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Google announces uProxy

engadget.com

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Re: Google announces uProxy

#71

Post by chaz »

svantana wrote: post #58
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #15

Nice! So I can use uProxy to access the Google Play store to buy a Nexus phone? ("Sorry, not available in your country") Thanks Google :-)

Remains only to figure out how to route the physical delivery via a US address... anyone know of such a service? I'd find that pretty useful actually. A lot of stuff on e.g. Amazon is only available for delivery to the US.

Lots of them are available. I haven't used any of these, but you may want to give one of them a shot: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/mail-parcel-forwarding-services...

Re: Google announces uProxy

#72

Post by jstalin »

StavrosK wrote: post #60

From a cursory reading, 70% of the comments in here are people who came straight to this page to say "I don't trust Google/why wouldn't they do /Google will just shut this down". Can we stop with the kneejerk reactions? This is a p2p browser extension, doesn't run through Google, wasn't developed by Google, the only involvement Google had was maybe fund it. Are we going to be getting these comments any time Google is…

...and how many of these people's own government are doing the same thing as the NSA? I abhor what the NSA is going, but goodness, I bet 90% of the nation's governments do the same thing.

Re: Google announces uProxy

#73

Post by jjoe »

This is going to be a nightmare if you verify and process transactions online. How do you now know whether someone who purchased a product is really really on Comcast from SoCal and not someone who's exploited a hole in uProxy?

Re: Google announces uProxy

#74

Post by r0h1n »

StavrosK wrote: post #57
r0h1n wrote: post #48

Another "free" Google service that blinds lay people from objectively considering the cost vs. benefits of online privacy/anonymity (since "free" tends to make us act irrationally). Instead, consider paying the equivalent of a cup or two of coffee and buy yourself a real VPN subscription. Even if you must get yourself a free VPN, consider someone other than Google, a company that already has so much data on your digi…

Did you read the article? It's not a Google service. Why buy a "real" VPN subscription instead of running things through a friend, which is way more decentralized and harder to surveil en masse?

I did. I also went to the uProxy site which mentions it was seeded by Google Ideas. Also,

>> One of the ways uProxy connects you through your friends, is by connecting to existing chat networks, such as Facebook or Google Hangouts. uProxy can use a chat network to discover new friends and setup peer-to-peer proxying from your friends. If a user does so, then the chat network can see that the user has uProxy installed. A user's chat contacts may also see this.

So Google funded uProxy; it will be able to see who your VPN "host" is via Google Hangouts; and lastly it controls one of the two browsers on which this plugin runs, Chrome.

That's too much Google for me, personally.

Re: Google announces uProxy

#75

Post by lwf »

toyg wrote: post #45
shazow wrote: post #11

While we're speculating about trust and such, the video mentions that it's a browser extension which connects to a trusted peer and uses the peer as a proxy. This leads me to believe that, 1. Since it's a normal browser extension, the source will be readable and verifiable. 2. It probably uses WebRTC. It seems Google merely plays an incubator role here for the authors. Either way, I don't see much trust issues that o…

> the source will be readable and verifiable. that's all well and good, but if it's executed by an unverifiable binary build of Chrome (i.e. the one distributed by Google), it's not worth much. For what you know, Chrome might just detect the extension is installed and silently eavesdrop on all its calls. If this extension will work as-is on third-party Chromium builds compiled from public sources, then yeah, it can b…

You say that like it probably won't. They state in the FAQ that it will work on FF and Chrome; there's no reason to think it won't work on Chromium as well.

Re: Google announces uProxy

#77

Post by lwf »

xr09 wrote: post #65

So Google helps building a proxy for by passing their own censorship, Bravo Google, Bravo. (I'm being ironic of course) This is what I get any time I try to download anything from Google Code or Android sdk or even read something hosted on GAE. http://s24.postimg.org/gr0lto1l1/work107.png I'm in Cuba but the same should be for Iran and others "bad boys".

By "their own", you mean "as required by US export restrictions that all US companies have to abide by", right?

See also https://sourceforge.net/blog/clarifying-sourceforgenets-deni...

Re: Google announces uProxy

#78

Post by panarky »

draugadrotten wrote: post #12

> "If someone from a country with limited internet access installs uProxy, they can get a friend from the US to authorize them to surf the open web using their connection. " In effect, they would also be sending all their sensitive, potentially illegal traffic to be read and copied by the american NSA agency. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%2... People proxying illegal traffic through the U…

If I'm trying to avoid the Syrian secret services, then maybe NSA surveillance is the least of my concerns.

This is a peer-to-peer proxy so you don't have to proxy with a friend in the USA.

uProxy should be equally useful in avoiding US secret services (though Google's site doesn't highlight this use case).

Re: Google announces uProxy

#79

Post by hrjet »

lwf wrote: post #77
xr09 wrote: post #65

So Google helps building a proxy for by passing their own censorship, Bravo Google, Bravo. (I'm being ironic of course) This is what I get any time I try to download anything from Google Code or Android sdk or even read something hosted on GAE. http://s24.postimg.org/gr0lto1l1/work107.png I'm in Cuba but the same should be for Iran and others "bad boys".

By "their own", you mean "as required by US export restrictions that all US companies have to abide by", right? See also https://sourceforge.net/blog/clarifying-sourceforgenets-deni...

The irony here is that they are announcing a tool to subvert restrictions in other countries, but they are following their own countries restrictions to the letter.
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