Proxies - Know and Use

Proxies - Know and Use

Lets start from general meaning of word 'proxy'. 

Its actually an agent/substitute or anybody acting at place of any other. 

Technically, proxies are used to bypass some firewall restrictions,  maintaining anonymity or for many other purposes. Like you must  using proxies for accessing social networking sites from your college network which your firewall restricts.

Lets understand the common methodology (talking in general terms)
You bunk the lecture, requests your friend to speak up your  attendance, you get the attendance (in case professor doesn't' detect).

Now talking technically , when college firewall doesn't allow you to connect to a site (say Facebook) You requests a proxy server to bring the web page from Facebook and serve  you, Now the firewall thinks you are dealing with a server other then Facebook and allows you to make a connection(in case firewall doesn't detect ).

Hence you have successfully managed to bypass a firewall. Proxy servers simply act as intermediate between your machine and actual server that you are accessing.

Proxy servers are mostly used to maintain anonymity. Suppose you are planning to commit an online crime,you can use proxy server. The actual web server doesn't come to know about you because proxy server is dealing with web server on your behalf.


Common ways to use proxies 

1) Setting in Web Browser 

Steps :-
1. First of all log on to whatismyip.com and pen down your current IP.

2. Logon to google.com and search for 'fresh proxies' You will get many sites providing you list of IPs and respective port numbers. 
It must be like this IP:port.

3. Now copy the IP and port no.

4. In Mozilla Firefox browser, go to Tools--Options--Advanced--Network--Settings . You will get the dialogbox as shown.

Check the option "Manual Proxy Configuration" , fill IP and port no. You can configure the proxies in any browser.

5. Check out whatismyip.com again , hopefully it mush have been changed. Similary you can configure proxies in other web browsers.

2) Using software's. 

You can download many IP hiding software's. There are easy to use and freely available on internet.They automatically keep changing your IP after a particular interval of time.  I would recommend you one that is Ultrasoft. 

Click Here To Get Ultrasurf


3. Using websites .

Many websites provide free services to hide you IP address.You can directly visit other websites through them.

Click Here To Visit Website