Proxy servers -- Useful?

I know you can configure IE/FF/Chrome to use a proxy. Are there any benefits/ downsides? What are some reliable proxy servers?

 

It depends, what are your reasons for wanting to use a proxy? The only real downsides are that same proxies will kill your latency, have a severely limited bandwidth and they log your activity when you connect to them. If you want a good proxy server you will most certainly have to pay for the privilege.

 

What do you need a proxy for? That determines if you will find the benefits outweigh the downsides.

If you are trying to route your net traffic via a proxy hoping to mask your traffic/activity, you will not find a free solution out there that does this while NOT logging your activity (feel free to prove me wrong though!) or doesn't limit your traffic in some ridiculous fashion. All proxies will, by their nature, drastically increase your ping/ms and you will probably be dropping packets along the way, so gaming (or doing anything more than basic internets, not including youtube) on one is not really viable.

 

I really don't know what they're used for so I wouldn't know what I'd need it for. I always remember kids would use them to get onto facebook in school.

 

Then you don't need one

And yes they are often used in schools/workplaces by people trying to bypass internal network firewalls. The sysadmins can see what you are doing if they bother to look, they just really don't care, so long as you don't make their job hard by downloading worms

They can be useful for home usage if, for instance, you live in an apartment complex with some idiot neighbour who gets your IP address block banned from a website, and you need to request the IP unbanned - you can use a proxy to connect to the website and send a PM or whatever.

 

That's pretty much what I'd figured. Thanks for the info.

 

Imagine proxy as a distant gateway to internet. All your traffic goes first to proxy and depending on anonymity level of that proxy destination site could never know that you were asking for it. It sees proxy address as an address of a requester. You are hidden behind a proxy.

If your school blocks Facebook - go to web proxy page and it will send your facebook requests. School firewall sees proxy address which is not blacklisted, Facebook sees proxy address too so it works.

Now check this: you can watch BBC in UK by assigning an UK proxy so BBC thinks you are coming from UK. Or Hulu in USA by assigning an USA proxy server.

So proxys are very nice network feature - anonymity, redirecting traffic, but can be very dangerous too. I wouldn't log onto my bank account through a public proxy for example since proxy is by default man in the middle (and go to Google and see what is a man in the middle attack)

Another thing - some public proxyies log your real IP addresess and will hand it to the law if you misuse their services for some criminal activities.