Public proxy servers are a good thing, for three very different reasons.
 

• First, they provide a way of distributing network traffic effeciently in real time, especially in response to the realtime "flash crowd" effect.  What happens when Kasparov plays Deep blue, and 1 million people worldwide all want to watch the match on the net?  What happens when netscape releases a new browser, and every geek in creation needs a copy immediately?  The answer is::nothing, because the sites that are being hit with ourtageous numbers of requests effectively become inacessable to everyone.  Enter the proxy server: If everyone were using the proxy server of their choice, then instead of 1 million direct connections, IBM would have to handle one thousand connections, and one thousand proxy servers would serve a thousand customers each, and everyone would be happy

 
• Second, they provide a way around censors.  Censors come in all possible ideological persuasions. Some want to censor sex, some politics, some religion, some entertainment, some cultural pollution. Some of these censors attempt to control the web by blocking "undesirable" sites. Proxy servers provide a way to circumvent them.

 
• Third, (and best) every browser in existance is already equipt to use them, and the technology to provide them is already ubiquitous, because for all practical purpose, a proxy server is the same thing as a firewall, and everyone agrees that firewalls to keep the bad guys out are a good thing.  Isn't it nice that the same technology that keeps the bad guys out can also keep the other bad guys from keeping the good guys (that's you) in?
  





Proxy Blocking

Since I established this page, the most common feeback, by far, has been "help! my ISP is blocking all the proxies you list".  The culprits seem to be politically motivated: Culprit #1 is the United Arab Emeritus, which seems to have made it their mission to maintain an internet bottlneck which "protects" their population from undesirable influences.  Naturally to ensure complete protection, they have to block proxies which would bypass their blocking.  Ideally, every web server would also be a proxy server, and would devote some percentage of its available bandwidth to servicing proxy requests; but that is not yet the case.

If you are being blocked, I recommend you think laterally to locate proxies that your censors do not know about.  Easy to find lists (like this one) are also easy for the censors to find, so they'll be busily blocking sites as fast as I name them.

• Find your own: I recommend using search keys such as "proxy" and common proxy port numbers such as "3128" and "8000".
• Web meeting services just happen to act as proxies, for example www.webex.com allows you to set up a meeting.
• Proxy portals exist where you connect and send SSL traffic to and from, while they proxy the web access.  Try www.safeweb.com or www.the-cloak.com.  If you are being bloced from safeweb.com, try sending email to feedback@safeweb.com for a fresh list of alternate portals.
• Grow your own: there are plenty of places that will sell you a web site with CGI access very cheap, in some cases for free.  Add a little knowhow, a little freeware, and you've got your own private proxy server.  For example, there's CGI proxy which can be dropped into any cgi-bin directory you own.  Browse there, then continue browsing by proxy.   The most important thing if you do grow your own proxy is to not tell anyone about it.  Obscurity is your best security.
  
• If there's a particular file or web page you really need (and you already know what it is) try using services which remotely access web pages for you, such as the Altavista translation service.

 

Related Good Ideas

Crowds is an idea from Michael Reiter and Avi Rubin at AT&T.  The basic idea is to become anonymous by joining a crowd, and to pass browsing requests to a random member of your crowd.  In effect, every member of the crowd runs a proxy server for the benefit of the eveyone else.  Read all about it at the crowd wiki entry.  Crowds seems to have been replaced by a a second generation project called Tor

Lucent has a public technology demonstration of a Personalized Web Assistant that enhances the basic concept of proxy with revocable per-site passwords, nicknames, and email addresses.

Anonymizer.com is a paid anonymous surfer, but offers a free (but delayed) anonymizer too.




The Work is not yet Done

• If you host mega-events, you should run a proxy service the rest of the time.  Are you listening Netscape, Microsoft, AOL, IBM?  Running a proxy service will help get your message through when it's fresh and hot, and at lower cost than dedicating mega-resources to mega-events.
• If someone would like to censor your web site, you should run a proxy service.  Regard it as the price of getting your message through.

• Multiproxy.org has a proxy you run locally and which switches among a list of known remote proxies.  The site also maintains a list of known proxies.    In general, there's a continuous battle going on between censors and proxy servers, so any llist of specific proxies rapidly becomes obsolete.  So if you're working around a censor, you've got to be agile, and no rely on published lists.
  

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