Transparent or non-anonymous proxies (proxy servers) do not hide your IP address. They do provide anyone with your real IP address and do not hide any information about you and your reading interests. Actually they just retransmit information between your computer and server without modyfying it in any way to keep your privacy. Besides that, they let anyone know that you are surfing through a proxy server. Transparent proxy servers can be used for all kinds of Web-services just to speed up data transfers.

Distorting proxy servers hide your IP address or modify it in some way to prevent target server know about it. They may provide or may hide information about you and your reading interests. Besides that, they let anyone know that you are surfing through a proxy server. Distorting proxy servers can be used for all kinds of Web-services to speed up data transfers and to keep your privacy. But they specificly tells target server that you are using proxy server.

Anonymous proxy does not transfer the information about the IP-address of its user, and thus effectively hide the information about you and your surfing interests. In addition, some proxies (the so-called elite proxies) can also hide the fact that a user surfing through a proxy server. So there are two types of anonymous proxies:

  • Anonymous Proxy server does not send HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR variable to host, this improves privacy since your IP address cannot be logged.
  • Elite proxy (high anonymity) does not send HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR, HTTP_VIA and HTTP_PROXY_CONNECTION variables. Host doesn’t even know you are using proxy server and of course it doesn’t know your IP address.

Some users are merely interested in anonymity for added security, hiding their identities from potentially malicious websites for instance, or on principle, to facilitate constitutional human rights of freedom of speech, for instance. Anonymous proxy servers can be used for all kinds of Web-services, such as Web-Mail (MSN Hot Mail, Yahoo mail), web-chat rooms, FTP archives, etc. to speed up connection and keep privacy as well. The only real thing wrong with free anonymous proxies is that they are usually very slow.

CoDeeN proxies (PlanetLab) – very fast proxies, you can also use them on port 3127. No POST allowed, so you can only view/download webpages and use simple forms that use the GET method (like search engines) but you can not use bigger forms that use POST (like buy stuff at Amazon). The PlanetLab Consortium is a collection of academic, industrial, and government institutions cooperating to support and enhance the PlanetLab overlay network. CoDeeN is an academic testbed Content Distribution Network (CDN) built on top of PlanetLab by the Network Systems Group at Princeton University. This testbed CDN consists of a network of high-performance proxy servers. Currently, proxy servers have been deployed on many PlanetLab nodes. Note that all accesses via CoDeeN are logged, mostly to aid in identifying abuse and other forms of damage control. However, these proxies are good for browsing some Internet resources.