 | By Mark Edwards Many public proxy services exist that let you both surf the Net anonymously and bypass overly restrictive content filtering systems. This week, I tell you how to easily build an entirely private, anonymous proxy service that you control at your own leisure. |
PHProxy brings anonymity to your desktop
Two weeks ago, in the Aug. 2 edition of this newsletter, I described a few ways to bypass overly restrictive Web filters by using a few search engine tricks. Even better, if you have a Web server that supports PHP scripts (most do these days), you can easily install a full-blown Web-based proxy service that you can use from any Web browser.
The script, PHProxy, is a free anonymizing Web-surfing proxy tool. Since the script runs on a server to retrieve content and deliver it to your browser, your PC remains relatively invisible to the site that you’re surfing. Even images and multimedia content, such as Shockwave files, are retrieved by the proxy and delivered to your browser!
If you’ve never used PHP scripts before, don’t worry, because this one is easy to install and use. Just download the .zip archive, unzip it to a temporary directory on your local desktop system, and then upload all the files to a directory on your Web server. That’s basically all there is to it. Then you can access it directly from your Web browser.
For example, if your Web site is located at Mysite.nul, you upload the script to a subdirectory called /secret. You can then access the proxy by directing your browser to Mysite.nul/secret.
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