Stay Invisible - A Tutorial

And why would you do that?
Proxy servers are completely useless for most purposes, especially this.

If you think it's for "security", think again. Noone can steal your personality and bank account based on an ip address, but the person running the proxy server can do just that because you're now sending everything you send to anyone on the net (including that creditcard information) to him for sending on.

Most proxies only work for port 80 though and can slow your connection down tremendously. I would rather change my mac address through the router config page and have it assign me a new ip address.

Good work though. Should help some people.

uh, your MAC address is set in hardware...
Your ISP (if you're on cable or DSL) most likely identifies your account by it so changing it (if possible at all, would require a very weird device with an EEPROM of some sorts, I've not come across them) you're making yourself unknown to your ISP (who'll most likely promptly kick you from their network as a potential intrusion attempt).

I can change the mac address of my router via the router config page. I'm not sure if that will change the ip address though since you still have the modem.

And why would you do that?
Proxy servers are completely useless for most purposes, especially this.

hmmm. There are a lot of people out there being privacy-fanatics. And I couldn't blame them knowing all the rumors about echelon etc.

Surfing anonymously will not help them in any way - but it helps them to feel safer...

raffzahn

I've been staring at this thread for some time.

I think I should post a real case where a proxy helps for something quite legal (at least from a common point of view): there are some places (services, forums, etc.) that denies the access to people not being from the same country or region. Just look for some proxy in that area and problem solved.

Also, in countries with too many restrictions on Internet usage (UAE comes to my mind), a proxy is a must. Even if you use the "government" ISP, you will have to deal with proxy details!

In the cases you describe you're using a proxy for illegal purposes (namely bypassing legal restrictions on your internet access, whether you agree with those restrictions or not is irrelevant in this context).

A proxy can be useful (legally) only when you have multiple machines on a network that has less connections to a larger network (say the internet, but it could as well be any WAN) than there are computers on that local network.
In that case the proxy provides access to the wider network to the other computers on the local network.
Anything else is useless, especially using services that claim to provide "anonymous" surfing for "security" reasons. Like I said most such services are in fact scams run by identity thiefs (or have a severe risk of becoming so in the future).

I think there are some practical uses for proxy servers. For example, the company I work for has a rather crappy host for their web sites. The site, on occassion, goes down, which drives management nuts. Well, not to long ago, we thought the site was down when in reality it was only the office network that couldn't access it. Somehow our IP got blacklisted by some piece of software sitting on the same server that our website was. After much frustration, I was able to figure this out because I could still access the site by going through a proxy server. After much arguing with the tech at the company who hosts our site(he swore up and down there was no way they were blocking our ip), the guy finally did some investigation and found out that we were indeed somehow blacklisted.

Plus kids can always use them to get back into chat sites that they get kicked out of and people in countries that have bans on free speech can use them as a means to contact the outside world.

I just found this

www.anonymouse.org