Anonymous Publishing
Perhaps its not enough to just access content anonymously. In some cases it might be interesting for you to publish your information anonymously. Of course the possibility for abuse is rather high in this case, but the question remains if for example a polical group, risking prosecution, shouldnt be allowed to publish their information safely. In the future certain content, such as drug information, uncensored news, etc might become illegal. In this case there has to be a possibility to retain free information by protecting the authors.
Janus
Janus is a very simple system to provide anonymity for webauthors. It works similary to an anonymous webproxy, just the other way around. The janus server translates a request to the real
webpage. If you want to access a webpage you use a url like this: http://januserver.com/[encrypted_data]. The Janusserver will decrypt the rest of the url and retrieve the requested webpage.
Before sending it back to you it will replace all occurences of the real url in the webpage with the encrypted one. This way you will never know the original url of the webpage.
Currently
there's a Janusserver at http://janus.fernuni-hagen.de You can also find more information about the Janusserver there.
The drawback of this system is that all security lies in the Janus server.If it get compromised or the admins get forced by an authority to surrender their data. The webpage is no longer anonymous.
Another danger is that search engines index almost everything, some of them don't even pay
attention to a robots.txt, telling them not to index. If there's any other link to this site
it will probably get indexed, so that once you retrieved the page via janus you can find the orignal url with the help of a search engine.
TAZ and the Rewebber Network
The Rewebber Network is a chained form of proxies, similar to the a remailer network. Please refer to the descriptions of a remailer network or to the onion-routers. The advantage of this
is that there is no single point of failure anymore.
In order to access a webpage via the Rewebber Network you will need to specify long urls, since there're multiple layers of encryption. TAZ (Temporary Anonymous Zone) acts as some form of information server which will tell you the long encrypted url via a shorted identifier.
You can find more information about this in an article in firstmonday and at http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/taz
12/04/1999 Stephanie Wehner