FreePay gone Bankrupt?

According to a recent post from a purported ex-employee of FreePay, the company might be filing for bankruptcy. FreePay, formerly known as Gratis Internet, is a company that gives away free products using a referral marketing based system.

In March, the company changed its terms of service so that users only had ninety days to complete the requirements to get the prize, where as previously, they had an unlimited amount of time. After this change occurred, many people stopped doing the FreePay sites altogether, while some tried to finish the requirements in time to get their gifts (myself included). Since the beginning of May, I have been waiting on a Macintosh Mini and a iPod Nano to be delivered to me by FreePay. Many others have reported similar problems with FreePay, prompting Anything4free to drop the company to a "D" rating, and Referral Swapper to remove them completely. In some cases, people are only reporting that they are receiving their merchandise after reporting the company to the Better Business Bureau.

According to the anonymous ex-employee, FreePay has been hit hard by a lawsuit filed in New York against the company for violating their privacy policy by selling their email list. However, in a strange move, FreePay seems to have started a new blog here on Blog*Spot. They previously had a blog on their regular web site. Why they have chosen to do this, I'm not sure. I can only hope it is a good sign that they are actively still at work and will hopefully continue to fulfill their contract obligations and send out customers (some who have been waiting since January) products.

Get $10 to Promote Freedom Online

The authors of a proxy software program called Circumventor are willing to pay anyone who installs it $10. Circumventor was created to help people who are firewalled in (either at work, school, or by country censorship) and allows them to view web pages they otherwise wouldn't be able too.

Unlike other proxy systems which rely on main servers that can be blocked, Circumventor wants to have a range of many IPs, so individuals can connect through your personal computer to blocked sites. By using this method, it would be virtually impossible for firewalls to be configured to block out a range of IPs.

There is very little documentation on Circumventor, except that it is reported to be based off of a similar proxy called CGIProxy. Circumventor can only run on systems running Windows XP or 2000 and you must run it for at least 2 weeks to get your $10. I have not run it myself so I don't know how much bandwidth or system resources it uses. However, the reasoning behind it is genuine, as it was mentioned in the EFF's newsletter. Their intentions are to allow people who live in countries that censor their internet connections, so it is a worthy cause.

If you sign up and run it, leave me a comment and let me know how it's going.

We will pay you $10 to install the Circumventor and share it out