Proxy’s for fun and anonymity – vol. 1

Oh no proxy related material!

Yeah I know that the world is full of proxies, but this ain’t gonna be another tutorial on how to change/set a proxy in Firefox/IExplorer/Opera/etc/passwd… this article is going to lead you straight to the basics of proxies, and how to work with them on raw TCP/IP connections.

But the last part I mentioned is only going to be a part of vol. 2, because I don’t have the time to write all of it at once.

What is a proxy?

A proxy is basically a gateway, a machine or a software that acts like a tunnel… no more, no less (better a short description than a long one). Basic functionality of a proxy:

—
client -> proxy -> web server -> proxy -> client
—

How many types can a proxy be?

As I know there are 3 types of proxies:

1. Transparent – If the website requests the proxy for your IP, then it will get it.
2. Anonymous – The website can’t get hold of your IP.
3. Highly Anonymous – Or so called l33t proxies, nobody installs this kind of proxy on his machine, but can be found in the will due too miss configuration.

Thing to note:a proxy is not only for anonymity, in different occasions you will get a page not found, even if you know the page is online… this kind of things happen when a ring from the internet chain “dies”, and you have to chose another route to go to the desired website.

What is not worth to speak of…

Socks 4/5 proxies and Wingates. Why? They are very rare nowadays, and nobody uses them. They were a big thing in the mid 90’s when IRC was more of a life-style.

Extra proxy stuff

You should also know that besides normal proxies, there have appeared a couple of cgi/php proxy’s… an illustrative example you can find here.

Proxy resources!

I will not make you here a list of proxy resources because there are so many online, but I will give you a link to an article that I think offers the biggest proxy resource on earth -> huge proxy resource!.

Check your proxies!

Many times proxies don’t live long in the wild, and here I mean anonymous and highly anonymous proxies. I recommend you to store your proxies in a flat file in the following way:

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proxy_address:port

ex:

123.12.65.2:8080
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And check which proxies work, and which don’t with the proxy checking script, written in PHP, called PHProxy: download

EOF! till vol. 2