Surf Anonymously with IPBlind
Friday, June 20th, 2008These days people are getting more and more concerned about their privacy on the
Internet, due to the overwhelming cases of identity theft, fraud, and stalking
being reported in the mass media and the Internet circles. Even for those who
dont usually visit private and questionable sites or use sensitive information
online, it may still feel awkward to know that any random website or a network
administrator can track your surfing habits and behavior in order to build a
record of your possible character and personality, this is where an
anonymous proxy server becomes
important.
Anonymous surfing is usually costly, since the ability to mask your online
activities would either require you to setup your own private proxy server or to
avail such service from a third party agency, so for people who are on a tight
budget, it is usually just better to self-restrict his surfing habits or be
paranoid forever. Fortunately, there are totally free proxy servers on the
Internet, such as IPBlind.
IPBlind, found at IPBlind.com works by acting as a frontend website where
you put in the URL of the sites you wish to visit, which it loads on its servers
and passes on to your browser, all the while encrypting both incoming and
outgoing data, which means a large part of your online activities will be
unknown to the websites you visit, to the administrator of your network, and
sometimes even to your Internet service provider. All that they will see on
their logs is that you visit Ipblinds website a lot.
Besides encrypting the data being sent back and forth, Ipblind also
removes intrusive client side scripting such as Javascript, gives the option to
store cookies on their server, strip meta information tags from html files, and
mask the url of the sites you visit, which can be helpful for restrictive
network setups that block websites based on keywords in the URL.
However, before you start browsing exclusively on IPBlind, you need to
know that there is a flaw inherent in all web-based
proxies; first, in terms of
browsing speed, you need to remember that the speed of your Internet connection
will be severely limited by the speed of the server hosting the proxy you are
using. For example, even if you have a blazing fast connection that can load a
flash intensive website in a second, your actual browsing will still be slower
if the hosting of the proxy you are
using can only load the same web page in 15 seconds. Additionally, there are
lots of users using the service like you, and during peak hours, the service
tends to get even slower. This makes downloading of files unfeasible with
proxies, since it will take ages for them to finish. In fact, even small files
are not recommended, since the encryption will corrupt the files and prevent
those that rely heavily on their file headers from being opened again.
Ideally, IPBlind should only be used for browsing text, images or watching
and listening to media. Proxies are also perfect for researching sensitive
information on the Internet.