The Good:
Compact; easy to use; lots of options to secure your Web browsing and e-mail; doubles as secure, portable file storage.The Bad:
Some of the security options can slow Web browsing, particularly when loading graphics.The Verdict:
If you want to hide your surfing habits and e-mail from casual prying eyes, this is the easiest way to do it.
Reviewed on:
Hewlett-Packard Media Center m380n Photosmart 3 GHz Pentium 4 PC with 1GB of RAM, DVD and DVD-recordable drives, a seven-way media reader, TV-input/PVR capability, Maxtor 120GB IDE and 250GB SATA hard disks running at 7200 RPM, an HP F1703 LCD panel, a 128MB NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 video card, and Windows XP Media Center Edition.Also available for:
Windows PCs with a USB port.
REVIEW:
Protecting personal information is the biggest single issue most users have when using the Internet. Some want to surf anonymously, some want to transfer information without it being read by unintended parties, and others fear identity theft - either through having their messages intercepted or their keystrokes logged by a hacker. The StealthSurfer II from Stealth Ideas Inc. tackles all these problems with a gadget smaller than your thumb.
As the name suggests, this is the second generation of StealthSurfer's privacy product. The most obvious change is the hardware. The original was a basic USB memory key, whereas the StealthSurfer II is a new type of USB Flash drive with a space-saving design. It has a standard plastic shell with a USB connector at one end like an everyday Flash drive (in capacities starting at 128MB for $99 U.S. and ranging up to 1GB), but you can also pull the memory card out of this sleeve. The tiny card is about the size of a Sony MemoryStick, but it has a standard USB pinout at one end so you can still plug it into any standard USB port - gimmicky, but very neat.
Aesthetics aside, a lot has changed under the hood as well.
The original Stealthsurfer contained a secure version of Netscape, and that was about it. The new package uses Firefox for Web browsing, and has a slew of other programs included, which I'll cover in a moment.
Setup is straightforward. You plug the StealthSurfer II into a USB port on your computer, and click on the installation program when the drive appears in the Windows Explorer pane. Then you enter the default password, and within about five minutes the program will unzip and install itself on the memory key (I'm not clear why it doesn't come pre-installed instead of as a zipped file, but it just doesn't ...).
Once installed, you can change the password (which encrypts the contents of the drive, including any files you want to carry around on it), and the programs are ready to run from the USB Flash drive. They don't launch automatically when you plug the StealthSurfer II into a computer - instead, you have to open the drive's directory in Windows Explorer and launch the programs you want manually, which is a bit clumsy. An autorun program would have been a cleaner design.
As a nice touch, though, there's a quick-logout hot button that appears in the Windows toolbar, so you don't have to go searching for the "eject USB mass storage device" screen.
The programs themselves are very slick. You get versions of the Firefox Web browser, Thunderbird e-mail program, RoboForm automated on-line form filler, and the Internet Anonymizer program. All the software is optimized to run directly off the StealthSurfer II.
And that's the key to this product: The programs run off the memory key, so you don't leave any files behind on the computer you're using. That includes cookies, temp files, browsing histories, cached Web page files, and so on. In other words, you can keep the record of your surfing habits secret - ranging from where you surfed to the banking passwords you use - whether you're browsing the Web from home, work, a hotel or cyber café.
