The Glade 4.0

Does anyone here make regular use of proxy servers and/or VPNs? If so, which ones would you recommend and why? When one uses proxies and vpns, I assume that just means the proxy/vpn service now has your actual IP address instead of the destination website, so really you're just trusting a different entity to maintain your privacy, right?

These are technologies which exist to serve different purposes. What are you wanting to do? I suspect the answer I'll be giving you is TOR, but I don't want to assume.

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Nothing in particular. I've just been getting more interested in the nuts and bolts of net security and anonymity lately. My question today was prompted by a dust-up on the legal blogs over a law prof who "outed" and then harassed a few anonymous commenters who had criticized him on certain blogs. In the ensuing discussion of privacy, anonymity and the applicable netiquette, the subject of proxies and VPNs came up and sparked my interest.

I have a 'squid' proxy set up on the same server I run the Glade on. I use it to bypass restrictive firewalls; I ssh to the Glade and tunnel http through it to the proxy. For what you're describing, though, this type of firewall, or really any firewall you set up yourself, is useless. To effectively anonymize your internet presence, you want to use a public proxy service, where your traffic can mingle with everyone else's, and you disappear. TOR is a well known tool for this purpose, though I have not used it myself. Basically, if someone was tracking your internet usage, they'd be able to trace from your PC to the TOR gateway or other proxy. If the proxy works as advertised, they would not be able to track you beyond that.

A VPN, on the other hand, is used if you want to go to a known destination but hide the contents of your traffic.

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I considered something like HideMyAss to get by MLBs arcane geographic blackout restrictions on the MLB.TV app service.

I decided against it (both MLB.TV and HideMyAss) for various reasons.

So, a proxy service will hide the originating requestor's IP address, but not much else. What a proxy server is generally used for is to go hand-in-hand with a cache and a blacklist. You make all of your web requests to the proxy server, it then checks to make sure that's allowable activity, serves from local cache any page/images/video/etc. that it has, and only in the event that your request is valid and not stored locally does it then send out the request. Some public proxies are run on the Internet, but their purpose is mainly to provide employees with access to content that their employers are blocking with their own firewalls and blacklists. I doubt they're very secure.

VPNs are a way to encrypt traffic, but are not generally a consumer solution. They're a method by which an entity can privately pass traffic amongst different branches of itself over a public medium, primarily. Say you have a site in New York and a site in LA that need to communicate with each other. The cheapest way to do this is via the Internet, but you don't want to be doing so insecurely, so you establish a VPN to encrypt your traffic. It's possible to use a VPN to obfuscate the original source of traffic, but that's not its primary purpose.

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LTTP. Yes, most free internet proxy sites are most certainly not to be trusted. Especially for any secure traffic. A proxy is basically being the middle-man for your traffic, and therefore can generally see it all in the clear.

TOR is a bit more secure in that one server is not supposed to be proxying all of your traffic, many servers are supposed to be relaying different bits. It's also supposed to be difficult to trace because of this as well.

There are other methods that are difficult for firewalls and other things to detect, like proxying through an SSH tunnel which I can verify works rather well (just not for the product my company makes, along with TOR and the others).

You can even be really sneaky and hide your traffic in ping or DNS. Though if your admin is watchful, seeing gigabytes of traffic as ping or DNS from one IP address should raise questions.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!