Is Squid the best free proxy?

[nixie]

Have been using squid for a while and was wondering if its the best free proxy or if there is a better alternative?

[BC_Programmer]

Talk about proxy's is usually frowned upon here.

Actually it might (not sure) be outlined in the rules.

[nixie]

ok... wont speak about them again here. Was just wondering because a friend of mine asked me earlier. He is on dial-up and so I have him set up with one of these on an old Celeron 500 Mhz to prefetch frequently visited websites, so that when he goes to surf frequently visited sites most of the static content loads quickly out of the cache on this server, and only the information that changes frequently or can not be cached is fetched across 56k.

He has also used the software that caches information too, but the last time he downloaded and installed one of those cache utilities for speeding up his dial up surfing, he got compromized. I set him up with this 2 years ago and its worked great ever since as a local cache. He just asked me out of curiousity if anything newer was available, possibly better than this setup. Unfortunately in his location there is no high speed out in the woods on the side of a mountain in Vermont.

[Geek-9pm]

Is this method of improving 56K throughput?

 Some dial-up providers already have this built-in and they say they can increase your effective dial-up by a factor of 5X using some kind of tricks with a cache and image compression.

Compression by the ISP
As telephone-based 56 kbit/s modems began losing popularity, some Internet Service Providers such as TurboUSA, Netzero, CdotFree, TOAST.net, and Earthlink started using pre-compression to increase the throughput and maintain their customer base. As an example, Netscape ISP uses a compression program that squeezes images, text, and other objects at a proxy server, just prior to sending them across the phone line. The server-side compression operates much more efficiently than the "on-the-fly" compression of V.44-enabled modems. Typically website text is compacted to 5% thus increasing effective throughput to approximately 1000 kbit/s, and images are lossy-compressed to 15-20% increasing throughput to about 350 kbit/s.

The drawback of this approach is a loss in quality, where the graphics acquire more compression artifacts taking on a blurry appearance; however, the perceived speed is dramatically improved and the user can manually choose to view the uncompressed images at any time. ISPs employing this approach may advertise it as "DSL speeds over regular phone lines" or simply "high speed dial-up"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-up_Internet_access
.

The above information needs to be updated. but it still is something you can check out. In general, if your phone lines are in good shape you should be able to get DSL for a price just above dial--up.

[nixie]

Will check into his ISP... for all we know he might be cached with compression vs caching bloated bits. Unfortunately dial-up or satellite are his only options right now, and dial-up is the more reliable and cheaper option. He did check into the new high-speed cellular internet, but until they put a closer tower to him thats not an option.  He checked into DSL and Verizon stated that the closest location for DSL was 12 miles from his home. He is still running happy, but inquired with me the one day if anything better was available, so since I dont use one, I figured I'd check here.

[Rob Pomeroy]

Talk about proxy's is usually frowned upon here.

Erm... I wonder if you have the wrong end of the stick about what Squid is doing...?

Squid is a pretty darn good caching proxy server.  I don't know off-hand of any better open source proxy - possibly some of the features of Vyatta?  But then you have the massive overhead of learning how to use it.

To be honest, given the prefetch/caching capabilities of Firefox and Chrome, I think Squid would be overkill in a single-user scenario.  It comes into its own when serving multiple users behind a metered internet connection.

[BC_Programmer]

Erm... I wonder if you have the wrong end of the stick about what Squid is doing...?

No. I don't. whether it's primary purpose is something else doesn't change the fact that it will act just like any other proxy. It's a proxy.

[Salmon Trout]

Squid is software that you install locally that acts as a proxy, as far as you are concerned, serving locally cached copies of stuff "out there", but not to confused with an anonymizing proxy that acts as far as remote hosts are concerned. as proxy for you as far as hosts out there are concerned, providing IP address masking for people who want to evade (e.g.) forum IP address blocking, is it?

[BC_Programmer]

Squid is software that you install locally that acts as a proxy, as far as you are concerned, serving locally cached copies of stuff "out there", but not to confused with an anonymizing proxy that acts as far as remote hosts are concerned. as proxy for you as far as hosts out there are concerned, providing IP address masking for people who want to evade (e.g.) forum IP address blocking, is it?

wait a second... that sounds pretty pointless. Web Browsers already have caches that do exactly this... Or does it actively cache sites during idle time? (In which case it's basically like the feature of many browsers to pull sites from the web for "offline" viewing. Probably easier to setup than most browsers feature for that, though.

[Salmon Trout]

wait a second... that sounds pretty pointless. Web Browsers already have caches that do exactly this... Or does it actively cache sites during idle time? (In which case it's basically like the feature of many browsers to pull sites from the web for "offline" viewing. Probably easier to setup than most browsers feature for that, though.

Well, it would be pretty pointless on a single computer system, and probably most domestic multi computer systems.

[Linux711]

I don't know if this is better, but here is where I get my proxies. I use a firefox addon called foxyproxy and just put those into it. They update the list with new ones every few minutes. Not all of them work, but a good 80% of them do.

Haha. It says that it blocked the url because it is Russian.

[BC_Programmer]

I don't know if this is better, but here is where I get my proxies. I use a firefox addon called foxyproxy and just put those into it. They update the list with new ones every few minutes. Not all of them work, but a good 80% of them do.

As Salmon Trout clarified (preventing me from looking too foolish) the purpose isn't to mask ones IP address but rather to locally cache files.

[Rob Pomeroy]

wait a second... that sounds pretty pointless. Web Browsers already have caches that do exactly this...

It comes into its own when serving multiple users behind a metered internet connection.

Back in the day, I was I.T. manager for a firm of solicitors with about 8 users behind a 56k connection.  Every slight speed improvement was noticeable.  Particularly on things like news sites - once one person had downloaded a page with lots of images on, loading was near-instantaneous for the next person viewing the same page.

Squid could (in theory) be used as an anonymous proxy, but it would be a lot harder to set up than any of the many dedicated tools.  These days, a network admin is far more likely to use something like Squid for the enforcement of security/compliance policies, using whitelist/blacklist for web sites, etc.

[Geek-9pm]

This was first about proxy and then abut dial-up cache.
Here is a dial-up company that claims thy can improve your 56K speed with compression and cache and image degradation.
http://www.turbousa.com/Landing/500307/

In those kind of things they cache the images and then feed them to you at a lower quality to speed up the connection, or make it look like is is faster. It is not really a proxy. But it is dial-up. If you call a long distance number you will likely get a different IP. Hard way to proxy.