Using Opera Mini as an anonymizer

Because Opera Mini fetches all content through a proxy server over an encrypted connection, you are guaranteed anonymity at the user end.

This prevents eavesdropping by your neighbor at least. The more recent versions of Opera Mini can be run in mobile emulators and look rather well on larger displays:

I then noticed two cool things: 1. MicroEmulator can run MIDlets from URLs using Java Web Start, and 2. When using the Opera Mini Demo, the client IP address is not sent in the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header. This is what gives us anonymity. It’s not as secure as Tor, but more practical. All you need is to click one link!

http://www.rictin.com/mini
(I recommend: Options > Select device > Resizable device)

(The link forwards to http://~~microemu.org/webstart/~~www.rictin.com/files/mini.jnlp where www.rictin.com/mini.(jad|jar) is the Opera Mini Demo)

P.S. Opera Mini does not provide end-to-end security. Also, we can’t control the HTTP headers or what Opera decides to do on its servers.

Tags: privacy

Created on Wed, 21 Sep 2011 20:25