Frequently Asked Questions
NOTE: A more advanced knowledgebase system is being worked on.
Meanwhile, if your question is not covered on this page, please contact our
customer support.
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What is
Identity Cloaker?
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How does it all
work?
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Why should I use Identity Cloaker?
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So what are the
main advantages of using Identity Cloaker?
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Isn't Identity
Cloaker one of those services using free proxy servers?
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I don't have a
PC. Can I use Identity Cloaker on my Mac / Linux computer?
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I don't
use MS Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Will Identity Cloaker work?
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Can I use
Identity Cloaker for securing other Internet traffic - not only web?
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I have to
use a proxy server provided by my employer / university / ISP to connect
to the Internet. Can Identity Cloaker work without direct access to the
Internet?
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How will
Identity Cloaker affect the speed of web browsing?
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Is there any
limit of the amount of data I can transfer every month?
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Is there
a free version of Identity Cloaker?
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What if Identity
Cloaker doesn't work for me? Is there a money-back guarantee?
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Can I use Identity
Cloaker to surf illegal websites or do something illegal?
What
is Identity Cloaker?
Identity Cloaker could be defined as "Internet Privacy
Protection Service". It protects your privacy by encrypting the data
sent over the Internet in the most vulnerable part of the data transmission
path and by hiding your IP address.
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How does it all work?
You download a small PC software application (no installation
necessary), run it and choose the proxy server which you would like to be connected
through - or simply click the "Connect" button if you want to have one selected
automatically. When you click the "Connect" button, a secure encrypted data
tunnel is created to the chosen server via SSH. This mechanism is commonly called
"SSH tunneling". If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, there is nothing more
you have to do as MSIE will be automatically set to use the new secure tunnel
for all web browsing.
If you use Mozilla Firefox, you can click on the "Install
Firefox Extension" icon found in the application. Then when you restart Firefox,
the secured connection will be chosen automatically whenever you are connected
to one of the Identity Cloaker servers. Note: this behavior can be turned off
if you prefer to set the connection by hand. Identity Cloaker will work with
any Internet browser. However, the automatic activation of secure browsing is
available for MSIE and Firefox only (it's quite simple to activate the secure
browsing for other browsers though).
Scenario 1 - Browsing the web without Identity Cloaker:
You visit a website - let's call it something.com
from your computer, your computer sends a request to something.com
and retrieves the data sent from it. This is actually an simplification but
generally, it's how it works. The data on the whole path of the communication
between you and something.com is normally unencrypted (unless https/ssl
is used) and something.com can read your real IP address. The part
of the communication between you and your Internet Service Provider is vulnerable
to "data eavesdropping".
Scenario 2 - Browsing the web with Identity Cloaker:
You visit a website - again, let's call it something.com.
The request is sent through the established encrypted secure tunnel to the chosen
Identity Cloaker proxy server. This is done "on the background" - you do not
even have to know about it. The proxy server then sends the request to something.com
on your behalf, receives the answer and forwards it back to you - again through
the encrypted secure tunnel. At all time, something.com was communicating
with the proxy server and does not even know about you! The proxy server works
as the middleman.
Please also take a look at our illustrations on the
How
it works page.
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Why should I use Identity Cloaker?
Internet is a dangerous place. It's full of black-hat
hackers, identity thieves and other crooks. Without Identity Cloaker, you make
their job much easier! Very often when you send sensitive data such as your
passwords over the Internet, they are sent unencrypted and they can be stolen
by anyone who has the know-how. And whenever you browse the Internet, you disclose
your IP address which the bad guys can use to find your physical location. Identity
Cloaker replaces your IP address with one from the Identity Cloaker proxy server
network - which can be even (and very often will be), in a different country.
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So what are the main advantages of using Identity Cloaker?
1) Encrypting the data transmitted over the otherwise
insecure Internet when browsing the web with your web browser using military-class
Rjindael
AES-256 cipher - the same cipher used by the US Department of Defense for
all documents classified as "Top Secret". This cipher is considered to be virtually
unbreakable!
2) It hides your own IP address. Your IP address is normally
stored in the server logs of all web servers you visit and can be used to find,
or help to find, your physical location. This could have dire consequences as
you can imagine.
3) It allows you to pretend that you are browsing the
web from a different country than you actually are. Some webs refuse visitors
from some countries or display different content based on the visitor's country.
For example if you browse the web through one of our US-based proxy servers,
you will see what you would see as if you were browsing the web from the States
even if you sit in the middle of Europe.
Are you in the US and want to visit that online casino
you love so much but the casino web tells you "Sorry, but we do not accept customers
from the US"? Just connect through one of our European proxy servers and they
will greet you!
4) It allows you to circumvent any firewall restrictions
set by your employer / school / ISP / government etc. The secure tunnel to our
servers is created using a commonly available port. Once the secure tunnel is
established, you can visit any web accessible to our proxy servers - without
any of the above mentioned party knowing this little secret...
NOTE: Just because Identity Cloaker can circumvent almost
any restrictions set by any party doesn't mean it's always a good idea. If you
breach any rules set for example by your employer or university network admin,
and browse for example some legal adult websites, it is just between you and
them. We will not interfere as long as you do nothing illegal. But we will have
to interfere if you want to use Identity Cloaker for anything considered illegal
in the Czech Republic and the European Union.
5) It allows you to visit websites you have been banned
from before. Have you said something bad in some forum and the forum admin banned
your IP address? Use Identity Cloaker to "unban" yourself.
There are more advantages, these are just the most important
ones.
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Isn't Identity Cloaker
one of those services using free proxy servers?
Absolutely NO! IdentityCloaker.com operates its own growing
network of private servers. We do not rely on some low quality free proxy servers
that are almost always oversaturated, overloaded, and may be even infected by
malevolent software threatening - not helping, your privacy. Another important
difference is that the data transmitted between you and our proxy servers is
encrypted using military class cipher! This is an extremely important feature,
usually not offered even by premium services offering access to private proxy
servers.
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I don't have a PC. Can I use Identity Cloaker on my Mac / Linux computer?
The Identity Cloaker
client application works on Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1. A
pre-release version if also available for Macs. On other devices, such as
iPhone/iPad and Android based smartphones and tablets, it is possible to
connect via VPN. If you are not sure whether you will be able to connect to
our servers on your specific device, please contact our customer support.
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I don't use MS Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Will Identity Cloaker work?
Yes, it will! Identity Cloaker will work with
generally any standard internet browser.
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Can I use
Identity Cloaker for securing other Internet traffic - not only web?
Yes, but with some limitations. This depends on the specific
application. While most recent applications should be able to transmit data
over HTTP proxy servers and they very often claim they are, the situation is
a bit different. We found that some applications which allow you to set HTTP
proxies simply ignore their own settings and transmit the data directly. Please
understand that this is not a fault of Identity Cloaker but of the third party
applications.
JAVA applets are a category of its own. It is possible
to write JAVA applets so that they completely bypass any proxy server set either
in the web browser and/or in the JAVA settings. No matter if you tell JAVA to
*always* use proxy server, some JAVA applets will simply ignore this fact. To
be honest, we really don't like JAVA applets. JAVA applets can transmit malevolent
code to your computer including computer viruses, crash or freeze your Win PC
and tend to be unstable. We recommend disabling JAVA Applets (not JavaScript)
in your web browser unless you absolutely need them.
There are some possible solutions to this problem. One
of them is to use an application called
FreeCap.
It is however not bug free and for example JAVA and Flash applets designed for
streaming of video content do not work correctly when executed from FreeCap
and crash. Please refer to the
FreeCap website for
more info about the FreeCap application.
Another, and from the technology perspective, much better
solution would be to use a full-blown Virtual Private Network technology such
as
L2TP/IPSec,
OpenVPN or
with some reluctance
PPTP. We have
already successfully tested all these VPN systems, but at this point we can't
promise when we will begin offering them.
UPDATE: We
now offer
OpenVPN
and L2TP over IPSec
access to all of our (proxy) servers as a part of our standard offer! The
VPN access is being offered as a part of the standard subscription
service, with no additional fee.
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I have to
use a proxy server provided by my employer / university / ISP to connect to
the Internet. Can Identity Cloaker work without direct access to the Internet?
Yes, it can! Identity Cloaker is one of very few commercially
available privacy protection services that does not need direct access to the
Internet and will still work. Identity Cloaker first establishes an encrypted
secure tunnel over your existing Internet connection no matter if through an
internal company proxy server or through direct connection, and once the tunnel
is established, all the web browsing is done through it. Please see our schemas
on the
How
it works page.
That should help you understand the whole thing better.
Naturally, you still have to be able to connect to the Internet and be able
to surf the web through web browser.
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How will
Identity Cloaker affect the speed of web browsing? I am afraid it will be too
slow.
This is a good question. The speed of your web browsing
when using Identity Cloaker will depend on several factors such as how far from
you is the Identity Cloaker proxy server you are connecting through, server
load etc. The "middleman" factor will naturally cause some delay in connection
*BUT* if you are not too far from the proxy server you are using, you will very
likely notice only a truly minimal delay. On the other hand, Identity Cloaker
will, in some scenarios, actually improve your web browsing speed!
How is that possible you ask? The secure tunnel through
which all the data is being transmitted is not only encrypted to prevent data
eavesdropping, it also sends the data in compressed format. If for example you
visit something.com which is a content rich blog (for example) with
around 100KB of text and the webmaster is not using any "on-the-fly" compression
mechanism (very common), that 100KB of text would normally mean your computer
has to download those 100KB (plus something for headers).
If you use Identity Cloaker, the data is compressed on
the proxy server side and your computer receives them in compressed format.
So instead of 100KB your computer would download only, say, 20KB of data because
text is highly compressible.
So to sum it up: Identity Cloaker can both cause a minor
decrease as well as a moderate increase in web browsing speed depending on the
specific situation.
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Is there any limit
of the amount of data I can transfer every month?
There is now no limit at all!
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Is there
a free version of Identity Cloaker?
No there is not. Offering a free version of our service
would undermine the quality of our service for the paying customers and would
lead to massive abuse. Please also keep in mind that Identity Cloaker is not
just a proxy server service which does nothing more than hiding your IP address
which is way too far from a "privacy protection service". The main difference
between pure proxy server services and Identity Cloaker is that the communication
between you and the proxy server is encrypted with a 256-bit military class
cipher.
The encryption and decryption of the data is done in real-time.
While on any modern PC you will not even be able to notice this, the server
will. The server is the part of the link than needs to do most of the CPU intensive
encryption job. Our system has been designed to cope with this load, however,
if we were offering a free version of our service, the server(s) load would
go to unacceptable levels. And we didn't even mentioned the bandwidth consumption.
Identity Cloaker is very affordable so that almost anyone
can afford it. Please see our
order page for the current pricing.
UPDATE: There is now a FREE DEMO
version of Identity Cloaker available!
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What if Identity
Cloaker doesn't work for me? Is there some money-back guarantee?
Yes, there is! We offer a 14-day "no question asked"
money-back guarantee. If Identity Cloaker doesn't work for you, just contact
our support and your order will be refunded. Please understand that in order
to prevent abuse and due to the nature of the service, we can not offer a
longer money back guarantee. However, Identity Cloaker is so simple to use
that you should be able to test everything and see if it's the right thing
for you in no more than a few days.
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Can I use Identity Cloaker to surf illegal websites or do something illegal?
The short answer: no, you can not! When using Identity
Cloaker, you have to agree not to breach any law valid in the country of the
party running Identity Cloaker (Czech Republic) and the country where the proxy
server is located. If visiting some particular websites is considered illegal
by your country government but legal by both Czech Republic and the proxy server
country, we will not interfere. This is between you and your government.
Hypothetical scenario:
You live in China and your government makes visiting certain
websites such as cnn.com illegal and if they find out you visited
cnn.com, you could have some serious troubles. They normally block
access to cnn.com but with the help of Identity Cloaker, it's a matter
of clicking one button to "punch a hole in the firewall". You choose to be connected
through a proxy server located in the Netherlands.
So will you have a problem with us in this case? Absolutely
not. Visiting cnn.com is 100% legal in both Czech Republic (company seat) and
the Netherlands (proxy server location).
Note: we don't really know whether visiting cnn.com
is considered illegal in China, this was meant only as an example for illustrative
purposes.
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Do you have a question that has not been answered? Please
do not hesitate to contact our
customer support.
Questions
