Press reports

Anonymisation service AN.ON launches commercial operation (2007-06-22)

The popular internet anonymisation tool JAP is getting a new name and a new platform: JAP has been renamed to JonDo (a pun on "John Doe"), AN.ON to JonDonym. The service is now run by JonDos GmbH, a business founded by members of the former research and development team. With public sponsoring of the AN.ON project having expired in 2006, this Regensburg, Germany - based company (www.jondos.de) will now fund operation and development of this cutting-edge privacy-enhancing technology.

AN.ON, the anonymisation service, and JAP, the corresponding client program, were originally designed and developed at German universities in Dresden, Berlin and Regensburg. The Independent Centre for Privacy Protection (ULD), run by the north german state of Schleswig-Hostein, provided legal support for the project. AN.ON represents the current state of the art in internet anonymisation: its technology ensures that it is impossible to uncover the identity (IP address) of a user. Even the operators of the service, as well as the providers of the servers making up the anonymisation chain (called a Mix Cascade), do not have the possiblity to break the user's anonymity, as long as only one of the servers is uncompromised.

Some free AN.ON services will still be offered by non-profit organisationslike the ULD. The majority of servers though will be new servers requiring payment, offering longer and therefore even safer anonymisation chains, with servers based in several different countries (currently Germany, the UK and Thailand). The new servers will also provide the users with higher speed and increased availability. Both the client and server software will continue to be available fre  of charge as open source software, free for anybody to use, inspect or modify.

In order to use the new servers, users (called JonDonauts) prepay JonDos for a certain amount of traffic to be anonymized. That credit can then be used with all servers. JonDos provides various payment methods, some of which are completely anonymous, and does not store any user data. This way paying users enjoy state-of-the-art privacy while using the internet via JonDo.