Proxify - Discovery How Web Filters Are A Threat To Privacy And What People Are Doing About It

By Peter Hill

In this day and age, web filters are the products institutions purchase and use in order to censor and control access to sites on the World Wide Web. It's the same for schools, businesses and even for parents, web filters are a way of controlling what is available on a particular network. It is also no surprise that countermeasures are being invented to bypass these access controls. From understanding what Proxify is, to how professionals are using them to bypass filters and access any web site, there are also a few things to understand in order to stop them. This article aims to explain the technicalities of how to bypass a web filter, and securely and privately surf the web.

Before discussing the gritty details, the first question to ask is, "what exactly is a web proxy?" A web proxy is a web site that you visit; it establishes a secure, encrypted connection. You know you have an encrypted connection when you see the "https://" in your browser URL bar. You then enter an address to a site you wish to visit, and then you begin to browse the site without ever contacting the site directly. Using the anonymous Proxify site as an example, when you visit the home page you see a bar in which to enter the URL for the site you wish to visit, as you visit different web sites you will notice that you never actually leave the Proxify site. In fact, from the point of view of the web filter, you are visiting one site and one site only. A proxy is able to act as the middle man, and all your private information is replaced with that of the proxy server. So a proxy server is just a middle man that fetches web pages for you and reconstructs them in such a way that it looks and feels exactly the same as if went there yourself. And this is exactly how web filters can be avoided.

A web filter has one major purpose, to deny the users on a network to access websites from its black list. Content filters have become very advanced in recent years and they can even reject web content based on keywords and phrases that are considered unacceptable to the institution that runs them. For this reason, the anonymous Proxify site has the ability to obfuscate and encrypt everything that passes through your web browser and their server. When this happens the web filter cannot tell what sites you have visited, it cannot tell what you have read, or what you have sent or posted. Some schools and institutions even set their web filters to only allow websites from within a certain country. Proxify counters this by having servers with changing names in each country that it provides service to. This is the main benefit of using these types of anonymity tools, they make all communications secret and secure. However,the developers who create web filters are putting up a fight.

Network admin's are constantly updating their filters to stop users from bypassing them with Socks and Proxy servers. It is possible for a suspicious administrator to view access logs and determine that users are using web sites such as Proxify. When they discover this, they will add the proxy to the black list of websites that the web filter blocks. The web filter developers have enormous lists of proxy sites, and they are continuously trying to stay ahead of things. For this one reason, Proxify has been forced to adapt and generate obfuscated domains to allow their customers to bypass the filters and stay secure. It seems that in the foreseeable future, this sort of arms race for free access to the internet will continue with no end in sight.

As you can probably tell by now web filters can be very restrictive and prevent you from browsing the sites you really want to visit online. Proxify is only one of the ways to defeat a web content filter. Some other pieces of the puzzle include using evidence erasing tools, and using browsers plug-ins that enhance security from the host side of things. But for this discussion, a proxy server is able to view websites for you, even if those websites are black listed by your network filter. Proxify is able to hide everything you do and see online, but the developers of web filters all always trying to catch up and contain everything on the network. For the time being, you can bypass your schools web filter and use the World Wide Web however you please.

Peter Hill is a computer hobbyist and writer who specializes in computer security issues. He runs an informational website that provides links to free services, articles and guides on keeping your identity safe on the net.

For more information be sure to check out http://Proxify.Strangled.Net

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