I've been going through a couple of proxy lists, testing for speed and function as well as testing their effectiveness at hiding my real IP
(according to http://whatismyipaddress.com/, a bunch of proxies advertised as anonymous shamelessly cough up my true identity)

Now, I've got a nifty proxy script for firefox called switchproxy which lets me import entire lists of proxies, and switch between them at regular intervals (e.g.: switch to a new one every 100 second)
Thing is: the majority of them don't work (10 to 1 I'd say)

Is there something wrong with my computer/ISP, or are the lists out there just full of bunk proxy adreses?

I'll check it out later this night, but from what I remember since last using switchproxy I had the same problems, spent imported a list of a few dozen proxies and finally had only 8 working ones.

Btw, thanks for reminding me of this, it's just the thing I need right now.

No, there are just a lot of bad lists. They change a lot.

This.

Many of the "free proxies" are actually intended to be private proxies, but are misconfigured so that anyone can use them. When the owners discover this, they tend to take them down or change the configuration to require authentication. As a result, a large proportion of the proxies alive right now won't be alive in an hour, let alone a day or a week.

The best proxies are those that aren't on those lists yet, since if fewer people are using them they are less likely to be noticed by the owners.

Tor is a good solution if you don't mind slow speed/high overhead, but I wouldn't even trust that alone for security. There's no substitute for being on an Internet connection that can't be linked to you, like someone's unprotected 802.11g.

Tor is a good solution if you don't mind slow speed/high overhead, but I wouldn't even trust that alone for security. There's no substitute for being on an Internet connection that can't be linked to you, like someone's unprotected 802.11g.

Not really. The feds are very good at finding out where someone could be to use a wireless network, and triangulating activity. You should definitely piggyback on someone else's connection if you can, but you should also use Tor to obscure your location.

Really, Tor's downfall is latency. It tries to pick nodes that are in different jurisdictions, so it's costly to make connections. It isn't actually that bad in terms of throughput, though.

I never said not to use tor. I said not to use tor by itself if you need maximum anonymity. The key word in my post above was "alone". Essentially, this just adds one more layer they have to peel off in order to find you.

Right then.

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago. My big idea was to rent a server with a dedicated web connection in a country with few laws ie sudan. Then create a VPN connection so the IP address is outside the reach of the authorities. The problem is that places like sudan dont really have a great IT infrastructure.

Another alternative is to rent a space on a server for a web site then create your own software to route the information out the website's IP address. Either way it's gonna cost.