The Proxy Guide

Web proxy guide for users and webmasters

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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.

 

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:

 

tunneling

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Tunneling proxy may have various meanings; but most time, this refers to socks proxy. As the name suggests, socks proxy use sock 4 or 5 protocol, which performs at an intermediate layer between the presentation layer and the transport layer.

Socks (tunneling) proxy can be used for any form of TCP or UDP socket connection. This means it can be used for most application software (in addition to http connections), e.g., instant messenger.

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open proxy

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open-proxyOpen proxy may have different interpretations, e.g., some geeks deem web-based proxy as open proxy; others may confuse open proxy with unauthentic proxies.

Open proxy usually is similar to web-based proxy (e.g., using http protocol), but there are some differences. Web-based proxy retrieves resources for the client, and at the same time some modifications were also made. For example, most web-based proxy scripts rewrite the java script and act as client directly. But most open proxy only fetch the resources and do not make any modifications.

Because open proxy uses http protocol for the connections between the client and the proxy server. This makes it different from tunneling, or socks proxy.

 

web-based proxy

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web-based-proxy-girlWeb-based proxy, some times called web proxy, usually refers to a type of proxy service through web servers. A client connects to the service provider’s website (proxy server), then type the web address he/she wants to browse. The proxy server fetches the contents, and passes them to the client.

By using web-based proxy, the client may access sites blocked by their local ISP or parents. For example, social networking sites, e.g., myspace and facebook, were blocked in some US and UK schools. The pupils may use web-based proxy to bypass the blocking and access these sites.

Similarly, in some countries, the internet is censored for various purposes. Some users in these countries may also use web proxy to access the blocked sites.

Some users use web proxy for privacy considerations, and they do not want to disclose their IP info to such untrusted sites. In this case, their info will very likely only be recorded in the proxy server.

Web-based proxy usually is powered by a few proxy scrips, including CGIProxy, PHProxy, Glype, Zelune and Surrogafier.

How to make money from your proxy site (Part I)

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how-woman-use-laptop-300Most of proxy webmasters are losing money, and eventually out of business. This is the reality. This article introduces you on how to generate revenue to run your proxy successfully. In Part II, some revenue sources will be reviewed and in Part III, a few real cases will be analyzed.

Before you start to provide proxy services, it is important to realize you have enough fund to pay your servers, your employees (if any) and yourself. Usually, it may take up to 3-6 months for you to get substantial revenues from your proxy sites; so be prepared for the hard time for the first a few months.

To generate income from your web proxy services, you have several options:

1. Sell you own ad space directly.

This could be very difficult for beginners as you do not have enough traffic. The advantage of this option is that you have full control of ads to be shown on your sites and you can set your price based on CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) or CPC (cost per click). The main disadvantage is that it is hard to sell!

You need install some software to track your ad campaigns. OpenX (formally PhpAdsNew) is an excellent ad server package. It is free, powerful and well documented. The shortcoming is that you may spend some time to integrate it with a shopping cart.

RevSense has a relative long history in the market for webmasters. It is free now (a few years ago, it would cost you about $149).

2. Earn money through paid users/subscribers.

This is more suitable for big players with large user bases. It may be difficult to attract enough subscriber to cover the cost if the number of daily users (unique) is less than 500, considering the fact that there are so many free web proxies. Geo-distribution of your users may also play an important role: if you have a lot of users from Europe or North American, you are very likely get more paid upgrades. Unfortunately, most proxy users are from China, Iran and some other developing countries.

3. Use 3-party ad services.

This is used by most providers nowadays. It is important to understand that the quality of these services varies largely and you may have little control of the ads to be shown on your sites. Although some providers allow you to exclude certain ads; it is usually not very useful. You should also understand most providers pay you on net-30 or net-60 days; it means you have to wait 30-60 days to receive your payment.

There are a lot of such service providers. In part II, I will review some providers that are friendly to web proxy webmasters.

proxy

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web-proxy-no-cheating-pleaseIn WWW world, proxy usually refers to the intermediary that retrieves information from other sources (e.g., websites) for the client. This is sensible when:

  • the client cannot directly connect to the resources, e.g., some ISPs’ firewall blocks these resources erratically or deliberately;
  • the client does not want to disclose his/her info (e.g., IP address) to the resources

There are different types of proxy: web-based proxy, open proxy and tunneling.