Web Proxies for Anonymous Scientific Peer-Review?

nodrogluap asks: "As a scientist, I am often asked to peer-review journal papers. The peer-review process is generally supposed to be anonymous, but often times it is necessary to extensively visit the author's Web site to check and test Web interfaces to software and databases described in the paper. It can be easy for the author to surmise who's reviewing the paper based on Web logs (paper subject + gleaned reviewer's institution), especially when the reviewers are getting the first public crack at the URLs. Are there free, reliable HTTP and HTTPS proxies out there (not including servers run by people who've somehow mistakenly enabled an unrestricted proxy server in Apache)?"

Comments

putty

[Macgyver7017]

You can use putty (free windwos ssh client) to create a SOCKS4 proxy that appears to come from any machine you can ssh to. Google for putty and click the first hit. To set up the proxy: under the tunnels settings, create a "dynamic" tunnel on port 8080 or some port of your preference. Then after the ssh session is up, point your browser at a SOCKS4 proxy on localhost, port 8080 (or whatever you used). It can also be helpful to enable keepalive packets to keep your firewall from closing the idle ssh session. Just get a friend to give you shell access, or maybe your institution has a shared machine you can ssh to for the proxy to come from.