How to Browse the Web through a Proxy Server

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One question I often see has to do with setting up proxies and browsing from a different IP address. While this tutorial isn’t about how to browse the web anonymously, it explains how to tunnel your traffic through a web proxy. This can be used for:

  • circumventing some types of censorship,
  • slightly more private surfing,
  • bypassing stateful packet inspection and content-filtering firewalls,
  • accessing your instaFaceTwitSnap from work,
  • getting around IP-based geo-blocking, and
  • otherwise rebelling against the man.

To outside observers, it will seem as if you’re browsing from that remote machine. Here’s my ASCII-art version of what this looks like:

(You) <====== [encrypted tunnel] ======> (your server) <====> [your web browsing traffic, going to the sites you visit].

The whole thing takes about 3 minutes to set up; here’s how:

 

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Sysadmin Links, August 2015

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The time has come for another edition of tech-timewasters/sysadmin links. This time, there are a few interesting security articles (including one that will give you an idea of what the malware analysis process looks like).

  1. What is mathematics? (math geekery for amateurs like me): http://math.coe.uga.edu/tme/issues/v09n1/4rota.pdf
  2. The postgres guide!  (non-official): http://www.postgresguide.com/
  3. Rowhammer (A nontechnical security article) — http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/07/rowhammer_security_exploit_why_a_new_security_attack_is_truly_terrifying.single.html
  4. Malware Analysis; a much more technical article on cdorked: https://reverse.put.as/2014/02/05/linuxhackingteamrdorks-a-a-new-and-improved-version-of-linuxcdorked-a/
  5. Scaling LinkedIn; a really nice progression (including graphics) showing a few different popular infrastructures for serving web applications: http://engineering.linkedin.com/architecture/brief-history-scaling-linkedin
  6. Yay videogame music (from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic — I occasionally listen to this while working): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz2wR2CFtrU