The problem
 The solution
 Setting it up

 Contents
 Questions

The Problem

Anonymous hubs provide a valuable service--when your data goes through them, websites cannot see who sent it. Anonymous hubs can also confuse your ISP, if it is trying to track your surfing habits. Unfortunately, this comes at a price. Anonymous hubs can slow down at peak usage times; they even sometimes become inactive. And ultimately, sending your information through an intermediary (the anonymous hub) is never as efficient as sending it directly to the intended recipient (the website).

GhostSurf's anonymous hubs window gives you some control over these problems. You can time the hubs to find the fastest ones, remove broken ones, and select the ones you want to use. But even the fastest ones may slow down periodically as traffic patterns change on the Internet; sometimes your information may not get through. GhostSurf's "blast transfer" feature is designed to solve this problem. With blast transfer, your anonymous Internet connection can be fast and reliable, sometimes even faster than your normal, direct connection.

The Solution

Normally, when you visit a website, your computer sends a request for that website's contents to the website itself, and waits for the response. When the response comes, it displays the page it has received on your computer's screen. Alternatively, when you're using anonymous hubs, your computer sends the request to the anonymous hub first. It then waits for the response. The request goes through the anonymous hub to the website; the website's response is sent back to the anonymous hub (because it doesn't know who or where you are) and it is then forwarded back to your computer by the anonymous hub.

Blast transfer changes this slightly. Rather than sending your request to one anonymous hub and waiting for the response, it sends your request to many anonymous hubs and waits for the first response. This solves two problems--slow anonymous hubs, and faulty anonymous hubs. If, for example, you're not using blast transfer and your anonymous hub is slow, your request will take a long time to reach the destination website; it'll take a long time for the response to reach you too. If the anonymous hub you're using is broken, your request will never reach the destination website; you'll never get a response. On the other hand, if you're using blast transfer, some of the anonymous hubs can be slow or broken; it doesn't matter. When your request is sent out to many hubs, only one needs to be fast and responsive. If you're using five hubs, the odds are much better that you'll get a quick response than if you're using one hub.

Setting it Up

You can turn on the blast transfer feature in the Options window, and you can instruct GhostSurf to use a certain number of hubs at once. Again, the more hubs you use at once the more reliable (and faster) your anonymous connection will be, but the heavier the load on your Internet connection. We recommend between 2 and 5 for this setting.

In the anonymous hubs window, select more than one hub to use. If you select 10 hubs in this window and have blast transfer use 5 hubs at once, GhostSurf will choose 5 of the 10 you have selected at each request. If, on the other hand, you choose fewer hubs than you would like to use at once, GhostSurf will just use all the ones you've chosen. Make sure you choose only the fastest hubs; this will improve your chances of maximum speed.