Being a Bit British Again (By Proxy)

Turkey is one of my favorite countries to live in, and has been for years. It’s got a wonderful climate, …

Upgrading your VPN Security

Many people use both proxies and VPNs for security reasons, in fact you’re unlikely to be able to connect to …

If you’re searching for anonymous proxies in 2009 be very careful how you use them. Sure there’s plenty of these proxies around but remember most of these servers are operating as open proxies without the knowledge of the network or systems administrators. For instance lots of them are running in corporate and educational networks on pcs, forgotten or misconfigured servers sitting in a corner somewhere.

Now if you’ve no problem with using the latest 2009 web proxies without the owners consent, then fine – I’m not here to moralise on this. What I do want you to be aware of is two main points –

1) Because these servers are rarely patched up to date or configured correctly – they are extremely insecure. It is likely that hackers will either take over or partly run these open proxies at some point.

2) HTTP – the protocol that you do the vast majority of your web browsing. Is a clear text protocol that is the whole data stream can be read easily. So anyone who logs the data passing through these proxies will see everything you are doing, downloading etc and your IP address.

I personally would never use a free anonymous proxy at all, I know how insecure they all are. If you do make sure you are very careful about what you browse through – never do anything which involves passing any personal information on them. Even something as trivial as logging into a forum or account will give away huge amounts of information about you. If you are unlucky enough to be on one of the many hacked 2009 open proxies it could cost you.

Why Can You Never find Working Anonymous Proxies

I get asked this quite a lot, but my answer is quite simply – it’s easy of course you can find working anonymous proxies they are everywhere ! But there is a single word missing here, a subtext to the question and that word is ‘free’

Free Working Anonymous Proxies

Now this is altogether a slightly different problem, the reason of course it’s so difficult is cost. Running a free anonymous proxy for everyone who wants, privacy, anonymity or simply to bypass restrictions based on their local firewalls and proxies – costs an awful lot of money. As anyone who has run a heavy bandwidth using web site knows it can get extremely expensive.

So the question is why would anyone supply anonymous proxies for free to total strangers? The answer may surprise you but it is that they don’t, I mean they don’t on purpose. Makes sense when you think about it, most people have other more fun ways to spend their money than supplying free anonymous proxies.

So where do these working proxies come from, well they’re either left open accidentally, or hacked and made into proxies and used and abused by the internet freeloaders society. The reason it’s difficult to find working proxies like this is that they usually fall over fairly soon or their owner realise what’s happen and pull the plug before they get even bigger bills from people surfing.

Ironically when they do pull the plug they actually have one of the most extensive logs of web searching about. Yes these servers have huge logs of everyone who has surfed through them, their IP addresses and every web site they visit. Enough to easily send bills out to each person although I don’t know of anyone doing it. It would make those people thing about their working anonymous proxies though if the surfers got a bandwidth bill from a systems administrator of a hacked server somewhere!

Surf anonymous – a dictionary and some technology

I get quite a few emails from one of my other sites asking me how I can surf anonymous. You’d be surprised both how many people search for this information – and how many people misspell anonymous! But enough of this brevity, the reason people are worried is that our information is not safe, it’s not secure.

You might need a search warrant or a crowbar to gain access to your home PC and information. But unfortunately there’s much easier ways to gain access to your personal browsing history, your emails, your banking logons and well just about everything else you do online.

In fact despite what you read your PC is a much safer place for your information. When it hits the net, you are no longer in control. This is the problem when people ask me how to surf annonymous, they don’t realise that the first step out on to the internet is their ISP. Sitting happily on the ISP logs is a complete record of absolutely everything you do online. Every web site you visit, every file and picture you download and every video you watch is associated with your account and stored at your ISP.

If you’re in the US the police or NSA can access this information at will, in Europe Governments are planning legislation to access this information centrally. Who knows how many hackers and identity thieves have access to this information, how much do you know about security at your ISP?

So my friends – if you want to ahem – surf anoynmous then check out how to encrypt your connection and protect yourself – try this video to start.

Watching Media Sites like Hulu on the Internet

It’s actually quite frustrating, all the incredible media sites that are available online like Hulu, Pandora, BBC and NBC to name but a few but most people can only access a fraction of them. The culprit is a technology called geotargeting which controls what we have access to online.

Geotargeting works in quite a simple way, when we connect to the internet our IP address is readily available to every web site we visit. This IP address can be used to locate our exact geographical position and that’s what many web sites do. When we connect to a site they look up in a database where the IP address is registered to and this determines what content we see.

In many instances this is quite beneficial, for instance the search engines use this technology to give us relevant results to our queries. When we type in a search query, the results are tailored to our actual position – meaning if we search for an electrician we will get local results rather than ones in a different continent.

The other effects of geotargeting are not so useful, American users get blocked from online casino sites due to their laws on gambling, media sites restrict access to local audiences due to licensing issues. You’ll not get blocked when accessing web sites based in the same country, but you will if you accessing from a different one. People who emigrate or spend a lot of time outside their own country are especially affected, I travel a lot and when I’m away from home I can’t access the BBC Iplayer abroad for example.

This video may help –

The only way to access these sites is to disguise your IP address, you can do this in two main ways. The first is to use a proxy server – this is a server that sits between you and the website you visit forwarding requests as required. The benefit of this is the web servers only registers the proxy server address not yours. Many of the media sites like Hulu and NBC though will block this access and you will need to connect through a VPN (virtual provate network) . There’s loads of information online about these workarounds, so just check online for a solution.

USA

Free Working Anonymous Proxies