Having a friend working as a network administrator at a high school, I can tell you that most of these network admins are overworked with nitty gritty paperwork and simply will not have the time to actively play the cat and mouse game with proxy websites. Only a very few minority will actually subscribe to our proxy newsletters from yahoo and google groups, search in yahoo answers, track the proxy listings for new free web proxies to be blacklisted and added to their school content blocks. Most netwok admins will completely rely on the school paid for content filtering systems such as websense, bluecoat, etc. Yes, there are some cases of them signing up in our proxy mailing lists every now and then. How do I know its them? Some used their work email accounts to sign up, without bothering for any stealth which once again highlighted their lack of time and dedication to fighting against bypass proxies. Some actually joined and then email us, the owners of the proxy newsletters to lecture us on the dangers of enabling school students uncensored internet access and to demand that we stop the proxy newsletter and our proxy business immediately. My proxy partner also told me about reading on a network admin's blog where he share self written scripts to analyze Internet access log files in his school and search for potential proxy sites that bypass school filters. Seriously, I do applaud their efforts and as long as there are internet filters, we will have business for providing web bypass services.
Many people are using free proxy sites to anonymously browse the net without leaving traces at the destination websites as well as at their network filters. They have learned that all the sites they visit during school and office hours are either being logged at the office firewalls or are already being blocked from direct access. Further persistent attempts to visit these blocked websites directly are going to raise a flag and they may risk losing their jobs for such unauthorized web surfing activities. At the same time, they are going to get some serious attention and questioning by the IT department if their work computers keep getting infected with the latest computer virus and spyware. We all know where such malware can be frequently found - definitely not on legitimate sites such as wikipedia and yahoo. Once you get the IT department on your trail, they can dig out your entire internet surfing history, mostly filled with exotic pictures and exciting videos totally unrelated to your work scope. Rather than risk their computers or jobs for viewing some blocked sites while being bored at work, they have learnt to use free anonymous web proxy sites to surf anonymously without exposing their real web destinations to the office internet content filters and to bypass blocked sites. Some people are still worried as to whether using proxy websites for unblocking websites are really legal or not. Basically, there is really nothing illegal about using a proxy server for surfing websites legitimately. It is an acceptable method for protecting your computer from hackers, computer viruses, spyware etc that are common on the web. If what you are doing online without using a proxy website is legal, doing so via a proxy does not change it legally. If you are only trying to unblock and hide your access to facebook during the lunch hour, you do not have to worry about infringing the law. However, infringement of company policies are a different issue. The only thing that matters is whether you are caught or not. As a whole, using anonymous web proxies is legal but proxies are also frequently used by shady people to conduct illegal online activities because proxies can help to hide their tracks and IP identities. It is this context where anonymous proxies can appear to be a gray subject - they are legal but can be easily used for illegal activities, it really depend on what your intent is about. However, if you think that you can abuse the free open proxy for blatant illegal activities, you will most likely be caught up and subjected to criminal proceedings based on what you have done through the proxy server.
It is perfectly legal to manage free proxy websites nowadays, at least in the US. Although you may be contacted by law enforcement to assist their investigations, all you need to do is comply politely with their requests and you will be fine. These officers know the nature and purposes of proxy websites so they know that any questionable internet activities are probably attributable to the vast number of proxy users and not directly due to the proxy webmasters. Just give them your server logs to help them track down the person they are after.
Showing posts with label anonymous web browsing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anonymous web browsing. Show all posts
Free Anonymous Proxy Users
The next type of proxy users are the group of people that do not want the sites they visit to know who they are. For example, I feel horny and wanted to look at some naughty pictures and videos. But I am scared and have heard stories of people getting blackmailed over their records of surfing naughty websites. So I decided to surf using an anonymous internet proxy to hide my real identity and IP address. I do not have any web filters, parental control software etc to worry about. I just need a proxy server, preferably free, that is fast working and does not have problems loading the pages, pictures and videos I wanna look at. The web proxy script it is using must provide complete web anonymity and hide my IP address. It has to be fast and not take several minutes to load a page that is normal done within seconds without a proxy. That means once I find a anonymous web proxy that meets all my requirements, I will bookmark it and can even type in the proxy url directly into my firefox if the domain name is catchy enough. After using for this free anonymous web proxy for some time, I learn where the advertisement banners and links are located at and can automatically avoid looking and clicking on these. I can become very single minded and zoom straight to the proxy url bar, enter the website I wanna visit and off I go. That means the owner of that free anonymous web server will be paying bandwidth for me, a free sponger without gaining revenue in return. Although I faithful come back and visit every night, this faithfulness translates to very poor earnings for the proxy webmaster. The traffic statistics look good, consistently high volume without doing much active proxy promotion and there is no need to insanely create tens of proxies every day as mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. To combat banner blindness and revive the happy ad clicking activities of your loyal visitors, such evergreen anonymous proxy site owners may need to change the web proxy template and design. Move the ad blocks and proxy url bar around, boldly switch their locations, change the color themes etc. After every change, observe if your earnings go up. When the number of ad clicks start going down, it may be time for another shakeup. Note that you may piss off some loyal anonymous web proxy users by doing so. See if your number of website visitors has indeed went down and gauge carefully whether it is worth it. For such long running anonymous web proxies, it is worthwhile trying to rank high in the search engine results for keywords such as “free proxy”, “surf anonymously” and other anonymous related keywords etc. Do not attempt to rank for keywords that are likely used by the students and office workers trying to bypass filters. Your targeted audience wants web anonymity and not bypassing web filters. It will be good to have anonymity related keywords in your domain name, but anonymous is quite a long and easily misspelled word, so it is really your call. You can also use the word proxy in your domain name, no problems as long as you are not trying to go after both types of audiences with a single free proxy website. Not advisable to do so explicitly anyway. By the way, if you are really offering your surf anonymously proxy services for free, do not be afraid to use the word free in your domain name either. Free always work great!
Start Proxy Business For Beginners
Some people asked if it is still worthwhile getting into the anonymous proxy websits business today? I say it depends on how much you can invest versus how high you wanted to take this proxy business to. When I say invest, I mean your time, skills, relationships and money. The more you have, the easier for you to start in the proxy business, or any other forms of money making ventures online. Even if you have nothing, no programming skills, no web design skills, no money to spare, no contacts etc, it is still easier to start making some money with working proxies compared to other stuff like affiliate marketing or niche blogging. The money for proxies come pretty fast, but is pretty limited to may be $5 for every 1000 real, unique visitors you can get to come to your bypass websense filter proxy. The golden earning period for internet proxy business is over. My mentor told me during 2005, you can easily get 1 to 2 million page views per month for every proxy you created. The pay per click for adsense and pay per view for other advertising companies were also much higher compared to what we have today for proxy websites. Anyway, there is no use mesmerizing about the past because we are neither aware nor equipped to take advantage of those opportunities anyway. If you start in the proxy business today, you will eventually learn a bit of wed design and coding, a bit of search engine optimization, a bit of internet promotion and marketing, a lot on online web monetization, a lot of contacts in the business if you bothered to participate in the community and other intangible benefits.
There is an untold big dream for internet proxy owners who are in for long term profits and running of proxy websites that serious provide a good service for web blocking visitors and websites that bypass school internet proxy. Unlike the opportunistic proxy creators that try to quickly create, promote and sell off web proxies, the long term public anonymous proxy owners wanted every visitor that has come to their proxies to have a pleasant anonymous web surfing experience and to come back again and again. This is the so-called dream of running proxies on auto-pilot forever with minimal involvement. Easy passive profits huh? Just remember to pay the hosting bills every month and bank in the cheques from google adsense every month in return. There is no need to add fresh content to the proxy website unlike those slaving bloggers that are thinking like mad for new topics to write about. Unfortunately, this plan is pretty flawed nowadays. Yes, you only need minimal content pages for web proxies. However, if you want to carry on serving the same visitors, you need to keep up with changes made on the sites frequently accessed by your visitors. That means no small amount of time must be spent on getting feedback from your anonymous web visitors as well as interacting with other web proxy owners in the community, looking for new patches for the proxy script in order to unblock websites with funky javascript interfaces or anti proxy measures. You cannot just let the proxy run by itself without continuing paid proxy promotions such as newsletter blast, banner ads, link exchanges and constantly tracking the returns on those expenditures. If you stop these promotions, other proxy owners will jump in and try to take your market share. Look at what happen with the market share of hotmail and yahoo mail when gmail is introduced with a bang. Proxy users seldom have any loyalty to the anonymous web proxies they are using for free these days. If you must ask, yes I do not believe in that auto-pilot proxy website dream at all.
Comparison On The Different Open Source Proxy Server Scripts
Do you know which freely available open source proxy scripts you should be using for your new free proxy websites? If you try searching for an answer via Google, you are not likely to get what you want. All search results are probably listings of proxy websites – not very useful huh? Try looking at proxy forums and you get 50/50 opinions and plugs from advocates of the different proxy camps. Some of these information you dug out online are probably going to be outdated anyway and maybe provided by the sincere but misinformed. What we have compiled are information we have derived from our own experience of running anonymous web proxies throughout 2007-2008, not very long compared to other proxy owners that started out since the birth of the Internet, but there has been a lot of new developments in these two years and we have dipped our fingers in nearly all. We are going to compare the four big open source proxy scripts: CGI, PHP, Glype and Zelune. If you still do not know it by now, there is really no need to pay for a proxy script especially when you are just starting out. These four are nearly sufficient for 90% of all web proxy users. If you are thinking about paying for some neat add on functionalities that are missing from these four free proxies, ask yourself if paying for these 10% visitors are providing sufficient payback for you. Are you really in the business of unblocking websites and bypass filters for others? Is the anonymous surfing experience for others really your top concerns? The following is going to be a boring read, so if you want our recommendations directly, download CGI proxy if you have a dedicated proxy server costing $200 monthly or download Glype if you have a shared proxy hosting plan costing $10 a month. Read on if you really have time to waste and rather not promote your proxy and improve earnings…
The CGI proxy script by James Marshall is the pioneer of all subsequent proxy scripts. The first thing to take note is that it uses a lot of CPU and RAM resources such that you can only use it on your own dedicated server hosting plans. All hosting companies, including those that specialized in proxy hosting refuse to allow the CGI proxy scripts to be used on any shared hosting plans and even on more expensive VPS plans as well. The good things about the CGI Proxy are plenty though. Firstly, it is still actively supported by its author James Marshall and works nearly perfectly with most websites today. Having active support is important because sometimes changes are being made to your favorite Myspace or Orkut which disrupts the proper viewing with proxy scripts. When such a problem arises, the script developer can quickly troubleshoot and release a patch to resolve problems with viewing a particular website through the proxy script. The latest version 2.1 already provides full Javascript and nearly complete Adobe Flash player support. That means you have no problems view websites that uses a lot of Javascript and
The PHProxy script is the most popular among proxy webmasters and nearly 70% of all online web proxies are running this script. Although it has been officially discontinued by its original creator Abdullah Arif since July 2007, the latest version 0.5 has been downloaded 49,628 times from sourceforge. The number one reason for its popularity despite offering less functionalities compared to CGI Proxy, is that it uses much lesser CPU and RAM resources and hence can be hosted on ultra cheap shared hosting plans. A dedicated server with 4Gb RAM costs at least $200 monthly, a shared proxy hosting plan with 100Gb bandwidth costs around $8 monthly and a general shared hosting plan with so-called unlimited bandwidth costs around $3 monthly. Since there are many more beginner proxy webmasters compared to established proxy owners, these newbies tend to go for the lowest investments possible and take out the cheap shared hosting plans and can only use the PHProxy script. Another reason for its widespread usage is due to its simplicity. There is only a few lines of code to be ported in order to use the proxy script with any web templates. As such there are a lot of proxy templates sites around, and they offer a lot of free working templates plus PHProxy script bundles to be downloaded. For a beginner proxy webmaster, you only have to unzip the bundle and FTP upload everything to your hosting account. If you have bought several domain names for your proxy websites, you only have to download different template bundles from the proxy template sites. You only need to add in your Adsense account number in the configuration files; most other coding, design and scripting stuff have already been done for you. The downside to using PHProxy is that it uses a lot much more bandwidth compared to CGI proxy but since they are very hosting friendly (uses less CPU and RAM), a lot of proxy hosting providers sell very cheap shared proxy plans with a lot of bandwidth.
If you are going to start your foray into internet business today with minimal investments in running a proxy, your best bet is to use the glype proxy script since it is arguably the most well supported proxy script nowadays. This is important because frequent changes to some popular websites can cause page loading problems with existing proxy scripts. Having a large support base usually means fixes are being rolled out at a faster rate to please the many types of proxy visitors. Glype is designed to be configured and managed via its simple password protected content management system. It is quite easy to setup and there is usually no need to touch the source codes at all. This makes things slightly easier for individuals that feel the world is spinning the moment they see any programming languages. Unlike the combined methodology of PHProxy where the script and web themes are coupled together in two or three files, the core proxy script engine codes and the web design theme files are clearly separated. Although this makes proxy theme design slightly more difficult for the designers, things become very easy for proxy owners. You just need to upload a new proxy theme to the /theme folder and then activate the new theme from the Glype control panel. Glype is designed to support plugins that can extend its basic functionalities. For example, there are many new plugins designed to improve handling of websites such as playing video on youtube, sending chat messages on web messengers etc. Some of these plugins cost a licence fee, so do take note. The latest version of Glype has support for javascript and works with nearly all the functionalities for both Myspace and Facebook directly out of the box, so you do not need to pay for any new plugins if proxifying Myspace and Facebook is important for your anonymous proxy users. Most proxy webmasters have tested Glype and observed that it is considerably faster then PHPproxy. A fast unblocking proxy is likely to get more recurring anonymous proxy users. Glype can also do server-side caching to improve page loading speed and CPU/RAM resources for commonly requested web pages. By loading these pages from the locally stored copies, tour bandwidth bills will also be reduced, although you may need to have a fairly large disk space for benefits of Glype caching to show.
The Zelune proxy script is more or less discontinued. It is seldom used although it claims to use lesser bandwidth and RAM compared to PHProxy, the CPU usage is observed to be higher. Some proxy webmasters claimed because the Zelune proxy script is less well known and of a lower profile, they are less likely to be targeted by web filtering companies. Thus, they are able to remain unblocked and continued to be used by college students and office workers that need to actively bypass website filters and web blocking firewalls. Actually, Zelune will be reborn as the new PHPhantom proxy script. This new proxy server is still in the development works and not freely available for downloads. Some proxy webmasters have been selected to join in for beta testing – I remembered someone saying the current version is a bit slow in loading pages compared to Glype. However, this newcomer has a very distinct feature that excited a lot of proxy owners – the problem of getting new proxies unblocked and unfiltered. The creators are touting that PHPhantom main strength will be its stealth and cloaking functions to trick web filtering spiders and internet protection bots into thinking that any anonymous web proxies running the PHPhantom script is not a proxy website that should be filtered. This is probably done as in other web content cloaking techniques used by blackhat webmasters - showing parental control spiders and web blocking bots one modified version of the website while showing human users the real version. They are tracking the IPs of the servers used by web content filtering companies such as websense and either blocking their spiders from accessing or showing them something like wikipedia content pages. When the websense internet filter spider bot sees "calculus", "differential equations", and other innocent terms and topics, it will say "ok, the school students will need information from this website, so lets give them open access". If your free proxy websites are not blocked frequently, chances are you will get good recurring proxy traffic since students no longer need to look for proxy new servers to get school filters bypass.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
