Don’t demonstrate: subvert
‘Public Wi-Fi hotspots are great. After all, what would life be without checking your email each morning at your favorite café?’
So sais AnchorFree on its demure website offering free download of Hotspot Shield. ‘But while you're enjoying your latte and a bagel, some hacker might be accessing your passwords, credit card numbers, sensitive company data and much more,’ it added.
Or, if you’re in China, some servant of the Communist regime may very much wish to know who you are, in order to introduce you to proletarian justice. So, AnchorFree has quietly posted the download information in Chinese.
The idea may have been born of the surge in Hotspot Shield downloads in Pakistan, after the Islamabad regime tried to block YouTube.
Hotspot Shield creates a virtual private network (VPN) between laptop and the wireless router. It is said to provide an ‘impenetrable tunnel’ to protect credit card information or anything else sent over a wireless network. Of course, it also means users can remain anonymous.
As the Olympic torch battles its way through frenzied demonstrators in city after city, Hostspot Shield has made it possible for ordinary Chinese to see for themselves, without fear of reprisals, what the rest of the world thinks of their rulers.
Full marks to David Gorodyansky and Eugene Malobrodsky, co-founders of AnchorFree, and backers Bert Roberts (former Chairman of MCI), Esther Dyson (Board Director of WPP), Denis Nayden (former Chairman of GE Capital), Richard Rainwater (President of Rainwater Inc.) and the Renaissance Capital Group.
