	Anonymous surfing software
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Anonymous surfing software

Why anonymous surfing?

There are many reasons why people need anonymous surfing. Some people need anonymous surf to protect themselves from information hackers, identity thieves, spammers and other people who want to get access to their personal information. Others want to surf anonymously as they don't want their employers or family members know their surfing habits.

Every time you surf the web you leave traces of your Internet activity that can reveal your real-life identity. Any web resource you access can gather and record usage information about you such as your IP address, location, last visited web pages and other information that you might want to keep confidential.
Using this information hackers, identity thieves, spammers and other people who want to get access to your personal information can monitor your browsing habits and activities, spy upon you, steal personal information and exploit security holes in your system to cause damage to your computer. It is possible to restrict accessing any information or provide customized content to specific IP.

What is anonymous surfing?

Anonymous surfing is private web sufing - web sites you visit don't know who you are.
There are several ways to organize anonymous surfing:
• Anonymous surfing through special anonymous surfing software.
You should download and install anonymous surfing software and then configure it for anonymous surfing.
• Anonymous surfing through a web site (cgi proxy).
If you choose anonymous surfing through a web site, you should visit a web site that offers such kind of service and enter the URL of the web site you want to surf to. But using cgi-proxy is appropriate for anonymous surfing only. If you want to stay anonymous while sending emails, using ISQ, etc., you need special anonymous surfing software. Furthermore, some cgi proxies set restriction for running scripts on the web sites you want to visit or set traffic limitation for requests from the certain IP.

• Anonymous surfing though a certain proxy server
In this case you should configure your browser/application manually to surf through a certain proxy server.

How anonymous surfing worka

When you visit a web site, your IP address is packed into a special header. As this header is transferred from server to server and router to router, the header includes special variables.
These are some environment variables:
REMOTE_ADDR - IP address of a client
HTTP_VIA - if it is not empty, then a proxy is used. Value is an address (or several addresses) of a proxy server, this variable is added by a proxy server itself if you use one.
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR - if it is not empty, then a proxy is used. Value is a real IP address of a client (your IP), this variable is also added by a proxy server if you use one.
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE - what language is used in browser (what language a page should be displayed in)
HTTP_USER_AGENT - so called "a user's agent". For all browsers this is Mozilla. Furthermore, browser's name and version (e.g. MSIE 5.5) and an operating system (e.g. Windows 98) is also mentioned here.
HTTP_HOST - is a web server's name
In fact there are much more of them. Your anonymity is determined by what environment variables are "hidden" from a web server.
Anonymous surfing can be organized by putting a proxy server between you and web sites you visit.
Anonymous proxy servers hide your IP address saving you from vulnerabilities concerned with it. So you can safely surf the Internet and your information will never be used by hackers and spammers.
• Proxy server is not used:
REMOTE_ADDR = your IP
HTTP_VIA = not determined
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR = not determined
• Transparent Proxies
REMOTE_ADDR = proxy IP
HTTP_VIA = proxy IP
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR = your IP
These proxies are not anonymous. They don't hide IP-address of a client and let a web server know that you are surfing through a proxy server. The task of such proxies, as a rule, is information caching and/or support of Internet access for several computers via single connection. Such proxies are not applicable for security and privacy while surfing on net. You can use them only for network speed improvement.
• Anonymous Proxies
REMOTE_ADDR = proxy IP
HTTP_VIA = proxy IP
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR = proxy IP
These proxies don't show your real IP but change the request fields so it is very easy to detect that you are using proxy.
• High Anonymous Proxies
REMOTE_ADDR = proxy IP
HTTP_VIA = not determined
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR = not determined
High Anonymous proxy servers do not pass an IP-address of a client and don't send any variables indicating that you are using proxy server to host and look like real browser.

Proxy Question
• The proxy software logs show that I am surfing through proxies but the IP address test shows my real IP.

As you may know not all proxies hide an IP address. Transparent proxies are not applicable for private surfing as they do not hide your IP address. If you need to change your IP address, you should use anonymous or high anonymous proxies.