As technology developed with the flying of time, we are growing to be depended more on the internet. So we can even call us Semi-Robot, because without electricity or internet, most of us can’t live normally as our ancestors centuries before. Only when we are “interneted”, can we consider us as a real free man.

However, since the born of internet, our access to the internet is not totally free all the time. For example, limited by the locations, our ages, nationalities, and even our policies, many knowledge and information are not available for us. So, some people try their best to come and go freely in the cyber world, and here comes the proxy. Hence, many businessmen and students have to resort to the proxy to achieve their goals. Many people may hear about the proxy, but don’t know much information. Here are some Q&As which can be helpful for understanding the proxy easily.

What’s the proxy?

The proxy is just like an intermediary between user and the server. Instead of connecting directly to a server for a file or web page, the user directs the request to the proxy server, which replace the user to do the rest. A proxy can provide you random IP from countries around the world.

How to identify different types of proxy?

1. A gateway/ tunneling proxy passes unmodified requests and responses.
2. A forward proxy is used to retrieve data from a wide range of sources.
3. A reverse proxy is usually used as a front-end to control and protect access to a server on a private network, which commonly performs tasks such as load-balancing, authentication, decryption, and caching.
4. An open proxy is a forwarding proxy server that is accessible by any Internet user.
5. Anonymous proxy does not disclose the originating IP address of the user.
6. Transparent proxy not only identifies itself as a proxy server, the originating IP address can be retrieved as well.
7. Reverse proxies forward request to one or more ordinary servers that handle the request. The response from the proxy server is returned as if it came directly from the original server, leaving the client with no knowledge of the original server. 

Generally speaking, there are mainly 4 kinds of proxies from the perspective of proxy server agreements:

SOCKS 4, SOCKS 5, HTTPS and HTTP.

How to use the proxy?

1. Monitoring and filtering:
2. Ensure Internet usage conforms to an acceptable use policy.
3. Support user authentication to control web access.
4. Produces logs: to give detailed information about the URLs accessed by specific users; to monitor bandwidth usage statistics.
5. Communicate to antivirus software to provide security against viruses and other malware.
6. with a specialized proxy, many websites and online services are restricted, and governments also can censor undesirable content.
7. Access the blocked websites that the filter is trying to block.
8. Requests may be filtered by URL or DNS blacklists, or content keyword filtering. Blacklists are often provided and maintained by web-filtering companies, often grouped into categories.

• Filtering of encrypted data
• Bypassing filters and censorship

Proxy can circumvent filter of the server that filters the origin of the request, such as restricting its service to a certain country by using IP-based geolocation, which can be accessed using a proxy located in that country to access the service.

Proxy is the most common means of bypassing government censorship.

• Logging and eavesdropping
• Improving performance
• Accelerate service requests by retrieving the content saved from a previous request made by the same client or even other clients.
• Reduce the upstream bandwidth usage and costs, while significantly increasing performance by keeping local copies of frequently requested resources.
• Improve TCP performance in the presence of high round-trip times or high packet loss.
• Make more efficient use of the network by compressing data sent at the application layer.
• Repairing errors

Automatically repair errors in the proxied content; fix accessibility issues.

• Accessing services anonymously
• QA geotargeted advertising

Used for validating, checking, and quality assurance of geotargeted ads.

• Security

Help the security of the internal network by using network address translation to keep the internal network structure of a company secret.

Summary

All in all, more potential values of the proxy are waiting for us to explore!