4 ms·
There's a lot of proxies, yes, and most of them either sell whatever data they can to advertisers and then hijack your browsing to show those same advertisement
by Argure 12y ago
There's a lot of proxies, yes, and most of them either sell whatever data they can to advertisers and then hijack your browsing to show those same advertisements. Those that don't, will usually try to sell you some premium service or VPN.
Which I'm totally fine with, running these things for a lot of people doesn't come cheap and if that's your business model then hey, go for it. I don't particularly want to use them though, and the only way that's avoidable is going self-hosted.
With self-hosted proxies your list of available options shortens dramatically. Sure, there's all kinds of VPN's, SOCKS proxies, hell, even Tor, but all of those require you to have people configure things on their machine. The first test it needed to pass, was sending it to my grandparents and see if they could use it without any explanation whatsoever.
And then, why stop there. Lets make it as easy for the sysadmin to deploy as well. Hence why it immediately runs as a fully functional webserver. There's a good few advanced things you can do with it, yes, and all of them are either already documented or being documented right now. But at the end of the day, any novice sysadmin should be able to clone and have a functional proxy within five minutes out of the box.
These two things are something I haven't seen any other proxy do so far and that's the use case: a very simple web proxy for both the end user and the person running it. At this point I feel it strikes a very nice balance between simplicity and having plenty of features and customization.
- SwellJoe 12y agoI don't think you've really answered my question (I still don't feel like I know why I would want to use this project, anyway). What do you use it for? You've told me why it's better than other proxies that you would use in the same circumstance that would lead to you using your proxy (which I'm getting the feeling means, "proxies that allow me to access data unavailable directly from where I am, or that allow me to access data more anonymously than I can currently access directly", but nothing like that is mentioned on the front page). So, I believe you that it's easy to setup. Why would I set it up? I'm not trying to be ornery, and I'm not proxy illiterate, I worked on Squid for a decade, and have built my own toy proxies to test ideas. I'm trying to convince you to make your website more clear about why someone would use your software. You can't just call it a "proxy" and expect understanding. Even when talking to someone who has deployed 1000+ proxies, you're talking past me. There are a lot of proxies that do many things. What is yours for? What do you want people to do with it? There are caching proxies to make slow links seem faster and use less bandwidth, there are security-oriented proxies that anonymize to one degree or another, there are proxies to allow users to safely tunnel through a firewall in a locked down corporate environment, there are reverse proxies for scaling and accelerating websites, there are proxies for content filtering and access logging used in schools and libraries and such, there are proxies that simulate different network conditions to aid developers, there are proxies for sniffing user data illicitly, there are proxies to allow people in other countries to watch YouTube or Netflix. There are all sorts of proxies. What is yours for?