The service is meant to be a secure alternative to Pastebin

Apr 19, 2012 13:55 GMT  ·  By

Ever since Pastebin revealed its plans to rid the site of hackers and their data dumps, hacktivists have tried to find not only ways of protest, but also alternatives. Now, they’ve launched AnonPaste, a website that’s meant as a secure version of Pastebin.

The service’s availability was announced on April 17, when Anonymous representatives and the Peoples Liberation Front (PLF) issued a press release.

“As many might be aware, PasteBin has been in the news lately for making some rather shady claims as to what they are willing to censor, and when they are willing to give up IP addresses to the authorities,”  the founders of AnonPaste wrote.

“And as a recent leak of private E-Mails show clearly, PasteBin is not only willing to give up IP addresses to governments – but apparently has already given many IPs to at least one private security firm. And these leaked E-Mail’s also revealed a distinct animosity towards Anonymous. And so the PLF and Anonymous have teamed up to offer a paste service truly free of all such nonsense.”

The list of benefits offered by AnonPaste includes the fact that connections are not logged and all the pastes are encrypted using 256-bit AES encryption. Moreover, the encryption is applied at browser level, which theoretically means that the site’s servers will not store any “usable” data.

Other advantages include the inexistence of moderation or censorship.

“Because the data on our servers is unreadable by us (or anyone), the responsibility for the legality or appropriateness of any paste is the sole responsibility of the person posting. So there will be no need for us to police this service, and in fact we don’t even have the ability of deleting any particular paste,” PLF and Anonymous explained.

The service will be maintained with the help of donations, making it an ad-free website.

“We feel that it is essential that everyone, and especially those in the movement – have a safe and secure paste service that they can trust with their valuable and often politically sensitive material. As always, we believe in the radical notion that information should be free,” they conclude.

The most interesting thing about this new service will be to see if it gets approved by Anonymous hacktivists. So far we’ve seen AnonyUpload, a replacement for Megaupload, and even an Anonymous operating system, both of which were immediately rejected and named as being schemes launched against the community.