Senate Closes Accidental Anonymizer
A proxy server is normally a dedicated machine that sits between a private network and the outside world, passing internal users' Web requests out to the Internet. But they're sometimes misconfigured to accept and forward connections from the outside as well, allowing anyone on the Internet to route through the proxy with a simple browser configuration change.
Because server logs at destination sites show only the IP address of the proxy server, and not the end user, some hackers and privacy-conscious netizens catalog open proxies and use them to anonymize their surfing.
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