Browse - Introduction
There are three main areas and/or topics that seem to come up surrounding online browsing. Those are: security, anonymity, and getting past/around proxy servers. We cover the in depth stuff on other pages, but read this first to get a simple introduction to what each is.
Security
There are plenty of times when you may be somewhere, like at work, a hotel, a friends house, or whatever and it’s an untrusted network. By untrusted network, I mean it’s not your network. It’s not under your control where you have the ability to make sure everything is secure. In these cases, it’s often a bad decision to log into important accounts or make payments with a credit card. For instance, you shouldn’t buy stuff while at a Panera bread, using their wifi, without at least securing your connection.
Anonymity
Sometimes you just don’t want to be known. Anonymity on the internet is like wearing a mask out in public. The goal is to simply masquerade who you are and without going into the good or bad about the possibilities of anonymity like that, I’m going to show you how to do it if you want to. I’m not here to judge your reasons for using it, I’m here to offer you the knowledge so you can make that choice yourself.
Bypass Proxy
Most people who work at a computer know just how annoying it can be to be blocked by your company’s web site proxy. What this means, if you don’t know, is that when you try to access a webpage that your company doesn’t want you to visit, you will be blocked. This can also happen at hotels when you use their wifi or other places as well. But if you have an SSH server up to connect to, like we will be using for our secure browsing, chances are you’ll be able to get past that proxy server.