Using Disposable mail boxes like Guerrilamail

I am a big fan of Avira Security Suite and the only flaw that you might find is not in their wide range of products but how they distribute its licences. Many companies such as PC World offer one to two months free, promotional license which can be acquired by giving your email address and some personal detail. These offers cannot be availed more than once from an email account. Obviously the first question that pops straight in our mind is what if we are somehow able to get unique email addresses once a month or so, then offers such as these can be used repeatedly.

All the email sites like gmail  require a lot of time for registration and remembering usernames and passwords is a very tedious job. What if there was a service which provided 'disposable mail boxes'? You must have realised where this post is heading towards.

Guerrilamail is a site which offers email address for an hour. After this time the account is deleted.It provides a couple of additional features like 'Forget Me' which instantly deletes the account or "give me another 1 hour' to extend the expiration time.

To create an account all you need to do is to enter the desired username and some space will be allocated for your emails. The process is quick,simple and there is no need to remember any password.

Services such as these were originally designed to prevent spam but have found newer, more innovative uses. You can give out this email address if you feel it will receive spam or the recipient is not trustworthy. There are other services which provide more features or more expiration time, for example mailinator or mailexpire. Links are provided at the bottom.

Personally, I have used guerrillamail's email service to get 3 months Avira promotional licence twice now, using different email ids. :D

Wiki on disposable mail box
Link to guerrilamail
Mailinator's home page
List of disposable mail sites

VPN introduced

Our institute recently banned facebook and other such sites in an effort to preserve bandwidth and although this was a very bad move we cannot do anything but find different ways to access the internet. There are web based proxy websites which fetch the page for you and then deliver them to your browser. They also allow the option of encoding the url so that administrators cannot monitor which site is being accessed. But these sites are really slow and unable to handle dynamic content effectively. So cgi proxies sites allow you to access facebook but it will not be able to load javascript or ajax content. Another solution is to use software such as PingFu, as explained before, which have developed their own set of proprietary protocols which encrypt data so that no one is able to 'read' it. 

The title is a bit misleading since this article is more about using third party software instead of complete understanding of VPN. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and was initially designed to allow remote users to become a part the office LAN keeping a few things in mind

1.Data confidentiality
2.Authentication support
3.Compatibility with huge range of devices

Data confidentiality is provided by using high grade encryption. VPN services are quite robust and can be employed on NAT devices as well. VPN servers can be installed on backbone routers as well to interconnect two different LAN's over the Internet.

Nowadays VPN connections also allow you to access high speed Internet through their fast connection to it. One such service is provided by SecurityKiss Tunnel software. It is a software which like PingFu bypasses firewalls by routing traffic to its servers, the difference being this software uses certain standards defined by VPN. To be able to run it you will also have to install OpenVpn as well. It is a foundation on which different companies build customised VPN products.

Simply install and run SecurityKiss with administrator privileges.Click on connect and you're done.Till now I have received seamless connectivity to various social networking sites like facebook.  Moreover torrent files were being downloaded at around 10kbps which is very impressive considering I did not have a premium account. They probably achieve this by using an efficient traffic compression scheme.

At present SecurityKiss provides 50mb per day limit to free users but there must be other similar services which provide better speed and download limit.Please leave a comment if you find/know any such vpn service.

NOTE: Remember to install openvpn and securitykiss with admin privileges.If there is a problem in connectivity try to run the software with admin privileges as well.

Few important links:

1. Wiki on VPN
2. OpenVpn
3. SecurityKiss Homepage
4. Learn more about PingFu