Yep, that was a popular one. Later in high school I had a shared hosting account with shell access so I could spin up a proxy with something like ssh -NL 8

Yep, that was a popular one. Later in high school I had a shared hosting account with shell access so I could spin up a proxy with something like ssh -NL 8080:localhost:8080 user@host Then point the browser to use that as a socks proxy.