Web Proxies for Anonymous Scientific Peer-Review? 34
nodrogluap asks: "As a scientist, I am often asked to peer-review journal papers. The peer-review process is generally supposed to be anonymous, but often times it is necessary to extensively visit the author's Web site to check and test Web interfaces to software and databases described in the paper. It can be easy for the author to surmise who's reviewing the paper based on Web logs (paper subject + gleaned reviewer's institution), especially when the reviewers are getting the first public crack at the URLs. Are there free, reliable HTTP and HTTPS proxies out there (not including servers run by people who've somehow mistakenly enabled an unrestricted proxy server in Apache)?"
Tor (Score:5, Informative)
http://tor.eff.org/ [eff.org]
Re:Tor (Score:2)
Re:Tor (Score:2)
In short no (Score:3, Interesting)
You will notice the amount of
Proxify.com (Score:2)
tor (Score:4, Informative)
Get a shell account (Score:3, Interesting)
Number of ways. (Score:1)
Try getting a VPN... (Score:1)
Stayinvisible.com (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox Extension: SwitchProxy Tool (Score:3, Informative)
SiwtchProxy Tool offers a simple status-bar interface where the user can change proxies on the fly. It comes with a pre-set anonymous setting which will change the proxy periodically (user-supplied value). For the list of proxies used, you can supply a simple text file or use a web-based dynamicaly updated list.
For SwitchProxy Tool homepage, see http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/switchp
(I have not observed any of the problems mentioned by the users - with the obvious exception that sites that know you by IP address won't recognize you if you use the anonymising proxy, but that can hardly be construed as a bug.)
You can find several suitable anonymising proxy lists in this forum:
http://forums.mozmonkey.com/viewtopic.php?t=19 [mozmonkey.com]
It's really quite fast, elegant and easy.
Is anonymity really required here? (Score:1)
If one review is harsh, and the other two are nice, the author of the paper still doesn't know who exactly (in this case you) was the nasty one. If all/most reviews are harsh, then you don't need to worry because you're not the only one being harsh (and so it was justified).
If your name can be tied to a single review, there's a problem. But bei
Re:Ask your employer (Score:1)
I dare say it would be possible to persuade an administrator or colleague at another university to set up a proxy though.
Why really bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why really bother? (Score:2)
They can easily ask/force/bribe/coerce someone in the IT department to provide the logs and maybe analize them. Or they can have a log analysis tool (such as webalizer or webtrends) to provide that info.
Re:Why really bother? (Score:2)
I think most IT personnel would react somewhat violently to a random professor trying to analize them?
Re:Why really bother? (Score:3, Informative)
I think you're pretty wrong here. Many resources are hosted in the lab, rather than by the department. Looking at the logs is easy. I am quite sure that people do it. We submitted a paper recently where it would have been very easy to determine the reviewers
Please (Score:2)
But, I don't buy the thread author's premise anyway. I think he's a hacker looking for tips.
Re:Please (Score:2)
Without a court order he can at best find out what ISP the user is on. Maybe what town.
ISP is enough! (Score:2)
Journal should set up a proxy (Score:3)
plenty of (mostly) free proxies out there (Score:2, Informative)
putty (Score:3, Informative)
To set up the proxy:
under the tunnels settings, create a "dynamic" tunnel on port 8080 or some port of your preference. Then after the ssh session is up, point your browser at a SOCKS4 proxy on localhost, port 8080 (or whatever you used).
It can also be helpful to enable keepalive packets to keep your firewall from closing the idle ssh session.
Just get a friend to give you shell access, or maybe your institution has a shared machine you can ssh to for the proxy to come from.
Re:putty (Score:1)
Web Proxies for Anonymous Scientific Peer-Review? (Score:1)
For this I have installed my own anonimizer:
http://usenet4all.com/gate/ [usenet4all.com]
This proxy is for public use.
Enjoy!
Is this really a problem? (Score:2)
Even with an anon
Google is your friend (Score:3, Interesting)
http://webaccelerator.google.com/ [google.com]
Then you'll show up in the logs as though the connection were coming from Google.
More info here. [slashdot.org]