A browser extension being developed for Chrome and Firefox will let Web users create VPN-like connections to the Internet by routing all their traffic through a friend's trusted connection.

Consumer VPNs—like the CryptoSeal service that shut down due to fears over government snooping—let users create secure connections to a VPN provider's data center. The user's traffic is sent to the rest of the Internet only after it gets encrypted and pushed through the VPN service.

The new "uProxy" will work in a similar way except that your traffic is routed through a friend's secure connection before traveling to the rest of the Internet. Both you and your friend would need to have a browser extension installed and running for it to work. You could also use uProxy to route traffic through your home Internet connection when you're out of the house and on a public Wi-Fi network.

"uProxy routes one user's connection to the Internet via a friend they trust," the makers of the technology explain on its website. "Both users have to have uProxy installed. uProxy is intended to allow one user, with a safer and more secure connection to the Internet, to share their connection to the Internet with trusted friends and family, or even with themselves when they travel. By encrypting the connection between the two users, uProxy makes it much harder for an intermediate step on the journey to watch, block, or misdirect traffic."

uProxy would also help users find other uProxy users through chat services like Facebook or Google Hangouts.

The site notes that uProxy "is not designed to be an anonymizing service. Services like Tor provide a much stronger guarantee that a user's IP address is hidden from the target site as well as intermediaries. uProxy does not provide such a guarantee."

The proxy is only for Web traffic and thus does not affect file sharing tools like torrent clients.

uProxy is being developed by the University of Washington and Brave New Software, with funding from Google Ideas. Chrome and Firefox are the first browsers it will come to. For now, it's in a limited release and you can apply for access here.

A Google Ideas event yesterday also spotlighted a new tool for protecting websites from DDoS attacks and a "Digital Attack Map" that tracks DDoS attacks in real time. "Many websites face targeted digital attacks by people who aim to silence their speech. This tool and visualization specifically surfaces anonymous traffic data related to these attacks, letting people explore historic trends and see related news reportage of outages happening on a given day," Google said.