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The Proxy Guide

Web proxy guide for users and webmasters

TheProxyGuide

How to get the latest web proxy if web proxy list sites are blocked?

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It seems some filtering software now also blocks web proxy list sites. So, this may give you some troubles in getting the latest web proxy. For example, a few users reported recently they cannot access the most active web proxy list, UnRestrictedSurf, which is hosted by us.

This is not the end of the world. Even your school or company blocks web proxy list sites, you can still get the list of latest web proxy  through Twitter, Email, RSS feed and Yahoo group. Here is how.

From Twitter. Once a web proxy is approved (it is free, but we need make sure it is really a free web proxy) on our list, it will be immediately twitted. Normally, this happens daily except Saturday and Sunday. So, you can just follow us on Twitter to get the latest web proxy immediately. Simple, right?  3 of the latest tweets are also shown on the sidebar of this blog.

From Email. Many of you probably don’t know, we maintain a proxy newsletter, which sends the latest web proxy listed on unrestrictedsurf.com. The newsletter usually is sent weekly, or bi-weekly if there are so many new listings. So, you can subscribe here. Please choose web proxy in the list.

From RSS feed. The latest web proxies can also be found in the RSS feed for the latest web proxies. As the feed is managed through Google Feed Burner, it is unlikely the feed is blocked. So, you can subscribe to the feed and read it in your browser (Firefox), or Google reader, or any RSS feed readers. Here is the link for the RSS feed.

From Yahoo Groups. 
The anonymous proxy list  group is not updated very frequently because it is not so active. However, we are going to broadcast the latest list to this group as well from next week. So, you can join the group and read the messages online or through your email. Again, here is the link for the anonymous proxy list Yahoo group.

Anyway, you can still get the latest web proxy list quite easily.

Do you have any other ways to share?

 

Top 5 Adsense rules for free web proxy webmasters

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This is a invited guest post from FreeHostingAnswers, a dedicated blog for free hosting providers and users on how to run free hosting service, and how to find free hosting service. for more posts, you may check their blog.

google-adsense-girlIn the how to make money from your free hosting service post, I told you there are many ways to generate revenue to offset your cost. Google AdSense is the first choice of many free hosting providers, including free web proxy webmasters.

Adsense usually can generate reasonable revenues for your free web proxy service. As Google does not require minimum traffic, and international traffic is also accepted, you can use Adsense from the beginning. As mentioned in the checklist for free hosting providers, it is unlikely to get profit for the first a few months. So, set an reasonable expectation from Adsesne, and prepare other advertisement as well to fill your ad space.

It is important to go through the guidelines of Adsense before you place ads on your site. Most free web proxy webmasters may just skip the reading. If you do not follow the rules set by Google, the consequence can be severe: your account is terminated and you are banned from Adsense.

It does not need a rocket scientist to understand the Adsense guidelines, but sometimes some webmasters may get confused, and interpret them wrongly.

So, I summarize the common mistakes made by free web proxy webmasters on Google Adsense placement. You need follow these five rules to keep your Adsense account safe.

Do not placed Adsense on proxified pages. You can only place Adsense units on pages in which you know the contents. Because you do not know what contents your users may browse, it is too risky if you put your Adsense on proxified pages. For example, your user may browse adult site, and if Google notices your Adsense ad in that page, then you are in trouble.

Do not solicit click. New free web proxy webmasters often put some words like this on their pages “please click ads to support our free services” bla bla. This is explicitly forbidden by Google, because you are soliciting clicks. You should not mention your ads except that you can mentioned your ad revenue will support the free web proxy service.

Add a privacy policy page. Most big ad network now requires a privacy page, You need state your site’s privacy policy. If you are not sure, find privacy statement from other free web proxy sites and modify accordingly. You only need make sure it is as accurate as possible based on your knowledge. Occasionally, Google may check around and ask you to put one.

Try different placements. The performance of Google Adsense units vary, greatly, depending on how you place them. You need do some experiments and optimize: size, location and color on individual pages. For example, square/rectangle (e.g., 300*250, 338*250) units usually performs better than 468*60 units. The location is also important. For example,if you put your ad units immediately after your near the address bar for proxy browsing, the click rate generally is high than other regions.

Do not use popup or pop-unders together with Adsense.Sometimes, you may have some popup ads or popunder ads for error pages, or proxified pages. But you should NEVER use them together with Adsense. Google does not like such ads. So, make sure there are no Adsense units on the page where you put popup ads.

These are the simple 5 rules that all free web proxy webmasters should follow, if you do not want to get your Adsense account disabled. To get best results, you should test different placements.

Will you worry about the privacy issue of Silk browser?

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This is an invited guest post from Surf100.com. You may check their surf100 web proxy blog for more articles. In this short article, the author reviews the potential privacy problems of the Silk browser in Kindle Fire.

amazon-silk-browserWhen Amazon launched its long waited tablet (and finally disappointing) Kindle Fire on Wednesday, the integrated Silk browser was also unveiled. This is more interesting for web proxy providers than the tablet itself.

The $199 price tag of Kindle Fire is really irresistible. Of course, Amazon need earn money. Some analysts say Amazon will earn back the profit margin in contents. This is absolutely true. But the overlooked (potentially) big earning machine of this cheap tablet is users’ browsing data handled by the built-in Silk browser.

The tablet works fast, at least, based on all demos. This actually also gives audiences a wrong impression that the tablet is fast. But the trick is that when you browse websites, most rendering will be done in Amazon Cloud, EC2. It looks like a super web proxy. And, more than a super proxy, it also “cache” your browsing data, which may include some confidential or sensitive information, for example, some business emails or memos.

So, it is not surprising that this Silk browser immediately raised some concerns on user’s privacy and security. The problem is not the proxy itself, but how Amazon will use the data handled. For most web proxies, user browser data are not stored, although some Glype web proxy may cache some images files. So, the user browsing data will never be used. Silk proxy may work in different ways.

Silk browser is very similar to Opera Mini. But Opera Mini does little caching, and does most on rendering and compressing. Therefore, there are almost no concerns on its privacy issues.

So, you can consider Opera Mini as a super web proxy, but not Silk browser, which will keep something when you leave. This is not a web proxy should do. The security of the “cached” data is one issue; whether such data will be misused by Amazon or third parties is another issue.

If you concern your privacy, when you get your Kindle Fire in November, you may turn off the proxy mode to access web directly, or use a web proxy.

 

Top 5 reasons of using web proxy

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This is a guest contribution from TheProxyFree.com. You may check their Proxy Blog. In This article, the top 5 reasons of using web proxy were summarized.

Top-5-reasons-of-using-web-proxyOf course, most our visitors are using our free anonymous web proxy service. Web proxy is quite simple. It acts as an agent between your computer and the site you want to browse. That’s it.

People are using web proxy mainly for the following 5 reasons:

  • Bypass blocking. This blocking may be placed by your government, or your ISP, or your organization, or even your parents. The intention may be good if contents blocked are not suitable for your age or your religion. But some ISPs or organizations just subscribe some third-party services, and block sites blindly. To access such contents, the only way is to use web proxy. Arguing with your ISP to whitelist the blocked sites is usually just a waste of time.
  • Surf anonymously. Netizens are more and more concerned about their privacy. If an ad pops out telling you an event in your neighborhood, and showing you the route from your home to the venue, will you be scared? Surely. This may be slightly exaggerated, but this is possible for some advertising companies already. They know your location, your gender, your education, your marriage, your income and probably even the color of your pants. Most webmasters may not collect such info, but the third-part ad-serving companies definitely collect as much as they can. Don’t talk about the rubbish laws; use anonymous proxy. Please note, this will only partially solve the problem because the web proxy have ads as well.
  • Safe browsing at work. Sometimes, you may not want your IT department knows the sites you visited. Although the site is not blocked (as a matter of fact blocking is the failed attempt to control the content access), browsing it during office hours may be deemed as inappropriate, especially when you are scrutinized for promotion or layoff.
  • Access contents not available for your region. The greedy content (movies, music…) providers always want to maximize their profit by restricting the availability to certain regions. Suppose you were sent to an Asian country by your company, if you want to watch an American TV show (anyway, it may be just a rubbish, which you already subscribed in US) in Asia, you have to wait, wait…, . Even the local government does not block it, the content provider blocks your access from Asia. It is not the fault of local governments or ISP, but the greediness of content providers.
  • Participate anti-govern activities. The Jasmine revolution in Arabian countries illustrated the powerfulness of internet. It is not surprising that some countries have tightened the the control of internet. So, if a person is involved in anti-government political activities (usually deemed as illegal in that country), he has no choice but to hide his identity as much as he can. Actually, what web proxy can hide is very limited. The law-enforcement in all countries have more advanced technologies to track the traffic through web proxy.

Of course, it is not new that a lot of ISPs and third-party rubbish internet security services block proxy sites. The good thing is that there are many new web proxy sites everyday. Building a web proxy is very simple as explained in this article.

If your web proxy is blocked , you have to change your web proxy. So, find a way to subscribe to proxy.org, or unrestrictedsurf.com to get latest proxy.

Please note, the privacy protection provided by web proxy is very minimum. Do not play with law-enforcement authorities unless you have better anonymous tools.

Glype

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glype-girlGlype proxy script is a free-to-use, web-based proxy script written in. It is open source, but it is NOT released as GPL or a similar license. Its license requires: either keeping the back link or getting a (paid) license.

Glype script has become very popular after PHProxy project ceased. Glype is similar to PHProxy, but there is one fundamental difference: Glype uses curl to retrieve web pages. In addition, compared to PHProxy, Glype has more caching controls.

On May 7, 2010, Baron Munchausen, the administrator of Proxy.org announced that he acquired Glype. (source: http://forums.glype.com/news-updates/1286-baron-acquires-glype.html and http://proxy.org/forum/1273292889.html)

The official website of Glype is: http://www.glype.com. A live example of Glype is UtopianPal.com.

Some tutorials for Glype:

 

Comparison of Web Proxy Scripts

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comparison-of-web-proxy-scriptsFor web proxy webmasters, the first thing is to choose a proper proxy script. In this articles, 5 of the most popular web proxy scripts are compared. This is your definite guide for you on choosing a web proxy script.

I received some inquiries periodically on choosing a proxy script to start a web proxy site. So, I decided to post my opinions here.

It is always a tough question, when “the best” is involved. However, for a web proxy site, the candidates are quite limited. For simplicity and legal reasons, I will limit my discussion on free scripts only. The possible options usually include: CGIProxy, Glype, PHProxy, Surrogafier and Zelune.

CGIProxy is one of the oldest proxy scripts, and is very popular among veteran webmasters. Because it is written in Perl, the source code of the script is visible to those who install it, although CGIProxy is not an open source project. It is actually licensed through its own terms: for non-commercial usage, it is free. There are some misunderstandings on the licensing terms on CGIProxy: a lot of webmasters had though it is licensed under GPL . This is not correct. So, if you are going to run a large web proxy business, it is better to negotiate the licensing with the author as early as possible, at least before sparing considerable budget on modifying it.

The setup of CGIProxy is not complicated, as long as your system and web server support Perl. One of the most challenging problems for many webmasters is the performance tuning for Perl script. Proper tuning can make your proxy run significantly (10-100x) faster, and use less resource. Therefore, it is better to outsource the tuning task to some reliable experts unless you have sufficient knowledge on Perl and web server (e.g. Apache).

Glype is very popular among young webmasters. It is written in PHP, so it is easy to setup, and easy to find some tutorials to tune the performance. Again, Glype has its own licensing scheme: it is free to use, but a backlink is required unless you pay for the removal. There are no updates since January 2009. On May 8, 2010, Baron, who runs proxy.org, announced the acquisition of the project. Now, it is unclear whether some changes will be introduced.

PHProxy is a open source project and is licensed under GPL. However, Abdullah Arif, the author, discontinued the project and relinquished all rights (as well as responsibilities) on September 7, 2007. PHProxy mimics most functions and layout of CGIProxy in PHP. The last release of 0.52b2 is actually quite stable. Although a few people claimed to continue the project, there are no matured updates or forks yet.

Surrogafier is not widely used, and there have been no update since 2007. The script is not licensed under GPL, although the source code is not encrypted.

Zelune used to be a promising PHP-based proxy script. But it seems it has changed ownership a few times, and it gradually becomes less popular for some reasons. The licensing term is not clear for me.

So, in conclusion, for serious commercial operation, PHProxy and CGIProxy are recommended. For normal webmasters, Glype and PHProxy are recommended.

 

–CGIProxyGlypePHProxySurrogafierZelune
Programming languagePerlPHPPHPPHPPHP
Licensing typeCommercial; free for non-commercialCommercial; free to use with conditions GPLFree to use with conditionsNot clear, but not GPL
Source code visibleyesyesyesyesyes
Template systemNo (simple)yesNo (simple)noyes
CustomizationdifficulteasyeasyNot testedNot tested
PerformanceCan be very fast, but need tuningFast, out of boxFast, out of boxNot reportedFast, out of box
ConclusionRecommendedRecommendedRecommended––

Tutorial 5: PHProxy Tips and Tricks–Insert Ad Code and Customization

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Tutorial 5: PHProxy Tips and Tricks–Insert Ad Code and CustomizationThis is part II of TheProxyGuide tutorials on PHProxy (PHP proxy) script. In this tutorial, we will show you how to insert advertisement code and how to customize the address form.

PHProxy script (PHP proxy) is one of the best proxy scripts and is used by many sites, although the development has stopped. The demo site of PHProxy is setup at: http://theproxyfree.com.

In this tutorial, you need change two files: index.php and index.inc.php

Enjoy the video.

 

PHProxy

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phproxy-proxy-girlPHProxy (PHP proxy script) was a very popular proxy script before the author,Abdullah Arif, discontinued the project and relinquish all rights (as well as responsibilities) on September 7, 2007. The script is very similar to CGIProxy script. Actually the author also mentioned that the project was inspired by CGIProxy project. However, because PHProxy was written in PHP, compared with CGIProxy, PHProxy is generally easier to install for most webmasters.

The last release (version 0.5b2) of this script was on January 27, 2007 under GPL license. The script is available for download in sourceforge.

A copy of the last version (0.52b2) can also be found on TheProxyGuide (click to download). A demo of PHProxy script is available at: phproxy.goyap.net

Usually PHProxy does not need complicate templates and most webmasters just change the color schemes. A typical proxy sites powered by PHProxy is TheProxyFree.com, which uses the default template with slight modifications. Once of the largest collection of PHProxy (PHP proxy ) script powered websites can be found at:UnRestrictedSurf.

Tutorials on PHProxy:

1. How to install PHProxy ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOwVrm6T0zI  )

2. PHProxy (PHP proxy) tips and tricks: insert ad code and customization

 

Tutorial 4: How to Install PHProxy

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theproxyguide-tutorial-4This is part I of TheproxyGuide tutorials on PHProxy script. In this tutorial, it was shown how to download and edit the files to make a workable proxy in a few mins.

PHProxy script is one of the best proxy scripts and is used by many sites, although the development has stopped. The demo site is setup at: http://phproxy.goyap.net

To install PHProxy, there are three steps:

1. Download the script from SourceForge or TheProxyGuide;
2. Edit index.php and index.inc.php;
3. Upload 3 files and done.

In the coming tutorials (part II and part III), customization and security configurations will be illustrated.

Web Proxy: what and for what?

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proxy-girlAnonymous proxy servers, e.g., sgmum.net are most frequently used because these web servers do not share your IP address or any information about you or your computer. These anonymous proxy servers will protect you from different forms of malware such as viruses or spam.

Proxy servers are computers that offer a computer network service that allows its clients to connect indirectly to other network services. Proxies that are able to block the offensive web content are called web proxies. Another meaning of web proxies is reformatting the pages for other different operating systems. The internet providers might also set up proxies for preventing the occurrence of the computer viruses or any other hostile content such as spam that might affect your PC.

The special case of web proxies and the most frequently used are CGI or PHP proxies. For everybody to understand it is good to be explained that these CGI proxies are web pages that allow users to access other sites through them. These special sites are mostly used to gain access to blocked web sites. This thing is possible because the web proxy servers hide your IP address from any website and might also lead to faster browsing.

Many organizations such as schools or families use a proxy server to enforce acceptable network use policies or to provide security such as anti-virus, anti-malware or anti-spam services.

Anonymous proxy servers, e.g., sgmum.net,are most frequently used because these web servers do not share your IP address or any information about you or your computer. These anonymous proxy servers will protect you from different forms of malware such as viruses or spam.

Another advantage was proved when it comes to the anonymous web proxy server. It is known that these servers work with the help of a virtual database called cache. This memory is used to store the asked information and when that information is needed again there is no need for a new connection. The required information will be restored from the cache memory and this can not lead to anything but an increase of web surf quality and an increase of browsing speed.

These web proxy servers are indicated because it is known that if some sites get your IP and some minimum information about your operating system, hacking might be possible. Hacking will lead to an ongoing block and more than that it may lead to sharing the information from your hard drive and RAM.

More an inconvenience than a risk is the fact that proxy users may find themselves being blocked from certain web sites because numerous sites or forums block the IP addresses that are known to be spammed or trolled.The good thing is that your IP is not vulnerable by using these web proxies.

You may try an Anonymous proxy server now at: sgmum.net (external link)