Your Proxy, My Proxy, Who's Proxy?

Closest thing I could find to getting the Internet when not at home. Is it relevant? Well no, but come on  'Pringles Cantenna', winner!

I was recently passed a question from a friend, “How do I disable my proxy so I can watch Iplayer abroad?”

Well the simple answer is you could but it wouldn't help as its your work station that chooses what server to connect to, irrespective of your country. The more useful answer is to use private proxies or scraped proxies located in various countries. To do this you can either use free ones or subscribe to a relatively cheap service for privately owned and sustained proxy servers in all the main countries. Now be warned, the free proxy servers may seem like an easy win but these are often swamped with users, resulting in very slow performance. Not to mention you run the risk of viruses commonly affecting these servers. If you're lucky with a google search you may come across a dedicated VPN or proxy server set up specifically for watching your video channel, but these will be short lived as they are set up to go down. By that I mean they often get threats from broadcast networks to shut down. There are also web based proxy services where you can put the URL of your desired video stream. Such websites are usually built on Perl of PHP scripts that act to hide your IP address. These aren't always reliable as they have to change the underlying HTML and change website looks. They also won't work if the URL is secure (https://) and a membership is required.

I've had a look around, and been able to find two paid services and one volunteer based service at your disposal. While I don't use these services myself I've read good reviews and feedback from regular users which can vouch for how good they are.

The two paid choices I have for you are these:

1.Identity Cloaker

2.HideMyAss

Both these services require you to subscribe to their service and at a very cheap price of between £6-£10. Both services provide encryption of the data you send and receive across the internet. They act to hide your physical location and IP address. With a range of countries and IP's privately maintained around the world, you can pick and choose your desired proxy to connect through (software provided) and access those sites usually blocked. Using Internet Explorer will work fine, but for Identity Cloaker, Firefox requires a small extra add on. 'HideMyAss' offers a partially free web based service as well as paid, but I can guarantee the paid will offer more security and more bandwidth.

The one volunteer service I have for you is this:

1.TOR

The Tor Project was originally a Naval online operation for secure data communication, but is now a widely public and frequently used online privacy service. It works in a similar way to the above services, hiding your physical address and IP. The clever aspect of TOR is best described by themselves as a twisty. Using their software your normal connection route is bounced around a circuit of encrypted networks until it reaches its destination. Each point only knows where the connection came from and where it goes next, encrypting with a fresh key at each point so the full route is never known. Your route is also reset every ten minutes.

While this is a very secure and robust method, the routes are mainly intended for relatively small amounts of data and rely heavily on volunteers. This can prove unreliable at times and if you don't see yourself as a power user, this service can confuse the average user.

So the whole process of switching proxy services isn't an entirely simple one. There are, as you have seen, multiple options available to you from the free but potentially harmful, the free but potentially slow and the relatively cheap but secure service. It's down to how tech savy you are and how much you are willing to pay against how much you are willing to risk. I personally think that Internet encryption at that level for that price tag is very reasonable and far better then taking a chance with something free. It's your personal data after all, but I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts on the matter are.