(Forked from an earlier version.)
Suppose you're at an internet café machine and you want to create something, but you don't trust the machine with access to your credentials and identity. What can you do?
It turns out there are a variety of services on the web that allow you to publish things anonymously, with a greater or lesser degree of permanency, and with a public URL.
- gist provides Markdown, editability (with a cookie I guess), versioning (and thus editing), and SSL encryption in transit.
- ideone provides syntax highlighting while you edit, and will run your programs in a variety of different languages.
- codepad also runs programs in a variety of different languages.
- WebPaste also seems to run programs in a few languages, but is kind of crummy.
- The original pastebin now has a Chrome extension, which lets you pastebin stuff in a popup window on top of whatever web page you have open. Seems like that could be handy. By default it only keeps stuff for a month, though.
There are lots more pastebins in the world, to the point where Wikipedia has a table comparing a few dozen of them.
There are also a zillion blogs and Wikis in the world that you could abuse.
For binary files, like MP3 files you downloaded, or 3D models you created. I think these services are called "webhards" in Korea.
- rapidshare lets you upload files anonymously. It gives you a secret link you can use to delete the file later.
There are also hotfile.com, filesonic.com, fileserve.com, megaupload.com, depositfiles.com, divshare.com, sendspace.com, filefactory.com, easy-share.com, uploading.com, and so on, but I haven't tried those yet.
DropBox and http://filebin.ca/ seem to allow people to download the files without jumping through RapidShare-style hoops.
So, how about actually writing some software? There are a variety of web pages that make this possible.
See also the ideone and codepad links from above.
- processing.js is for making display hacks by programming in a textarea, using HTML5 JS and Canvas. The web IDE doesn't have a way to save your work. The other IDEs for it, which look cooler, are hascanvas and Studio Sketchpad, which latter does seem to save your anonymous work (I did a simple hack on their default by making the background black.) Studio Sketchpad seems a little buggy. Sketch.processing.org doesn't seem to save your work but does report errors (unlike the others!)
I don't yet know of a way to put together a whole web service (e.g. a bulletin board) on one of these things.
Once you have created some pieces of persistent data on the web, probably with some kind of obnoxious long URL, you can link them from a single document (ideally in some format that allows you to make clickable links; gist.github is nice for this because you can write stuff in Markdown) but you might also want to give the individual resources URLs that are short enough that you can write them down on a piece of paper when you leave the cyber café. There are lots of services that do this; bit.ly is probably the most popular.
Bugmenot is handy for getting anonymous username/password pairs for those sites that you would normally have access to without registering.
IRC networks generally allow anonymous users. Blogs generally allow anonymous users to comment. Wikipedia allows you to contribute to arbitrary articles anonymously, although a few articles don't allow anonymous contributions, and generally your contributions will be subject to heightened scrutiny.
You can of course create an email account on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, I think live.com, or other similar providers, but then you go from being anonymous to having an at least potentially persistent pseudonymous identity. Also, these providers tend to include your originating IP address in your outgoing email, which is also a pseudonymous identity.
Lots of other services (e.g. Wordpress.com) require you to have an email address to sign up for them. Mailinator, which I haven't tried, posts any mail it receives on a public page. It has a bunch of alternative domains, and there are also other similar sites.