Slashdot Mirror

Anonymouse surfing: http://www.anonymization.net/ http://www.anonymizer.com/ http://osiris.978.org/~brianr/ians/ http://www.guardster.com/ http://www.antiproxy.com/ http://www.attackcensorship.com/ http://proxify.com/ http://www.anonymous.as/ http://www.mezzy.com/s-index.php http://anonymouse.ws/anonwww.html http://unipeak.com/ http://www.urlencoded.com/ http://www.behidden.com/ Full system proxy systems: http://tor.eff.org/ http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ http://internet.flashback.se/ http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html http://www.privoxy.org/ http://www.silentsurf.com/ http://www.peacefire.org/circumventor/simple-circu mventor-instructions.html Ordinary proxies: http://www.atomintersoft.com/products/firewall/cou ntry.aspx/Sweden-se http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html http://www.publicproxyservers.com/page1.html http://www.proxz.com/ http://www.digitalcybersoft.com/ProxyList/ http://www.freeproxy.ru/ http://www.samair.ru/proxy/ http://www.multiproxy.org/anon_proxy.htm http://www.rrdb.org/ http://www.free-proxy-servers.com/ http://www.proxylists.net/ http://www.proxywhois.com/anonymous-proxy-list.htm http://www.openproxies.com/ Plenty, as said.

They're making sure that your computer isn't an open HTTP proxy. If it is, the post is rejected. It helps to prevent crapfloods.

Here is a list of open proxies you can use to get to Bush's reelection site.

You can google for open HTTP proxies, or even just visit this site. Pick one in the US, set up your browser, and away you go. Paraphrasing John Gilmore, the Net interprets regionalization as damage and routes around it.

I use this technique to visit Japanese idol sites that disallow non .jp addresses. Slower, but better than not getting any, er, "eye-candy."

I only take one issue with your post: I don't believe that offering proxy lists for sale is necessarily a bad thing. There are any number of reasons why someone may want to use a proxy to visit a certain site. Concealing sexual preferences when visiting a gay or lesbian porn site, trying to read up at the English version of Al-Jazeera without leaving digital footprints, etc.

Proxies are generally web only in nature. Of the more than 100,000 wide-open proxies that I've cataloged over the past several years, only a slight percentage of them were able to relay arbitrary connections (e.g. HTTP CONNECT protocol). The vast majority of proxies only relay standard web requests, and are harmless as far as spam is concerned. In fact when Joe Jared's Osirusoft RBL was running, my proxy database fed directly into its RBL (proxy.relays.osirusoft.com), just to prevent any possibility of the proxies being used to spam those who subscribed to RBLs/DNSBLs.

It's unfortunate that the media, as of late, has taken to calling infected/trojanned Windows machines which relay spam "proxies," instead of "zombies," a term widely attributed to Steve Gibson at GRC. When GRC was DDoS'd a couple of years ago, he took to calling the trojanned machines "zombies," and the media went with it full force. More recently, the media has been calling them "proxies," which creates negative connotations that aren't necessarily deserved. Yes, there is the occasional proxy which leaves itself wide open to HTTP CONNECT, but most proxies have nothing to do with spam.

Of course, if some idiot is spamming spammer message boards trying to sell proxies, he deserves whatever he gets. There have been clear cases where alleged spammers such as Jamie Baillie have attempted to buy proxies that they can spam through. However, I chalk this up as the exception to the norm, and in most of these cases the spammer was clearly foiled anyway. The above link is an extreme example of how spammers get "victimized" themselves, and start bitching holy hell, trying to buy proxy lists.

Please, don't equate proxies with spam. Most of them are simply being used to facilitate anonymous browsing, and this is an ability which needs to be maintained as long as possible.

www.openproxies.com

Blocking all ports but 80 is hardly going to stop spammers from going nuts at Starbucks or other intentionally public WAPs. There are thousands of proxies out there which run on port 80 and would be happy to connect you to port 25 on any mail server in the world...

Now on top of this people do use open proxies and these are harder to find

Its much easier to block a proxy than to create a new one (on an IP) once it's blocked. Unless you own the ISP and have a zillion to rotate through.

Any system or forum administrator worth his salt could easily block a range of IP addresses as well as some of the more popular proxy servers that allow deviant trolls to sneak through and continue posting.