If you’re searching for anonymous proxies in 2009 be very careful how you use them. Sure there’s plenty of these proxies around but remember most of these servers are operating as open proxies without the knowledge of the network or systems administrators. For instance lots of them are running in corporate and educational networks on pcs, forgotten or misconfigured servers sitting in a corner somewhere.
Now if you’ve no problem with using the latest 2009 web proxies without the owners consent, then fine – I’m not here to moralise on this. What I do want you to be aware of is two main points –
1) Because these servers are rarely patched up to date or configured correctly – they are extremely insecure. It is likely that hackers will either take over or partly run these open proxies at some point.
2) HTTP – the protocol that you do the vast majority of your web browsing. Is a clear text protocol that is the whole data stream can be read easily. So anyone who logs the data passing through these proxies will see everything you are doing, downloading etc and your IP address.
I personally would never use a free anonymous proxy at all, I know how insecure they all are. If you do make sure you are very careful about what you browse through – never do anything which involves passing any personal information on them. Even something as trivial as logging into a forum or account will give away huge amounts of information about you. If you are unlucky enough to be on one of the many hacked 2009 open proxies it could cost you.