Understanding IP Address and Anonymous Web Surfing - Part 1

What is Anonymous surfing? How to hide my IP address from others? How to browse anonymously? How to browse through website your IP is banned from? How? How? What? Where? Again HOW?

Well.... hmmm..... uhmmm..... ah right, I remember ;-) It has to be in steps, slow and steady wins the race. But slow doesn't mean take years doing single task. Another, 'Early bird catches the worm'. Guides on IP hiding will have less introductory part and more practical stuff.

The easiest way to hide your actual ip address is indeed by using a non-transparant proxy server. Stop!!! If you are seeking easy, cheap & lesser secure methods commonly used by web public, wait for the next part of this post. Otherwise, there are several ways of doing this using servers. The first and easiest is using an online anonymizer. This requires no tinkering with your browser settings and is probably the best solution in your case. Simply go to the anonymizer site (see below), enter the url of the site you want to visit and your ip wil automatically be hidden. In order to test the anonymizer, visit the site http://www.whatismyip.com , both directly and through the anonymizer. The ip address shown should differ when using the anonymizer service.

Some free anonymizer sites:

http://www.the-cloak.com/login.html

http://www.megaproxy.com/freesurf/

http://anonymouse.org/anonwww.html

http://www.proxybuster.net/Browser.htm

http://proxify.com/

http://www.guardster.com/subscription/proxy_free.php

http://behidden.com/index.php

Note that surfing through a proxy server is usually much slower than without. Also, some free services will add banners and such.

If these sites don't help solve your issue, don't worry, we can try the alternative ways of using a proxy. These include configuring a proxy from a free/open proxy server list in your browser settings, or using a stand-alone application, such as JAP (http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html), to route all your internet traffic through a proxy server. We'll go into more detail if you'd like to try these, however the sites listed above should suffice to access the forum you mentioned without interrupting your regular internet traffic.

Most free proxy servers do indeed not support post operations (needed to submit forms, such as when logging in) and make this feature
available in their commercial equivalents.

An alternative would be to install JAP (http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html) - a free piece of
software which intercepts you internet traffic and routes it through a proxy server. To use JAP:

* Download the program from their website:
http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/win/download_en.html

* Run the installer. At the end of the installation offers you the ability to automatically re-configure your browser (IE or
Netscape/Firefox) to use JAP. Let it do so.

* Start JAP (you will find a new entry in the Programs folder of your Start menu) and set 'anonymity' to 'on'. Now start your browser and
you should be surfing anonymously (you can again test this with http://www.whatismyip.com).

* In order to surf without JAP after you're done, you can click on the 'Automatically configure the browser' icon in the JAP program group
and choose the 'restore configuration' option.

In the next part, mostly practicality will be covered, reviewing various free and commercial easy to use tools to make you surf anonynously! Hold your breadth..!