Surfing Thriough proxy

Introduction

Proxy may refer to one who or that which acts on behalf of someone or something else.

In computers it simply means that you ask a website to fetch you a page, but indirectly.

Use of proxy

Proxies are used around the world to surf anonymously. Whenever you visit a website they collect many personal information about you with the help of your ip adress, in order to avoid such a tresspasing people especially aware ones use proxy sites.

What do these sites do?

When you use a proxy server, it requests the website you intend to visit and get webpages for you hence saving you from losing your valuable information.

Types and functions

Proxy servers implement one or more of the following functions:

Caching proxy server

 caching proxy server accelerates service requests by retrieving content saved from a previous request made by the same client or even other clients. Caching proxies keep local copies of frequently requested resources, allowing large organizations to significantly reduce their upstream bandwidth usage and cost, while significantly increasing performance. Most ISPs and large businesses have a caching proxy. These machines are built to deliver superb file system performance (often with RAID and journaling) and also contain hot-rodded versions of TCP. Caching proxies were the first kind of proxy server.

The HTTP 1.0 and later protocols contain many types of headers for declaring static (cacheable) content and verifying content freshness with an original server, e.g. ETAG (validation tags), If-Modified-Since (date-based validation), Expiry (timeout-based invalidation), etc. Other protocols such as DNS support expiry only and contain no support for validation.

Some poorly-implemented caching proxies have had downsides (e.g., an inability to use user authentication). Some problems are described in RFC 3143 (Known HTTP Proxy/Caching Problems).

Another important use of the proxy server is to reduce the hardware cost. An organization may have many systems on the same network or under control of a single server, prohibiting the possibility of an individual connection to the Internet for each system. In such a case, the individual systems can be connected to one proxy server, and the proxy server connected to the main server.

Web proxy

A proxy that focuses on WWW traffic is called a "web proxy". The most common use of a web proxy is to serve as a web cache. Most proxy programs (e.g. Squid) provide a means to deny access to certain URLs in a blacklist, thus providing content filtering. This is usually used in a corporate environment, though with the increasing use of Linux in small businesses and homes, this function is no longer confined to large corporations. Some web proxies reformat web pages for a specific purpose or audience (e.g., cell phones and PDAs).

AOL dialup customers used to have their requests routed through an extensible proxy that 'thinned' or reduced the detail in JPEG pictures. This sped up performance but caused problems, either when more resolution was needed or when the thinning program produced incorrect results. This is why in the early days of the web many web pages would contain a link saying "AOL Users Click Here" to bypass the web proxy and to avoid the bugs in the thinning software.

List a few proxy servers

http://www.flyproxy.com my personal favorite!