I’ve spoken about Tor before on several occasions, I’ve also mentioned the excellent SwitchProxy Firefox extension. Well, Tor has its downsides, and sometimes it’s better to switch to regular anonymising proxies. One of the great people on the shroomery message boards has written a proxy-list scraping script that generates a flat list of proxies. I’ve hosted this script here for those of you who don’t have a working PHP setup. The best thing about this script is that you can set it up to import into switchproxy and even auto-update. Here’s how.
Before I start, I realise that hosting this and the guide is likely to generate a lot of extra daily traffic without any extra visits, so lets make a deal. I’ll promise to keep the list up so you don’t have to host your own if you agree a) not to hose my bandwidth and b) put SnakeOil Labs in your aggregator, visit occasionally, and visit a few of our fine sponsors.
Ok, to kick things off, go to round two, download and install SafeProxy. SafeProxy has heaps of features designed to make things better. Now go to the SafeProxy Options (Tools->Extensions, SafeProxy then click on Options on Windows) and you should see something like the screenshot below.
Now click on Manage Proxies. In my screenshot you can see that I have Tor pre-configured. You probably won’t have anything, but if you do then this will work in conjunction with your existing proxy configurations.
Click on Add, then choose an Anonymous proxy. On the resulting window there’s a wide array of options. Add http://www.snakeoillabs.com/proxy/ to the Import URL box, toggle the Automatically import from this url daily option and hit Load. This should populate the grid below with a nice big list of proxies. You can switch between these proxies automatically if you wish, but as you haven’t confirmed connectivity, I ‘d be careful with it. For portable firefox use, this is a godsend. I set mine to change proxy every 60 seconds.
Finally, add a label such as ‘AutoProxy’ and hit save. In the bottom right of your Firefox window you should be able to see the text ‘Proxy: None’. Right-click here and switch to ‘AutoProxy’ or whatever you named your proxy group. Now try going to google and seeing what happens. At first this might not work, if this is the case, right click on your AutoProxy text at the bottom right of the window and select ‘Next Anonymous Proxy’. Alternatively, you could wait 60 seconds, but whatever works best for you.
I hope you’ve found this useful, and remember, stay safe on the net!
What theme do u use? that nice brushed look, and vista border?? tnx
The Firefox theme is ‘brushed’ from http://temporaer.net/open/themes/brushed.php, and the Windows theme is the Vista Inspirat BricoPack from http://www.crystalxp.net/
Very cool; thanks for the writeup.
Incase anyone’s interested, I hacked up an app that will check a text file list of proxies and see if they’re working. It does require the .net framework V2.0 (Working on getting VS2005 to build 1.1 apps, but it sucks) so eh.
http://www.kyhwana.org/openproxychecker.zip
Kyhwana,
Thanks for the info about your tool. Got any screenshots etc. to encourage people to make the jump for 2.0? I’m not running 2.0 yet so haven’t checked it out.
Well, not from a users perspective. It doesn’t really look any better than it would with 1.1.
The instructions for compiling to 1.1 with visual studio 2005 don’t seem to work, so I might just try reusing the code in sharpdevelop or something.
Just a heads up: Switch Proxy apparently DOES NOT work with the newer builds of Firefox – 1.5+. Don’t even bother downloading it until they have updated the extension to be compatible.
Agree with Ans, the Switchproxy DOES NOT work with the newer builds of Firefox – 1.5+.
when I tried to load a proxy list from “http://www.snakeoillabs.com/proxy/”, I got this error: ([Exception..."Compoment returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIListBoxObject.getItemATIndex]“nsresult:”0×80004005(NS_ERROR_FAILURE” locateion:”JS frame::chrome://global/content/bindings/listbox.xml::getItemAtIndex::line 481″data:no])
Agree with Ans, the Switchproxy DOES NOT work with the newer builds of Firefox – 1.5+.
another two free web proxies
http://anon.emigrantas.com
http://proxy.emigrantas.com – text based
i was wondering what you did to get that php script
running on your server ? ive added the phpscript and
also added proxylist.txt and tried to edit the script but im havening no luck ! any help would be much appreciated !
ps your blog is sweet !
New service realised
You do not need to search for working free web proxies. All is here.
Find free web proxy for desired country!
All proxies are regulary checked if they still alive.
http://getproxy.emigrantas.com
http://getproxy.ath.cx
http://getproxy.mine.nu
http://proxylist.getmyip.com
http://proxylist.homeip.net
http://randomproxy.ath.cx
enjoy them!
I tried the proxies and they came up as not accepting connections or not working at all