[yc1010]

1. Buy/spinup a cheap vps (aws or digitalocean)

2. Install tinyproxy (apt-get install tinyproxy)

3. Configure it to bind to the vps public ip, set a high port, limit access to your home/work ip address or range(s)

4. Set your browser proxy to vps.ip.add.res:12345

The above is simple and effective, only downside anyone else on your ip or range you specified can use that proxy too (if they find out the ip:port and if they done steps 3 and 4 above). You can switch off the vps when not using it (saving you money)

[bnegreve]

> only downside anyone else on your ip or range you specified can use that proxy too.

If you have ssh access, you can set up a proxy on the remote server, and use ssh dynamic port forwarding (-D) to forward the proxy connections on your local machine.

Using this trick you can safely use any ssh capable machine as a proxy. It works like a charm.

[kijin]

And if your 'ssh capable machine' runs Linux, OSX, or any other *nix, you can use sshuttle [1]. It's a layer on top of SSH dynamic port forwarding that allows you to proxy any application, even those that don't support proxies out of the box.

[1] https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle

[yc1010]

Yes that too :) I remember doing this more than a dozen years ago in university to a local research unix machine we could make accounts on in order to bypass the stupid firewall. In hindsight i think the network admins knew about our trick but put blind eye to it since it required people to muck around with command line and learn stuff :D

[meddlepal]

Forgive me if i'm not realizing some sort of networking safety here or inherent indirection, but how does this protect any kind of anonymity? Seems like it would be pretty easy for a government to ask the host for who owns the specific IP address communicating with a service. The host has all the billing information for an owner. IP -> Host -> Billing Information -> Owner.

[yc1010]

Same would apply for a VPN company or a company selling a proxy (like the person i replied asked for) if you paid with credit card/paypal, governments can and do hit these with requests

If are worried about privacy you should be using bitcoin (and know how to use this anonymously, which i am not going to go into), You could then buy a vps with bitcoin quite anonymously with likes of chunkhost.com or bithost.io (reselling digitalocean for btc)

[enneff]

Note that by default tinyproxy logs all the URLs it accesses, which may not be what you want.

[chmars]

What's the advantage of a proxy server with such limits in comparison to a VPN server?

[yc1010]

See my reply here in same thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8834476

Basically having a http proxy (im not talking about web proxies but forward and reverse ones such as tinyproxy & haproxy) has its uses for example if you have a robot scraping via multiple addresses (to bypass limits for example or scrape different content dependant on location)

and well they are simpler to setup and use that vpns both on client on and server end

a vpn is fine in most cases but there are usecases where a quick and dirty http proxy helps save alot of headaches.