While browsing through the December issue of IEEE Spectrum, I came across an article describing (yet another) anonymizer service called Relakks. The company was founded by some of the leading Swedish Internet pioneers and member-of-parliament-hopefuls of the Swedish Pirate Party as a way to promote awareness of online privacy issues. Although technical details are somewhat scarce, it is stated that Relakks is a VPN service featuring 128-bit encryption and little to no degradation in perceived bandwidth. Since a month's worth of service is only $6 (5 Euro), I decided to give it a whirl.

Signing up is very simple. You select a user name and password and create a new network connection on your PC that accesses the Relakks VPN with those credentials. When you've opened the appropriate port and protocol on your firewall, you're all set.

This is where the fun stops. The claim that the service has little impact on your bandwidth is not true. Despite claims by the company that such problems have been solved, the service suffers from massive lag problems, and the connection is frequently dropped completely. In other words, it doesn't work any more reliably than a small town dial-up connection during a thunderstorm. I recommend that you save yourself six bucks and avoid this failed attempt at brilliance altogether.