> And presumably you ran your own DNS servers as well? And ensured your proxy wasn't in turn being monitored? I'm not defending anything else in the GP's comme

> And presumably you ran your own DNS servers as well? And ensured your proxy wasn't in turn being monitored? I'm not defending anything else in the GP's comment (I think they're 100% wrong) but they meant running Squid as a transparent caching proxy. In the dial-up days I ran Squid as a transparent proxy on a Linux box that shared the dial-up connection for the network. You'd set Squid to have a large cache with a long expiry. That way all the styles, scripts, and images for pages would get cached on the proxy. Subsequent page loads, even days later, would be super fast since many of the resources would be loading from Squid's cache. I even had some scripts that I'd run every week in the middle of the night (modem speaker disabled obviously) to load the homepage to a bunch of sites I visited regularly to freshen the cache. Unlike a browser cache the Squid cache worked across machines and was much easier to set long expiries and just cache way more content. It improved browsing significantly especially since even with a 56k modem I rarely got better than a 28.8k connection. While for me personally this kind of thing is no longer necessary it's not the worst thing if you've got a slow or unreliable connection. With TLS everywhere setting up such a transparent caching proxy is much more difficult since you need a literal MITM proxy to make it work right.