Switching Your IP Address

Now the ability to change your IP address is well documented on these pages. In my opinion a proxy or …

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!

The Internet Censorship Debate

As with most things are life, there are always positive and negatives. This is especially the case with the Internet and leads almost inevitably to the Internet Censorship Debate.

It is inarguable that the internet has changed the world. It has made the way we research easier; we have the wonders of the world at our finger tips; delight and desires realised at the touch of a button and it has revolutionised the way we shop and keep in touch with one another. This is especially helpful for those in remote places who long to keep connected to the rest of the world.

But there are negatives to the World Wide Web. It is now easier to access inappropriate material and the internet is a scouring ground for criminals to prey on the young and vulnerable.

As the internet has become more mainstream and embraced by society, the powers that be have censored the internet. All countries have some form of censorship imposed upon them; some may be rather lax whilst others take firm control over what can be viewed over the World Wide Web.

No one is disputing that the internet can be a dangerous place full of uncertainties. But the level of censorship that government applies can be questioned.

Within certain countries the internet is totally restricted, the government decides what can and can not be viewed. Impossible, I hear you cry! But it is true. In these countries the government control all computers that have internet connection capability. Now, this obviously is the extreme of internet censorship.

But the government will obviously always argue that censorship is for the good and the welfare of the public. Protecting the young and the vulnerable is the reason for censorship. Yet, when there are no clear definitions of what is offensive or harmful, and then the debate flares. internet censorship debate Internet censored

The reason that there is such a debate over internet safety is down to the impact that this censorship has over the basic human right of Free Speech.

Some argue that censorship of the internet limits free speech and this goes against basic human rights. This is true, however there are laws relating to Free Speech that concern speech when it id classed as harmful, offensive or insights hate.

The problem arises, however, when considering what is classed as offensive. Everyone has a different view point built up by their own beliefs and experiences. If the internet was censored due to what every person found offensive, I doubt that there would be anything left.

This is where the internet debate begins to get stuck. Depending on the individual’s viewpoint depends on whether internet censorship is a positive or negative regime.

Internet Privacy Protection – Is there a Need?

o we really need to be concerned with protecting our privacy on the internet? Are there really legions of people spying on us and watching our every move. Well hopefully this article will give you some knowledge of the issues that are really involved in priivacy protection on the internet.

So who is likely to be spying on us and why?

Well let’s be clear, internet crime is big, very big, the totals are never going to be exact as we simply don’t have a record but you’d be safe to assume it’s going to be counted in billions of dollars world wide. Many, perhaps the majority of these crimes are not listed, recorded or even noticed so an estimate is all we’re going to get.

There are many major crime syndicates who are targeting the internet. Cyber Gangs in places like Brazil, China and Eastern Europe have very sophisticated criminal networks. Stealing over the internet from you and me is immensely rewarding and relatively risk free. You can see the attraction to the criminal fraternity big rewards, safe and very low risk.

So we know that gangs will routinely target the average internet surfer, furthermore many will be extremely careful in how they steal from you but there are literally endless ways to steal your information and ultimately your money. For instance I have seen a sealed copy of windows XP which looked 100% legitimate bought from Eastern Europe, it was shrink wrapped, had a licence, manual included but it had an extra bonus. The CD contained a version of Windows XP with spyware and trojans already installed, as soon as you used this version of XP your details, accounts and passwords would be passed out to a remote site on the internet.

Just like you lock your doors to protect your possessions and home, many people do the same on the internet. I want my privacy protected because online I pay bills, order goods, do my banking and many other activities which involve my financial and personal details. Do I want these details logged on servers, routers and at my ISP – well no not really.

You see it’s not that hard to steal personal details online, it’s slightly harder to make money from them but not too difficult. It’s certainly the only way a gang of cyber criminals in Rio De Janerio will be able to steal from you without you holidaying in Brazil. If you did discover your bank account has been raided like this, what could you do? IN reality all you can do is try to get your money back from your bank or credit card provider, either way the criminal will be unlikely to pay for his crimes.

It’s certainly worth checking out how you can add another layer of protection when you surf online, proxies and VPNs are one possibility. However you should stay away from unmanaged, free proxies that you can find online, simply because they are often run by the criminals themselves in order to harvest passwords and email accounts. Try this as a useful introduction –

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.

Update on the Australian Internet Filtering

There has been an update (28th, June 2011) on the Australian Government’s internet filtering scheme and I’m afraid it still suffers from the usual limitations of such censorship schemes. To be fair they have made a few changes after the huge wave of crticism from the initial prototype scheme which frankly was ill conceived, badly implemented and well pointless to be honest.

So what has the Internet Industry Association (Australian Internet body) come up with this time?

Well it’s probably not surprising considering the current economic climate that it’s definitely pretty cheap. In fact there is virtually no new equipment required, nothing more than a few tweaks to current infrastructure. It’s important to keep costs down when you’re doing something as pointless as this sort of censorship of course.

Now of course no-one can argue with the basic assumption that we should protect children and restrict access to child pornography. The scheme will effectively implement the blocking of a list of such sites provided by Interpol and the Australian Federal Police. The onus will pretty much be on the ISPs using the big stick of section 313 if Australia’s Telecommunication Act. It’s not much more than a basic framework of a big blacklist of bad sites which are blocked by the ISPs in their routing tables.

The sites will also be blocked by the even more pointless method of modifying DNS tables. Just to clarify this method involves changing the DNS tables on Australian servers so that the ‘bad’ sites don’t resolve to their correct servers properly. It’s a very crude method, easily bypassed and one I’ve never liked. Messing around with the way the internet works is never a good idea but of course as well as being pointless and easily circumvented – it does have the advantage of being CHEAP!

Needless to say this probably won’t end here – lists of stuff you can’t do rarely get shorter. We’ll probably end up seeing lots of committees and groups lobbying for other web sites to be added to the list. Just as now you see some web sites about evolution being blocked in restrictive Muslim countries.

It’s an almost complete waste of time in my opinion. It’s headline grabbing nonsense that has very little real affect other than allowing a Government to pretend it’s doing something about a problem. The blocks and filtering will only be effective against people who don’t want to access these sites anyway – the vast majority of us. These filtering techniques are so easily bypassed by anyone with a mind to, there are literally thousands of security programs, secure VPNs and private proxies that just make these methods completely ineffective.

The other main issues is that the vast majority of this material is not stored on standard web servers. It’s shared by email, P2P and FTP – it’s stored and distributed on private networks and areas like the darknet. None of these filtering will effect these distribution points. Censorship is being implemented against the wrong people – innocent users of the internet. It will have no effect on sophisticated rings of technologically savvy paedophiles across the internet.

But the real concern is that it’s simply posturing and blocking access to a problem rather than trying to solve it. It doesn’t help the victims by altering routing tables so that Australian citizens can’t access the material – it’s still there, the victims are still victims. This posturing would be better replaced by concerted efforts to track down arrest and bring to justice the people who are creating and distributing this material. It’s of course much more difficult to do but does actually have an impact. Of course it will create more demand for an Aussie proxies perhaps.

What we’ll end up with is more pointless censorship on the average, law abiding internet users.