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August 2008

August 28, 2008

Change your proxy settings (how to...)

Lots of questions lately on how to change your proxy settings...

If using Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to Tools | Internet Options | Connections | LAN Settings and select the "Use automatic configuration script" option, with http://www.pickaproxy.com/nonCN.proxy.pac as one example of the PAC files we currently support for tryouts.

As an alternative, you could select the "Use a proxy server for your LAN" option, along with the "Bypass proxy server for local addresses" option, de-select the "Automatically detect settings" option, click the Advanced button, enter "tryout.pickaproxy.com" in the "Proxy address to use" fields for HTTP, Secure and Socks, and enter 8123 in the "Ports" fields.

If using Firefox, go to Tools | Options | Advanced | Network | Connection Settings and select the "Automatic proxy configuration URL" option, with http://www.pickaproxy.com/tryout.proxy.pac as one example of the PAC files we currently support for tryouts.

After this, use your browser to go to https://check.torproject.org or http://www.whatismyipaddress.com or https://www.showmyip.com to confirm that your new proxy settings are geospoofing you!

Other browsers and other programs will have similar ways to change their proxy settings. If you come across something that is giving you grief, let us know and we will find out what you need to do.

August 07, 2008

Major recent DNS Vulnerability - but not here

There has been lots of recent coverage about the major DNS vulnerability found by researcher Dan Kaminsky earlier this year: see doxpara.com, news.oreilly.com, and CERT for examples.

We wanted to let you know that one of the very few DNS servers/services that has NOT been vulnerable to this "DNS cache poisoning" exploit is OpenDNS, which has been the DNS server/service we use at pickaproxy.com and our other privacy-ecosystem.com sites for quite some time.