School Proxy Lists Are They Still Useful

There are so many nonsense associated with school proxy websites that can be found online these days. Since the school proxy business has a very low entry barrier, the typical school proxy webmaster has a pretty low level of knowledge in terms of how proxy scripts really work. Their main concerns are to create as many internet proxies as possible, hanging out at forums to find cheap deals for domain names, cheaper sources of traffic and advertising their own network of proxies and comparing their daily income. Probably only 5% of these online proxy webmasters know how to dig deep into the source codes of popular proxy scripts to order to change and optimize the performance for the demographics of their primary site visitors – the school and college students.

I have just read about this tag line from a well known article site: “Use special web proxy software to automatically search and retrieve free new web proxies from the internet and avoid the proxy filters. We recommend this easy, effective and fast method to give you thousands of proxy server addresses in less than 10 seconds.” So are we all spammers? Otherwise why the heck do a ordinary student trying to catch up with his Facebook and MySpace account need thousands of new proxies every day? This is also funny: “The CGI Proxy script does not have the customizability found in the PHProxy script as an anti internet blocker but the CGI Proxy has no advertisements or cookies unlike the PHProxy.” CGI proxy is not freely available and costs money while the previously open source PHProxy is discontinued with no official software support. Both can be customized as much as possible, limited by the knowledge of your programming skills. No advertisements or cookies? Are you thinking of not seeing advertisements of your favorite Famous Amos cookies instead? Funny as things can be, there are many intelligent school proxy webmasters out there as well. Too smart in fact for the rest of the world.

There are now many school proxy lists available freely online. If you have tried to use any of such free web proxies, you will know how much of a headache things can be. A lot of these proxy listing sites and proxy topsites are being spammed to death by a gang of blackhat proxy webmasters. The entire list is filled up with proxy url belonging to the same webmaster, and more often than not, hosted on the same server, same IP address. When the server goes down due to being overload or periodic maintenance, every single proxy website on the lists are dead as well. If the web filtering software at your school or office catches on to any of these school proxies and decides to ban or block its IP address, boom! All these anonymous proxies will become unusable again. Actually, all the above scenarios are actually on the bright side. Look at it this way, these online proxy url lists are being dominated by blackhat proxy webmasters and they are going in to capture all the web visitor traffic and the advertising dollars. They do not get paid directly for providing you a proxy service to surf your favorite sites. They can jolly well make it painfully slow for you to surf the internet unblocked or deliberately mess up the page loading. When you get fed up, you are likely to click somewhere to get away and that often happens to be an advertising banner or link that pays these rogue webmasters some pennies. These people are here for the money and not trying to provide a free community service. They may even provide a fake proxy that can never connect successfully to the places you wanna go like Youtube and Myspace. Letting you browse videos through their website costs a lot of bandwidth and the required web hosting fees will eat into their profits. So why bother? Just get a visitor like you, piss you off and you click a banner to go away. Repeat a thousand times and the bandwidth does no even cost more than $1 every month. Why bother to pay $300 a month for a webserver in order to bypass filters and properly load videos or social websites for you.

There are worse things that can be done by these rogue blackhat proxy webmasters. They can choose to provide a real and decent proxy website for people to anonymous surfing the web, bypass filters and unblock sites. Meanwhile, they can record all the login information and other private information you provide while surfing the internet on their so-called anonymous proxy server. Holding these crucial information in their hands, they can then hijack your accounts and then demand money from you in order to return the account. For example, they can login to Myspace after obtaining your account id and password, then set the password to their own. When you next try to login to Myspace, you are going in for an unpleasant surprise with a foul aftertaste. If they have a privacy policy, you will be safe from such unsavory practices? Haha, are you sure these chaps are going to follow rules and that brief little policy writeup is really written to protect your interest or their own butts? Change your password regularly and you wll be safe? That is provided you can change faster than they can find your stored login details and try an account hijack. Things are going to get very laughable if you try to change the password while using their black proxy honeypots. You may think that you are using an anonymous proxy to hide your own IP but actually, these anonymous web proxies could be using your computer and its associated IP to do other stuff behind your back. Instead of hijacking your web account, they can simply hijack your computer itself by download malware onto it and bypass any internet security software you may have on your computer. These hidden malicious software can be used to help them make more money in ingenious ways you have never heard of. These anonymous servers can download all sorts of internet browser cookies onto your computer. When you buy something online from a site that has a related cookie, they profiteers get paid. Although reputable shopping sites such as Amazon, Ebay etc are clamping down and banning people using such cookie stuffing methods to earn commissions, this practice is still very much rampant and there are actually many discussion forums dedicated to such methods.

Unless all the webmasters of proxy topsites and proxy listing sites wise up fast to the darker arts of web spamming, it is difficult for school proxy users and run of the mill proxy websites owners to get anything done. It is really a vicious cycle. Since a low level proxy site webmaster cannot get his or her internet proxies to be listed on the topsites, they get very little traffic and eventually quit the proxy business scene. When that happens, proxy users have no legitimate web proxy servers to use and end up with the dangerous honeypots or the frustrating fake proxies. Unfortunately, the knowledge level of a typical proxy topsite owner is not much higher compared to what has been mentioned above. Just as bad as the average free proxy web owner, they usually use a ready made proxy listing script for $50 and have no idea how to customize or improve on the script in order to combat the spammers. Some proxy topsite webmasters may find there is no real monetary reason to fight off spammers and give ordinary proxy owners a level playing field. As long as visitors carry on coming and the advertising revenue remains, who cares about the eventual web browsing experience of the visitors right? Actually wrong again. Remember why you switch over and remain with Google even though you started web surfing with Yahoo, Alta Vista etc? Because Google is a search engine that finds you the stuff you really want fast and accurately. Google does not return you search results on unrelated nonsense that wastes your time and efforts. Similarly, you go to a proxy listing because you want a new working proxy that is unblocked by school web filters. When all you get in return are trashy fake proxies trying to trick you into clicking a banner for them, you will curse and swear and never to trust and return to that proxy listing. There are plenty of other free web proxy listings online anyway, so its their loss and not the visitor’s. Generally, you find less blackhat webmasters owning the free proxy topsites. Creating a popular proxy listing takes a lot of time and these guys prefer the quick money by riding on the traffic meticulously gained and gradually built up over the years by honest but uninformed proxy lists and school proxy website owners.