apart from paedophiles downloading child porn.. who would need this kind of service ?

It's not just for porn and not only for paedophiles. You can use this if you don't want your internet activity to be known in your local network, especially by your Sys Admin. Since images and other stuff gets stored in the cache while surfing thru the web, you don't want others to know every thing you do in the web especially if you're at work.

the guys at work will still see your cache.

anyways.... if i wanted to surf annonomously.... i just ssh into a Unix machine at University, set the display variable to my home IP address (to get a remote GUI login) and fireup mozilla....

although im sat at home... am actually working on he uni Unix machine.

If I ever wanted to go anonymous on web I have access to my university's computer club's anonymizing proxy. SSH tunnel there and I am untrackable.

another useful site for people that want to surf at work:
http://nocensor.citizenlab.org/
the webproxy part is very interersting. and there's a lot of interesting stuff in the 'todo' section too: php msn messengers, pop mail checkers, gmail & hotmail checkers,...

using proxies is like having all your traffic pass through an extra computer, so it does slow down the traffic. but if you use a proxy in your own country, or with a very low ping (you can test this by opening a command window and type 'ping w.x.y.z'
where w.x.y.z is the ip adress of the proxy.
try to find that that has a ping of less than 100ms!

hiding your ip is not illegal as far as i know.

'Proxies' are not a good way to try and surf 'anonymously'. Obviously, your ISP is going to be aware of everything you do, whether you route through a proxy server or not - afterall, all the data that comes to you has to travel through them first.

prolifik, what do you mean that the sys admin can't see what you are browsing? Of course they can. The data has to come from somewhere, and on a local-area network, it is usually from a computer (or a series of computers) that act as the server. Seeing as how a network admininstrator [should] have control of this server, they can therefore track what you are doing, regardless of how many proxies you tunnel through.

The only thing that a proxy can really achieve is masking your IP address from servers that you access through that proxy server. For those who don't know, your IP address logged and attached to every post you make on this forum, but is only visible to moderators and admins. Using a proxy would mask this. It more or less works by relaying commands you send it to the destination host (hence the name proxy), so on the server side of things, it appears that the proxy server is accessing the network and not you directly. Still, a lot of proxy servers keep connection and activity logs (only the high-anonymity ones don't - or that's what they say), so you can be traced easily if you try and do anything illegal. Your ISP would probobly sniff you out first anyway if you try and download illegal pornography or whatever it was you people were talking about.

well, not if u use ssl connection to your proxy. on the site i gave, there are some ssl proxies. the connection with that proxy is ssl, so the info that is sent between them cannot be read.
still those proxies have logs so if you'd do something very illegal, they'll have to show those logs to the fbi or whatever so they'll find you for sure.
also, a simple traceroute could find you in 1 second

but if it's just to surf at work to hotmail and other sites, ssl webproxies should do the trick. or you could use the ssh trick explained above.

What i meant was, you don't want them to know what your internet activities are, that's why you want to be anonymous. Yeah they can see what you're browsing but if you use a proxy and your IP address is masked then they can't pinpoint which machine/computer it is, right? Or am i wrong again? Hehehe.

You cannot mask your IP address to the proxy. Proxy has to know your address to work. Anonymizing proxy does what any proxy does, acts as a "middle man" for your traffic to the web, but does not keep logs on its usage making it impossible to trace who was the sender and receiver of the traffic.

wad if u connect to a proxy thru a proxy? would it make u more anonymous? or harder to detect? just wondering...