Simple explanation of proxies?

[mopar man]

Looking through Wikipedia and other sites, I was noticing a trend that nobody explains in simple terms what a proxy really, truly is. A "real" proxy, not a simple website proxy.

How would one go about making what he sends and receives completely anonymous, if at all possible?

 

[captaincranky]

There are several programs that do this. One is "Anonimizer". There is also a freeware program to do this, but the name escapes me. It was in PS World mag. Suposedly, anonymous surfing though a proxy slows the process down quite a bit. Also, some really paranoid individuals insist that free public servers, are "honeypots for the FBI". But that could simply be urban legend.

 

[DelJo63]

Consider the analogy of a Stock Proxy: you authorize a person to vote on your behalf.

The proxy appears to do your bidding, but holding your authorization, any new subjects that arise are handled by the agent without further discussion with the stock holder.

A compute proxy is very similar: you authorize it (defacto by accessing it instead of the Internet directly),
and the compute proxy does as it pleases, including

• redirecting to other sites,
• filtering the replies
• and/or denying access.

The anonymous access is entirely a side-effect in that your IP address is never seen
as a referrer header sent from the proxy to the real server - - it could, but doesn't.
In addition, the website that gets the proxy request, sees only the IP address of the proxy itself. Chain two-three proxies serially and the website can not find your IP.

You may be aware that you can proxy ANY tcp/ip protocol; email{in & out}, http, dns, dhcp, and even https.

99% of the time, we use proxies for achieve {A-C}