It can be easily asserted that everyone has visited a mall at some point in their lives. It is quite a place; tons of stores right next to each other, competing for lower prices and all within walking distance. There are also a multitude of stores to choose from; clothes are in abundance and are tools of the trade for malls of all sorts, but there are also house based stores, electronic equipment, music equipment, and even the odd gag gift store. These malls are often air conditioned quite nicely, but during the scorching summer months or the frigid winter months, can be to one extreme or the other. Also, the usefulness and competitive prices these malls offer bring in throngs of people, and one can often have trouble traversing from store to store, let alone accessing the crowded rest areas and trying to find a seat. As refuge from these malls, but with the convenience, price, and selection they offer, online shopping was born. Your wallet protects all of your data from being stolen.

Online shopping is a novel concept. Instead of actually carrying all of your groceries, clothes, or other miscellanea around with you, you simply add them to your shopping cart. The prices are still low, but you can shop from the convenience of your home and without the open and close hours that sporadic malls have. Also, you don’t have to carry all of your bags when you are shopping and worry about keeping track of receipts and all of that small stuff.

Many computers nowadays come with a lot of extras. In a world where every computer is lightening fast, these computer manufacturers have to have some reason to manufacture these more expensive models, and the people to shell out their hard earned money for them. Many say they have increased browsing speeds, free games, or other stuff, but the biggest draw these days is a built in “webcam.” This little device does as its name suggests, it is a camera that allows you to communicate on a face-to-face basis over the Internet. It is one thing to speak to a potential customer over the phone, but a business man who has something to sell has to show more than pictures to his or her client to convince them to buy. Through the web cam, the business man could show a customer how a product works, and see their reactions, and probably have a much better shot at making the sale.

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.

Nearly every thing in life these days is password encoded. Your MySpace account, YouTube video account, Email account, Bank Account, etc. Nobody in their right minds would leave these important things containing sensitive information unsecured. This would be an identity thieves nightmare. You do in fact leave something completely unprotected each day without even realizing it; your Internet activity.

Internet activity you ask? Why is this something that needs to be secured and password protected? The truth is, hackers can intercept your transmissions from your computer and trace you right back to the source. A hacker could actually find your house through these signals, and then you’d have more than data insecurity to worry about. Imagine if your child was using the Internet and a hacker traced them back to your house! Also, these hackers can place tracking cookies on your computer and track you all around the Internet.

The Internet is a place in which it is imperative to remain anonymous at all times while working or just relaxing. When surfing online, you are side-by-side with many people you have never met before. Many of them are just there to do their business and leave, but some are there for other reasons. Where there is money, there are criminals. These criminals realize being online and doing theft is much easier and less risky than doing so in real-life and running the risk of being caught red-handed.

While this data should never be handed over willingly, this just recently happened. A cheerleader at a school in Mississippi was demanded to hand over her FaceBook information to her cheer-leading coach. The cheer-leading coach heard about this girl making a fuss about some internal politics of the team, and figured the information would have been conversed about on FaceBook. She was right; the girl surrendered her information and the coach found the conversation and alerted the rest of the school faculty. The girl was quickly reprimanded for her actions.

This seems wrong, and it is. The girl was forced to give up her personal information for her FaceBook account and then her account was hacked during school hours and on school property, then she was punished for her speech. This is unconstitutional, but unfortunately happens often on the Internet.

The Internet is probably the quintessential reason this day and age is called “the information society”. Everything is right at our fingertips, and is so easy to access. Instead of spending hours researching in a library for your research paper, you could simply do a Google search and find endless pages of information. Instead of drudging between houses during a yard sale, one can head to Ebay and find bargains and deals galore.

Infatuated with this great new invention, no one stopped to worry about the dangers it could present. Internet crime began to rise. People panicked, and with only rudimentary knowledge, didn’t know how to protect themselves. Some just gave in, and assume you had to be a genius to stay safe and anonymous on while surfing the web.

Where there is strife, there is demand for some benefactor to come along and rescue the oppressed. This hero turned out to be something intangible, but nonetheless, effective.

The internet is not the club it used to be. There are many more people using it, and some with bad intentions. It is more important than ever to be guarded online, and luckily, you don’t have to have a doctorate in Computer Sciences to do so.

One must always be wary of their ISP. The ISP has a meticulous log of all internet activity done while under them and every website has a log of every IP that visits them. By using an anonymous proxy, your ISP won’t have a log of sites you’ve visited because it won’t have been under them, and the website will log the proxy’s IP, and not yours when you visit.

Anonymous browsing is just that. Using an anonymous proxy service, a person browses the internet with their IP address and information hidden from the sites being visited.  There are a number of websites, called “Web Proxy Servers”, that are often used for this purpose. Most of the online servers are unreliable for a number of reasons which will be explained later in this article.

When you access an online proxy site, you type in the web address of the page you wish to visit. The site will then take you to the page while hiding the location of your computer. The online proxy server is supposed to act as a representative for the user. The problem is, often it isn’t a very good representative and has a low level of protection.

The Risks of Using Online Anonymous Browsing Severs

Any data sent over a free anonymous proxy server runs the risk of not being encrypted.  This means important and private information can be seen on the anonymous browser’s server.  Passwords, logins and credit card information can be collected and recorded when a person is surfing in this manner.

As many devious people prowl the Internet and try to intercept exchanges of information, encrypted anonymous surfing is becoming more important on a daily basis. Because of this, the amount of people searching for the best way to become anonymous in their web surfing is growing everyday. US Military personnel are not exempt from this need to hide their identity and activities on the web.

The use of an anonymous web proxy can allow you to do more than just hide your IP address. It also allows you to have more freedom to explore websites that are restricted for some reasons, including government restrictions. Many schools, offices, organizations impose these restrictions, but our focus is on bypassing government censorship for military personnel abroad.