# Proxifier for Mac: how does it work?



## heebie (Dec 28, 2007)

Hi everyone.

I go to college, and obviously I wanna be able to use Skype, Bittorrent etc, but my IT department ban it... I looked at Proxifier, and it worked, no setup, I just told it to proxify Skype, and it did it.

Now I have the tough question: how does it really work? How can no setup be necessary? How, how???

Thanks for your time in advance!


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## jmcm (Sep 13, 2005)

heebie said:


> Hi everyone.
> 
> I go to college, and obviously I wanna be able to use Skype, Bittorrent etc, but my IT department ban it... I looked at Proxifier, and it worked, no setup, I just told it to proxify Skype, and it did it.
> 
> ...


I believe it simply forwards the data through their servers.


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## heebie (Dec 28, 2007)

Thanks for replying but I kind of figured that out. At college I sit behind an HTTP proxy, complete with SurfControl and Firewall, so how can it get through that before it goes to their servers?


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## chas_m (Dec 2, 2007)

Here's a wild thought: just accept that it works, and try to severely limit your use of bandwidth sucking apps like this. You're at college, it's their house, respect their rules.

See, the reason they even HAVE an IT department and all those hoops they are putting you through is because of people using too much bandwidth-sucking stuff like Skype, BT, et al. If people (and I'm not saying you're one of these people) would just EASE OFF and not go nuts on bandwidth-sucking apps, the college would be able to devote less resources to trying to stop that, or caving in to anti-privacy authoritianian methods, and be able to spend more resources on making your college days more enjoyable and productive.

Just a thought.


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## heebie (Dec 28, 2007)

You know what chas_m, I, in some ways, agree.

But, here's the long reason why I'm so devoted to getting my full use out of my internet connection at school:

I go to a full-boarding school which many foreigners think of as somewhere like in the Harry Potter books. It's a great school, one of the best in the UK. And you guessed it, it's a private school. The fees are £27 000 a year, that's $52 654 in Canadian dollars. Some may say it's the most expensive internet cafe in the world...

Here's the crunch: our technicians are truly the largest waste of space, and we know it. People always say that they have a go at the IT people even if the system is working, just because they can't identify with them or for some other weird reason but I know that they waste their time playing computer games when they should have been fixing the science lab computers. They apparently run a service whereby you give them your Windows laptop to fix, and they'll do it in 7 days. I gave them my old Windows laptop (yes Windows, I know), with a nice trojan thrown in, and they did nothing. I got my laptop back in 26 days, with the trojan still there and the computer lid not having been opened. And how do I know all this? Because a) I put a sticker between the lid and the base, which wasn't torn, and b) because the keylogger that I installed showed no sign of work.

OK, because I was so angry with them for not having provided this simple service, I went about having a look round the school servers for what they were doing (oops) and what did I find? A VPS called dump.*******.local (I don't want to give away my school name) full of porn, games, music and movies stolen from the laptops of the poor guys who did hand in their laptops for repair... I run a proxy service on my own servers which the guys use at school for accessing Facebook and the like, and I run safely knowing that if they tell my headteacher about my proxy, their VPS will be unearthed. 

They know what I do, I know what they do (and a little more).

That, in the long winded way, is why I want to talk to my girlfriend on Skype every evening .


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## chas_m (Dec 2, 2007)

THANK YOU, heebie, for understanding what I meant and not taking it the wrong way.

I certainly don't begrudge you the Skype call to the girlfriend, sitting as I am within striking distance of a VOIP phone from Florida I use for "local" calls to the states. VOIP isn't going to be much more than a blip on the radar till everyone's on it.

And your tale of IT is sadly typical and unsurprising. I too went to an expensive boarding school in (northern) England (but was far younger than you at the time), before computers, and have always been amazed at how suddenly a large staff of VERY highly-paid nincompoops with A++ certificates can just be glomed on to what I recall as very tight education budgets when most of it simply WOULD NOT BE NECESSARY if they'd drop Windows like the pile of droppings it is. Ah well.

It's not the people who download the occasional file or VOIP from time to time that are the problem, it's:
1. Excessive torrenters/P2P abusers
2. Spammers (I know, they ought to be #1)

Clean those two groups up and you've "solved" the bandwidth problem and opened the door for a floor of more beneficial uses for that bandwidth, and knocked the wind out of the authoritarian sails that seem to be creeping ever more closer on us, having successfully swallowed the USA whole ...


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## heebie (Dec 28, 2007)

Oh yes, sure my school is full of people who download "Football-Manager-2008 Cracked/K3yg3n-m3gal0lz" on BT which has several .daa files which they don't know how to open along with a couple of keygen.exes (what do you do with that one, do you add an apostrophe? I hate bad grammar but I'm stumped...). That's, I guess, what you're getting at. I don't think we have any serial spammers at our college thouh.

The number of people with Macs though are minimal, most people were stupid enough to buy their laptops through the school (Acer Travelmates mostly). That's worthy enough for me to shed a few tears...

So that's why Chameleon was born, Project Chameleon. For those lucky enough to have their own SSH servers, it's an easy way to tunnel. But I'm still intrigued by Proxifier. I really don't understand how it works with absolutely no set up whatsoever? Do you know chas_m?

Also I'm pleasantly surprised you went to a good olde Englishe College. Up north, eh? Which one was it, may I ask?


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## chas_m (Dec 2, 2007)

heebie said:


> But I'm still intrigued by Proxifier. I really don't understand how it works with absolutely no set up whatsoever? Do you know chas_m?


I took a look at Proxify.com, which is what I presume you mean. The way it works is that you enter your first URL of call through their widget. This opens your browser of choice and takes you to the URL, but with an "ad banner" type bar at the top of the page. From there, if you want the proxy's continued protection, you must enter your next URL into the "ad bar" rather than your browser's URL bar. Thus, no configuring needed.

It's too much hassle for day-to-day use IMHO, but I suppose if I was visiting "naughty" sites at work or somewhere where I didn't want to leave a trail it might be worth the effort, and there's some other more-innocent circumstances where I could see the need to use a proxy, and this one (which is really more of a workaround than a practical solution IMO) would do for that.

It's a sad commentary on the authoritarian war on privacy that we even need to be having this discussion. 



> Also I'm pleasantly surprised you went to a good olde Englishe College. Up north, eh? Which one was it, may I ask?


Not a college, a boarding school. 
In Hull. I can't find any web presence for it now, or I'd make a link. It was a CE boys' only school at the time, but it's almost certainly not now, if it is even still a school (the UK school system has changed _dramatically_ from when I were a lad).


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## heebie (Dec 28, 2007)

Sorry to waste your time chas_m, but I know full well what _Proxify_ is, it's _Proxifier_ (Proxifier - Bypass firewall and proxy, tunnel connections through an HTTPS and SOCKS proxy) that I'm confused about!

I myself run a proxy at Pollination - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia but for some reason my DNS seems to have stopped so for the moment, it'll have to be http://www.b3nji.com/~heebie/goive/!

It's the application at proxifier.com which really confuses me... Thanks for your time though.

Well OK, I'll come clean just for the sake of clarity, I go to 
Winchester College. So it's called a college but is in fact a boarding school...


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## chas_m (Dec 2, 2007)

Wow. Nice.

Sorry I can't be more help. I'll check out proxifier.com, thanks!


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## Guest (Dec 31, 2007)

It's the same sort of thing that a VPN does when you are set to route all your data through the VPN interface. It sets up a tunnel from your machine to their servers and all the additional routing is handled at their end. Data you requested is then routed back to you through the tunnel. Their tunnel will use a "working" port that your proxy and firewall don't block (likely 80). You can do much of the same thing yourself if you have ssh ability and an outside server you have access to with a single command at the command line ...

What gets me about this type of setup is that they are then tunneling ALL you bandwidth through their servers, which would add up super fast.

for the DNS issues, look here:

Proxifier - DNS through Proxy Server


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## heebie (Dec 28, 2007)

Thank you mguertin, that's cleared it up a little for me. Is it using SSH then? And if I were to find out the SSH credentials for their servers would I *theoretically* be able to use any SSH Tunneling client such as Chameleon to tunnel like they do?


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## Guest (Jan 1, 2008)

No I don't think they are using ssh .. but they really don't say. I don't think you would be able to use their servers like that, only with their software.


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## heebie (Dec 28, 2007)

So for a one-off payment you can connect to their servers transferring all your bandwidth through them? Surely that's ludicrous for them!


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