Now the ability to change your IP address is well documented on these pages. In my opinion a proxy or VPN service is a necessity for anyone who spends any amount of time online. There is of course the security and privacy aspects which in these times when everyone from the Government to identity thieves are spying on your every move are of paramount importance. Even if you’re not worried about your Government spying on you, anyone who has had the hassle of their credit card details being stolen or their email account hacked will tell you it’s not worth the risk of beiong unprotected online.
Even if you’re not worried about these risks, then there’s still the simple invasion of privacy from the web sites you visit tracking and logging your every move then dumping tracker cookies on to your hard drive to stuff adverts in to every website you visit. But it doesn’t end there, many of these site as well as logging your details actually block and filter your access – primarily so they can make more money by selling you the same service for more money somewhere else. All this linked to your IP address, uniquely identifying your online presence.
So using a simple proxy at the very minimum makes some sense, but sometimes that isn’t enough. For example, if you wanted to watch the News on RTE (Irish TV station), then catch the latest Walking Dead on HBO and finish off with Match of the Day on the BBC – you’d actually need three different IP addresses – one Irish, one US and finally a UK IP address to be able to access all this stuff online. So rotating your IP address is pretty much a necessity too – here’s a video explaining it –
As you can see this program has the facility to switch either manually or automatically between IP addresses in all sorts of countries almost seamlessly. The manual switching to a specific country is of course useful, but why would you need to switch addresses automatically every few minutes? Well there’s several reasons for this but here’s some common ones.
Security is vastly improved when you switch your connection randomly as it obscures the fact you are using a proxy or VPN service. Consider the logs in any ISP or corporate network, if you use a single proxy that is all that would be visible. Of course it does hide the websites you visit but it will appear the only web server you ever connect to is a single proxy server. This makes it fairly obvious that a proxy is being used when a single address is only ever recorded. Switching between different servers will make this less obvious and have the benefit of distributing any activity logs between different locations.