum. Configuration details can be found on WebVacuum's review page. To register GhostSurf, click on "purchase" on the menu bar which will bring open your browser and bring you to the Ghostsurf registration page. Opera users may want to open Opera first since direct links occasionally only open up Opera's startup box. If Opera is already active, a direct link will bring you to the proper page. You can download the trial version by clicking on the button below. I hope you find the program useful and would like to hear your comments at products@sharewaregenie.com - The Genie -  |
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