The Growing Usage of Web Proxy Servers

Internet has become one of the strongest media of our times. You have millions of websites to browse through and yet more and more websites are being uploaded everyday. Since internet has become more like an integral part of every organization, everyone has an access to all these websites at any hour. To check the misuse of internet, various companies and organizations prefer to block the sites, such as the social networking sites, that may not be useful for their official purposes. This is where 'web proxy' has a role to play.

In the networking of computers, a proxy server is a server (an application program), which takes the requirements of its client system) and processes them by sending them to other servers. The client gets associated to the proxy server which aids him by requesting services such as connection, web page etc which have to be retrieved from some other server. The proxy server connects to the specified server and requests the service on behalf of the client. A proxy server may occasionally adjust the client's request or the server's response, and from time to time it may serve the request without contacting the particular server. In this case, it would 'cache' the first request to the remote server, so it could save the information for later, and make the whole thing as fast as possible.

A special case of web proxies are ‘CGI proxies’. These are web sites that allow a user to access a site through them. They generally use PHP or CGI to implement the proxy functionality. These types of proxies are frequently used to gain access to web sites blocked by corporate or school proxies. Given that they also hide the user's personal IP address from the web sites they avail through the proxy, they are from time to time also used to gain a degree of anonymity, referred as ‘Proxy Avoidance’.

A circumventor is a method of overcoming any kind of blockings or banned websites implemented using proxy servers. But fascinatingly, a number of circumventors also act as proxy servers on different levels of action which efficiently put into practice ‘bypass policies’. A circumventor is a web-based page that takes a site that is blocked as well as ‘circumvents’ it through to an unblocked web site, letting the user to view blocked pages.

Students are able to access blocked sites (games, messenger, social networking, etc.) through a circumventor. As fast as the filtering software blocks circumventors, others spring up. However, in some cases the filter may still intercept traffic to the circumventor, thus the person who manages the filter can still see the sites that are being visited. For instance, consider elgooG, which permitted users in China to use Google after it had been blocked there.

Circumventors are also used by people who have been blocked from a web site. Another use of a circumventor is to allow access to country-specific services, so that Internet users from other countries may also make use of them. An instance is country-restricted imitation of media as well as webcasting. While usage of a proxy server (for example, anonymizing HTTP proxy), all data sent to the service used (for instance, HTTP server in a website) must go by through the proxy server before being sent to the service, frequently in unencrypted form. It is consequently probable, as has been recognized for a nasty proxy server to trace everything sent to the proxy inclusive of unencrypted logins as well as passwords.