Now Is The Time to Change IP

You have seen the evidence all around you; friends telling you about phishing e-mail scams, credit card fraud, or perhaps you have experienced it yourself. Everyone has seen the CitiBank advertisements portraying two elderly woman identity theft victims as the two rough talkin’, dirt bike boys who stole their identities. The zeitgeist of today is being protected online, as all of these identity and fraud worries come from careless online travel. The Internet is a wonderful place and a great resource, but criminals lurk here and attack blissful individuals. They don’t go for the ones who are protected because they know they can’t get them, so why not become protected today?

As people have become more aware of their online activities and made strides to protect themselves, the criminals have followed suit. Although criminals are often pegged as uneducated and ignorant, they certainly have to watch what their prey does and match or out-match it. Many people flock to a free web-based IP changer to remain anonymous and surf privately. While they have noble intentions, sometimes they are making a grave mistake.

Something about these free IP changers doesn’t add up; using so much bandwidth and changing so many people’s IP addresses is very expensive, and most people aren’t philanthropically enough to pay for everyone else to mooch. Where do these proxies get their money then? When you are thinking about using a free web-based proxy, keep in mind that while you may be hidden from the rest of the Internet, the owners of the IP changer can still see everything that you do. That means that all bank transactions, log-in names, passwords are all perfectly visible and lucid to them. Authoritarian power corrupts quickly, and it is not a far stretch to believe that these people may dip into some people’s credit cards to keep their services running. Call it in involuntary donation if you will.

As much as the temptation may entice you towards it, don’t opt for these free proxies. Since anyone can set one up, and they are quite easy to configure, anyone could do it, and you could be surfing under the eye of a skilled hacker. There a multitude of change IP services that are fee-based that only cost a few dollars a month, and the protection they offer is thrice that of a free one. On top of that, you won’t have a hacker possibly looking over all of your data like it is a money buffet.

One thing to keep in mind, especially in a work setting, is the speed at which web-proxies crawl. With so much traffic on these servers, everybody shares a single connection, causing things to go really slow. They also have to “re-write” all of the pages so the browser will allow the blocked sites to pass. Many fee-based proxies have multiple servers to go off of, so you can change your IP to make it look as though you are in a variety of locations. Sometimes, if the IP changer uses a cache system, old files will be stored in a secure anonymous database, and can be accessed directly from there, bypassing the website totally, and making the connection that much faster.

The lesson is; the Internet is not a place to be thrifty. One cannot put a price on online security and certainly not on the value of using Internet protection software. Never cheap out and use a free proxy just because it’s free. Using a fee-based proxy is the best way to go, and you can easily find them for reasonable monthly rates.

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