recon 16 said:
are these legit so they can not track you back?
If your asking whether they are anonymous, then there are different types, they are mainly anonymous but can be classified according to thei effect or to which extent they are able to go to to hide your identity, ie there are transparent, anonymous and highly anonymous
also, sorry as you said i am a noob, but are there any risks of using proxys
I wouldn't call it so much risks ... but disadvantages ... some of them include a LARGE loss in bandwidth speed, for example if you have to bounce your packets from Sydney (where i live) to the United States, when originally you could have directly sent it to the UK for example
But there are many advantages so don't be worried, for example, these proxy servers all have caches, so it may be able to decrease the amount of time in which your computer needs to retrieve the information from the internet .. also anonymous surfing and so on ...
and one last thing THIS IS A MAJOR NOOB QUESTION but please answer how do you use a proxy? where do you tell your computer to use one?
Hmm ... i'll show you with diagrams ok ...
Firstly you have to find a public proxy servers, there are a few listed in threads above but i like
http://www.publicproxyservers.com/index.html and because there are quite good links there
Anyways i'll configure my computer for a proxy via an australian proxy server
Step 1 : Get yourself a ip address and the port number in which you are supposed to connect through
Step 2 : Go to Tools and then Options, then connections tab and then go to LAN settings if your working with a broadband line like most people are here
You should be presented with a dialog like this
Step 3 : Tick the box under the Proxy Server heading and then enter your ip address and port
Step 4 : Click ok and then your done ... that took long but sometimes it may not work, don't worry this is only due to the fact that the proxy server is not active ... try another one
Good luck
By the way, this is for IE, the browser which i use (please don't start an argument saying how good and better FF is compared to IE, i know all the features and i can compare)