There are 5 very fast proxy servers operated by Performance Systems Inc. (PSI) in Washington, DC that scare me.
They are all exit nodes on the Tor network, providing proxy support for DNS (port 53), POP3 email (port 110), IMAP email (port 143), MSN Messenger (port 1863), ICQ (port 5190), Jabber and/or Google Talk and/or possibly a Tor Hidden Service (port 5222), MMCC (port 5050), Virtual Places (port 1533), and IRC (ports 6660-6667). One of the 5 also provides proxy support for telnet (port 23). None of them provide proxy support for http (port 80) or https (port 443), but there is a good chance if you are using the Tor network your traffic will run through 1 of these servers as a relay or guard/entry node.
None of them have any records in the DNS domain name system that I can find, they all have IP Addresses starting with 149.9.0, these are the only proxy servers on the Tor network operated by PSI, and they all seem to be configured identically, even to the point of using the same out-of-date version of the Tor software.
I would say it is likely they are operated by, or on behalf of, some branch of the US government.
As a result, in order to limit your exposure to the potential of your internet activity being monitored by or through these servers, we have now configured our pickaproxy.com tryout services to always exclude these 5 proxy servers. This will slow down our proxy service to some degree, but we consider the trade-off to be worth it. Eventually we will allow our users to decide for themselves if they want to exclude these or any other proxy servers.
Comments are certainly welcome ...
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