The last few months I’ve been testing out a variety of proxy services to get access to websites which are blocked in China (youtube, facebook, twitter, etc) and just when I had found a great solution it stops working. Fortunately the company, Freedur, seems to be on top of it and hopefully the problem of their entire customer records being deleted will be remedied and they can continue to provide their service. Freedur, unlike Sneakme.net or my proxy, installs to a computer and has an on/off toggle switch which allows access to unblocked websites without routing through the proxy. This is a small but helpful addition.

If you check Freedur.com you’ll see a lengthy explanation of the events that led to the demise of this service. Some excerpts:

Working as an accountant on Freedur project, Chris was in charge of buying/paying various small things for our company, (for example advertising, etc.) He purchased for us domain name as well (freedur.com). He abused his access to our registrar account a week ago as well as today by redirecting freedur.com to his private servers (hosted by smallvillages.com hosting provider).

Chris has stole our web scripts, database and money and afterward destroyed our site and backups in an attempt to, with a group of his friends, Vincent Shen, a Chinese programmer from Shnaghai, and Rick Olson, an American programmer, take over Freedur service and run it on his private servers.

We have got a few questions from our customers regarding stolen database and about their Credit Card records. Yes, unfortunately, Chris has now Credit Card records of our customers, but all records are encrypted and only our engineers working on payment system have the algorithm to decrypt them. Also we can advise Chris this time, that abusing customer records in any way is severe crime and we will advise him to delete all copies of stolen database immediately.

For all illegal actions Chris performed against StackFile Corp. and its customers, we will be filing a set of law suits as well as against any hosting company running our web scripts on their servers (for example SmallVillages and MediumCube etc.)

Because our money is stolen, and Chris holds the money, we will ask this time all customers whose record is lost due to Chris sabotage, to fill a dispute on PayPal for a full refund (You can select reason: not satisfied by the product as it doesn’t provide all features it advertises on its declaration).

What a nightmare. Fortunately Freedur has decided to provide all of the details of what happened. This sort of espionage and domain theft actually isn’t too uncommon, all it takes is one person with access to the domain registrar. Freedur will be offering a month of free service to those affected by this so I’ll continue to use Freedur and hope that they can resume service as normal.

Obviously the best case scenario would be to not require a proxy at all.