While the idea of being watched sounds bad, it really is not. It depends clearly on the type. When you are being watched for your own safety, as these video cameras are doing for the citizens, sometimes it is necessary to make some privacy sacrifices to ensure your protection. The only question that arises is what exactly is “anti-social behavior”? If this anti-social behavior means a man waiting outside someone’s house looking to see if anyone is home, and then trying to break the door down or open a window, then it goes without saying that we would all be okay with these cameras. Sometimes these cameras can snoop into places we don’t want them too, and they then abandon their public service. This is the bad kind of being watched, a voyeuristic viewing of your life and its details. It doesn’t have to be the actual watching of your person though or what you are doing; this illegal type of surveillance expands into the extension of your self, except online: your social security number, your documents, your emails, etc.

This kind of surveillance is obviously the aforementioned bad kind. It usually has one defining characteristic; it is done through technology. Somebody snoops on you using some high tech device, breaking through the meager defenses you have on your (it is oftentimes) computer. You always have to be wary of your computer; it can be a great addition to your life and make many things easier with the power of the Internet, but it can be dangerous as well. Most computer are not secured and protected properly, and surf the web “without their seat belts on”, if you will.

Don’t fret; getting a secure Internet is easy. Anonymous proxy is what you need to look for, and once you find a good one, look no further. An anonymous proxy can enable you to surf the web anonymously and keep you hidden from the prying eyes of those wishing to commit this “anti-social behavior.” Find a reliable private proxy and stick with it, and you will be perfectly secure on the Internet.

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Take the Internet for example. Kids, every day, converse with each other online. This has become the primary form of communication among the youth of America; rare is the case when a group of friends will actually go out and meet in person when it is so much easier to do so on the computer. With this virtual existence though, one can argue they lose who their friends really are. While this is meant in a sentimental, profound fashion, the literal meaning applies too. Without seeing their faces and hearing their voices, how do you know the person typing is the one actually typing? It would be easy and plausible enough that the friend they are exchanging personal information with is actually a hacker who is trying to lure them into a real life encounter. This is sobering news, but sadly it happens often.

These false identities online can be harmful. A poll was recently posted on the hot new social networking site FaceBook with an insidious title: “Should President Obama be killed?” The poll was open with four options, and almost seven hundred and thirty people navigated to the site to post their response. While this can quickly be written off as a joke due to the ease of posting a poll and the fact that anyone can do so, it is still entirely possible this was the doing of some sociopath looking for support.

The poll was quickly investigated by the Secret Service and was promptly shut down. Consider the implications of this: if the Secret Service pounced on it so quickly, it was obviously no laughing matter. While these people are doing their crimes secretly on the Internet, others are invading your privacy. In a mock contest to give away a certain amount of money, Netflix investigated nearly all of their user’s browsing histories to determine what kind of movies they would like, and market to the customers appropriately.

Anonymity on the Internet isn’t always a bad thing though; only when put into the wrong hands. If everyone on the Internet was anonymous, these privacy issues would not occur. If you plan to protect yourself and ensure anonymous browsing online, you have to utilize an anonymous proxy. By masking your IP address, it hides you from the rest of the hacking and tracking Internet.

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Some people use these cache systems to help out with their P2P (peer-to-peer) transfers. This will store part of the data that needs to be transferred and copied, and will allow it to load much more quickly. The cache will also hold other data that will cause the Internet to be a faster place for users and allow more data to be transferred more quickly.

The cache also comes with some risks too. Anytime identifying data or browsing history is stored on your computer, you will have some sort of privacy issue. The less information you keep about yourself and your browsing habits on your computer and on the Internet, the safer and more anonymity you will enjoy. It is possible that a hacker could gain access to your data by using your IP address to hack into your computer. It is also possible to just steal your computer and get into your cache. It is one thing for your system to be physically stolen, but if a hacker could remotely access your computer and get all sorts of sensitive information and other browsing habits, it could be forever before you found out and tried to stop it, but by then the damage could be irreversible.

There is also the practice of ISPs using a cache system for all of its users to enjoy. This seems ideal, because with so many users going on so many different sites, yet sharing the same cache, they could all use the giant cache system to load many sites faster, instead of only the ones they previously went on. This seems great, but if someone were to somehow gain access to the gigantic universal cache, they would have access to so many people’s data that it would be a privacy nightmare. Imagine, so many people’s data compromised so quickly!

Today though, the cache system is archaic. It was a good idea when Internet connection speeds were slow, but with today’s DSL and broadband being the norm for most Internet users, the connections are so fast that the cache became a liability. People worried about the security risks.

Today, proxies don’t use the cache system either. One of the concepts for a proxy was specifically for the caching of sites making your browsing faster.  Companies cached the sites that their employees went to thus speeding up the web browsing. They used to have a system like the ISPs, but they have pretty much abandoned that due to the speed of Internet connections. Although the cache still is in effect on most every computer, it has taken a backseat after the Internet became so streamlined and fast.

Now proxies are used primarily for Internet privacy.  By using an anonymous proxy a user can surf the Internet anonymously.  An anonymous proxy can do two things for the user.  First it can change the IP address of the user thus protecting their location.  And if the proxy uses encryption it can also prevent hackers from intercepting and reading the data sent over the Internet.

Cache, however, remains on your PC.  These are now mostly garbage files and should be deleted regularly.  All browsers have the ability to clear the cache upon exiting.  Some call these files temporary Internet files, some call it cache.  In either case, you don’t need them anymore.

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Although out Internet is as free as red, white, and blue can be, freedom can bring about some bad things. Criminals and identity thieves roam the Internet; hackers and trackers prey on innocents. As technology increases, these criminals up their arsenal and still have some tricks up their sleeve. Some people may feel comforted by the security systems and firewalls installed on their computer, but this is just the same as a child hiding under the covers; what are the covers actually going to do?

These preliminary defenses are a piece of cake for a hacker of even the most rudimentary talent. The truth is, even if these defenses worked, they still wouldn’t fix the main problem: the IP address. This virtual nametag your computer wears is shown to every website, and contains your location. If someone got your IP address, all they would have to do is copy it into a Google search, and they would have your location.

Although the IP is completely public, it can be hidden using anonymous proxy software. This will actually mask your IP, and allow you to travel anonymously and securely on the web. The proxy will change your IP address to one it uses, and this way, you will not appear as you, but as the proxy.

There a variety of these services to choose from. Web proxies are the most common, and most widely used, often because they are free. All these entail is going to a website, hitting in the address you wish to visit, and the proxy will act as a middleman, and retrieve the information for you, so it’s like you never even visited the site.

The other type of proxy server is the professional, fee-based server. These will offer the same services as a web proxy, but often add in an additional layer of security. Although people feel safe with a web proxy, the truth is they offer no security and are sometimes run by hacker to steal people’s information. Fee-based proxies offer encryption services, which will encode all of your data so that it will appear as hieroglyphics to any hacker or interloper.

Don’t be disillusioned by total freedom; you are not always safe. The systems that protect you and come stock on your computer are not enough to combat the perils of online life and browsing. There are criminals who, every day, make an illicit living on people who are unprotected. Don’t be one of them! Protect yourself by using an anonymous proxy and ward off any intruder to your Internet space. Most importantly, don’t let anyone locate you through your IP address, use an anonymous proxy and gain the peace of mind that comes with complete safety.

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With blogging becoming such a popular and widely utilized pastime, people are beginning to see the security issues it represents. First of all, there is the possibility of someone tracking the blogger from his or her page, and maybe even posing as a friend (which isn’t hard to do online) to arrange a real life encounter. There is also the simple possibly that the blogger is just putting too much information out there. While they may talk about other things, blogs are often centered around friends and their activities together. Oftentimes you will see a blog that lucidly describes the place they are discussing, (sometimes even an address…) people involved in the event, and usually a picture attached of the person and their friends. This is everything and more than a criminal needs to find this person and rob, kidnap, or steal from them.

This new awareness of blog safety brought about the anonymous movement. People realized that the root of their problems and the biggest danger in their blogging lives is that they were being tracked and identified in real life. These blogs are often public too; imagine if a boss or potential employer were to view someone’s blog and turn them away from the job! The reverse of this happened a little while ago; a woman who constantly blogged about her disdain for a local politician and his methods was anonymous online. After some time and after having built a strong fan base, she decided to go public, and posted her name, a brief bio, and a picture of herself. Her boss, being an avid supporter of the ousted politician, fired her and forbid her from coming back to her job. She is now blacklisted from many employers in her area, for fear of being guilty by association.

Use an anonymous proxy to stay anonymous online. This is the best and most powerful way to do so. High bit encryption services will protect your identity, and a changed IP address will ensure you safe and anonymous browsing; and the avoidance of any identity-based privacy issues.

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You can really mess them up by using an anonymous proxy’s encryption services to encode all of your data. When surfing through the private proxy, the data between you and the server is protected.

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While these web cams can be used for business related purposes as stated above, they can be purely social as well, and in this respect, they shine. People can, instead of simply typing out a smiley face emoticon, can smile and laugh and hear their friends or family’s voice. Imagine the joy a soldier feels when he is able to hear his family’s voice again; imagine the joy they all would feel if they could see each other again. Some couple are known to chat over dinner over the Internet when they are apart. An Internet program called Skype actually allows people to organize these chats with a phone number like system and chat and talk and see each other over the Internet. Many people use these to record their musical performances, their political rants, or just their random antics and upload them straight to the online video giant YouTube. The possibilities are endless; perhaps online classes will be enhanced to actually have a teacher lecture to students while they take notes.

While this is a truly promising and a growing technology, as is with everything good, there are risks you take. For example, perhaps if a child were to go into an Internet chat room they could be forced aside and have to talk face to face with their enticing aggressor; just as the salesman was more convincing once he was able to be seen, so would be a child molester to a child. It seems as though the Internet is getting a little to personal, and anonymity is scarce, especially with the cultural phenomenon of the social networking site; MySpace, FaceBook, Xanga, etc. Perhaps they will have web cam integration soon too, and everyone will be seeing each other, rather than just viewing a recreation of them on their web page.

An anonymous proxy can be used to keep an Internet user safe, and keep what anonymity is left online. Using a private proxy will ensure anonymous browsing through a secure tunnel of access, and strong encryption services will keep your sensitive documents safe and not allow your security to be compromised whatsoever.

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Why do they do all of this? Well, for one they do save your user preferences, so maybe you can stay logged in until you sign out of some particular sites, and they can help bring you towards parts of the site you enjoyed. This is generally helpful, but these cookies can also be dangerous too.

Recently, a controversy has been brewing over the use of cookies. Some people go shopping on the Internet, looking for better deals by cutting out the middle man or what have you, and they do so looking for good deals. Recently, some sites have been using cookies and identifying which users have money and which ones don’t, and marketing their information and wares that way. This way, if a wealthy man had cookies on his computer of him buying off of an expensive car site, the merchandise he saw on the front page of a buying website would be different (and probably more expensive) than what others see.

There are a couple of ways to counter this. This can be done by every basic browser. In your security/privacy options tab probably at the top of your browser, you can choose to delete cookies. This will help for any cookies you previously got on your computer, but you will have to do this at the end of every web session. There is a better way though.

Stop cookies and keep yourself safe and anonymous browsing online. First, you can actually choose to stop allowing cookies onto the computer and this will completely stop their flow. This way you don’t have to keep deleting them, and fretting over the ones that weren’t deleted.

Then, on top of that, an anonymous proxy will actually cloak your location by changing your IP address, and block hackers by providing you with a secure tunnel of encrypted access.

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The Internet, for all of its greatness, can be a very distracting place. While many workers use it for productive reasons, some just lollygag all day on it, and create a large loss of productivity among their company. It is for these workers sake that the Internet at work is usually highly restricted and censored. The same goes for school; if a paid worker is slacking off, imagine the apathy an unpaid student involuntarily put in a boring class feels!

This is why many sites are blocked while you are trying to surf them. Every worker has had some downtime, and bored, they try and log onto YouTube and gotten the “this site has been blocked” message. The company IT department usually is the one who arranges and sets up all of these blocks. They do so by finding keywords that they wish to block, and anything with them usually is. “Games”, “Videos”, “Fun”, and “Social” are some stock examples of what they block.

There are ways around this. While it is not a good idea to squander all of your work time logging on MySpace and viewing YouTube, some sites are unrightfully blocked. The keyword system is not infallible, and many sites that even have words close to the ones that are blocked will be grandfathered in.

Using an anonymous proxy server can get you through the blocks instated by your company workplace or school. These anonymous proxy servers will actually get you through the blocks by getting the sites for you, and it is like you never even accessed them. When you open up your anonymous proxy software or the website, there will be an address box for you to type the website you wish to go into. The anonymous proxy will then retrieve the website for you, and it won’t even keep record of you having visited the site.

If you are worried that your boss might find out you have been circumventing their online blocks, you are in luck. The anonymous proxy won’t keep any identifying information on your computer, and if you are using a web proxy, all your history will say is the name of the web proxy over and over again.

Your boss won’t be the wiser and you may be able to not be bored out of your mind during your free time. Also, you will be protected and safe on the Internet. You will have completely anonymous browsing and surfing as your IP address will be hidden, and no one will be able to track you.

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With the advent of the “Information Generation”, people flocked to the Internet for its unlimited resources and its great exploring potential. People began to have virtual lives online, living vicariously through games or social networking sites. The Internet unknowingly conglomerated with television through YouTube, and is currently putting television on its last legs. Even the drudging commute to work is becoming archaic, and being replaced by the coffee-fueled masses that earn their bread working from home.

America has always been a land of change, as well as freedom. Right now, we are in the middle of another Industrial Revolution; although perhaps it will appear in history textbooks as the Technology Revolution. As the people evolved and changed their habits, so did the inventive criminals. Crime has always been a plaguing leech on America’s side, but one that is inevitable by the amount of freedom each citizen enjoys. Although criminals are often stereotypically portrayed as completely ignorant, uneducated low lives, they know quite some about their art; it is their chosen profession. They follow people and find out where they are most unprotected and will strike there when the opportunity arises. They also factor in how likely it is that they will be caught.

When everyone began using the Internet, criminals began to see that this was an excellent new avenue for them to exploit. Instead of having to rob someone in a suspicious back alley or on a crowded subway train, they could do so surreptitiously online, without even a trace of fear. A robber mugging someone in an alley will be plagued by the screams of his victim, and most likely caught by police as he tries to escape. An Internet hacker who hacks into an innocent person’s bank account online will not have to worry about the victim screaming for help, nor about a quick escape. It is likely the victim won’t even know that they have been robbed until months later, and by then the criminals will be gone, without a shred of evidence left behind.

You may think that these criminals have to be rogue N.S.A agents to be able to hack into your computer, but the truth is, it isn’t that difficult. All the thief needs is access to your Internet communications.

How do you hide it then? Obviously you don’t want a criminal breaking into your computer and stealing your data and secret information. The best way to do so is by using an anonymous proxy server.

There are two kinds of anonymous proxy servers; web-based, and software-based. A web-based proxy is the most common that people use, and the ones most commonly made. These can be accessed by just doing a brief Google search of “anonymous proxy”; you will get a ton of results. By going onto one of these sites, you will see a new URL box (where you type in the website you wish to go to) that will be able to be typed in. Simply type in the website you actually wished to visit and the proxy will act as a middleman, going and retrieving the website for you. This will ensure that no record of the website being visited remains on your computer, no tracking cookies have been planted, and your identity is kept completely anonymous. Remember that your IP address contains your location and other identifying information, so the proxy has effectively kept you safe.

That all sounds good; but it is not all that it seems. Any proxy server is operated by one particular person, or a group of people. While you may be hidden from the rest of the web, the owners of the proxy can see everything and everyone’s real IP address that flows through their network. Anyone can configure and set-up a web proxy. Although some of these people might be hosting one to help out a friend living in a less-than-democratic country, the chances are slim of this, and it would probably be private. The bottom line is, bandwidth costs major money, and with so many people on one server, the owner is likely to accumulate quite a large bill at the end of the month. Most people lose their philanthropic spirit after their bank account is emptied by other people. These proxies are often free, which raises some eyebrows, and correctly so. Oftentimes, these web-based proxies are run by hackers and criminals to lazy to break into people’s computers, so they have their prey come to them. These people are under false pretenses that they are safe on these hacked servers, but the truth, is a hacker is diligently recording and watching all of their bank transactions, log-ins, and other private information. It is not too big of a stretch to think that these people are dipping into their unknowing consumers accounts to keep their proxy going.

The other kind of anonymous proxy is called a software based proxy. These are similar to web-based proxies in theory, but differ in practice. As their names denote, web-based proxies are done by accessing an Internet site, while software-based proxies are used by downloading something into your computer. These proxies also differ in one more major manner; they are usually fee-based. This usually turns some people running to the hills for a free-web based proxy, but the truth is, you get what you pay for. Remember, proxies cost money, and you are paying in one way or another if you don’t do so up front. By paying a small monthly fee, (your child has enough money in their piggy bank) you can be ensured that the proxy will guarantee anonymous surfing and browsing for as long as you use it. These also are much faster that free web proxies too, as the software based ones will have more servers to disperse traffic, while a web proxy will keep all of its users on one server, sometimes slowing traffic to a haul. Another plus is that you won’t see incessant amounts of random advertisement. If the web proxy isn’t stealing from you, they will likely fill your retrieved page with all sorts of advertisements and other garbage that decreases your anonymous browsing experience.

Both proxies have their ups and downs, but a software based proxy is the way to go if you can spare just a couple of dollars a month. It is worth it to know no hacker is intercepting all of your documents and compromising your anonymous surfing experience. Identity thieves hang out on web proxies, and can cause some serious privacy issues. A web proxy should only be used when surfing on a public computer where you want to bypass some sort of institute instated blockade. Use software proxies for your home and work computers where you wish to bypass any Internet censorship your boss might have instated, hide your IP address, and make sure you are enjoying an anonymous browsing experience through your secure tunnel of access.

Don’t be baited by a hacker and use a web-based proxy unless you are on a public computer; use an anonymous software based proxy and get the Internet privacy you need in the “Information Generation.”

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