There are lots of proxies available on the Internet but which ones are the best. How do we distinguish from reliable and trustworthy proxies from ones that are unreliable and do not work. There are several steps that we can go to determine which ones work and which do not. The first step is to determine where the proxy is being hosted. Ideally, you want it to be hosted in a jurisdiction that offers tight privacy laws and protects you from snoops. Most countries like the US and places in the EU do not have this and data privacy is severely compromised.

One of the best options to go for would be Panama or Guatemala. Both of these places have privacy laws in place to protect you from snoops. This means data help on you by companies in these countries are safe from foreign authorities. The only way someone could get at your records would be to get a court order from a Judge in the country in question. This is very rare and Panama is very reluctant about sharing information with other countries. Once we have established that the proxy is being hosted ina country that protects your data we then have to establish the reliability of the site its self. Check forums, newsgroups, yahoo groups etc to get an idea of how good and reliable a proxy is.

If you have not yet found a proxy to examine just go to Google and type in proxy website. You will get thousands of results and endless of sites for you to choose from. The important thing is to use a reliable one. Sometimes proxies actually do the opposite of what they make out to. Sometimes their owners have bad intent and will launch attacks on your computer in the form of viruses and spyware. This does happen and I have known it to happen to friends of mine so you must be careful.

If you are worried about virus attacks when using proxies then there are things you can do to keep yourself safe. First of all make sure that your Windows firewall is enabled. Secondly, make sure that you have a good antivirus product installed and that it has regular updates. There are so many viruses and threats on the Internet that weekly updates are not good enough. Two to three times per week is not the safest.

By the way, if you are looking for an even better privacy solution then invest in a product that offers encryption as one of its features. Ok, this may not come cheap but it will be well worth it to protect you from hackers and unwanted intrusions into your computer or computer network. I hope you can use what I have briefly discussed and it helps you have a safer and more enjoyable browsing experience. There are millions of proxies available and finding the right one to meet your needs is not always easy but using these steps you should be able to find a safe and reliable proxy site in no time. Happy surfing!

We all know it really, when we see web sites constantly updating with free anonymous proxy lists. New ones seem to be added every day, isn’t it nice of people to pay huge bandwidth charges to let complete strangers surf anonymously on the internet?

Well the simple fact is that they generally don’t, the majority of owners of these proxies have no intention of using them as free proxies. It’s simple they didn’t patch their server, they’d didn’t quite set up Squid properly, they made a mistake somewhere down the line and suddenly their server has been opened up to the not unsubstantial crowd of surfers who want to use their proxy to surf the internet with.

Why do people use these proxies?

Well several reasons really, some think it gives them complete anonymity on the internet (which it really doesn’t) and some people want to use them to bypass some local firewall which stops them accessing Facebook. Then there are those stuck in countries who censor and filter the entire internet for their citizens, saving their people from the evils of You tube and the like. Proxies help you do all these things to an extent.

There are a few problems with this even if you get over the obviously moral one of taking advantage of someone and using their server without permission. The main practical one is that unless you catch a very new free proxy - your surfing will be extremely slow as you share it with thousands of others. All the free anonymous proxies end up either falling over, overrun their bandwidth limit or the poor unfortunate systems administrator realising what’s going on!

The other really good reason to stay well clear of these anonymous proxies is that a lot of them are simply traps to utilise the fact that you browse in clear text with HTTP and a proxy is a great place to gather lots of personal identity information. Saves the hackers going to look for victims when they send their data through a single point in clear text. It’s just not safe to use them unless you are certain who owns the server, so do you yourself a favour and stay away from the anonymous proxy lists, you’ll be much safer.