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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS |
| Please
read this section in its entirety before you ask us any questions. This
section has been compiled by our support department after taking into
consideration the questions they have been asked the most by members and
non members. It is very likely that you will find an answer to your
question here.
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| I am clueless. I am new. I don't understand what this whole thing is about. | |
| See
STEP By STEP section. New users are guided
through the entire process there. Brief and simple explanation of our
services and how to use them or test them is written. Extremely simple
and non-technical language is used. It would be impossible for anyone
not to understand. If you still have trouble after reading it, contact
us and we will guide you step by step.
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| Where is the MASK? Why is it removed from your logo? | |
| We
have removed the mask from our logo with Version 4.0 as the mask only
represents a very small part of the services we are offering now.
Somebody has started as an anonymizing service to address the needs of
internet users, but with time, we have progressed and we now offer
plenty of other services. Anonymizing is only just a very small
part of our service scope.
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| Why am I being asked a username and password in FREE TRIAL? | |
| FREE
TRIAL is limited to only the web sites mentioned on our FREE TRIAL page.
You can only access the internet addresses specified there without being
asked for a username and password. If you try to access anywhere else on
internet, you would be asked a username and password. This is the
purpose of free trial: to let you know our service works. If you need to
have unlimited access with us, you will need to signup and obtain a
username.
Only the domains mentioned on free trial page are allowed access without a password. Any other website would require a password. You problem may be like that Suppose you are trying to access www.cryptography.com using our service. This is a free access web site from our end. But if owners of cryptography.com put a link to an image say in http://linkexchange.com/pretty.gif , this link would require a password when loading their page since it is outside the boundary of cryptography.com. But if you did not put the password and pressed CANCEL, you would still be able to see cryptography.com without this particular image. When we are choosing the sites, we are first verifying that they do not require resources outside their domains. Unfortunately, since we don't have a control of these web sites, we do not know if they change their links or resources and we cannot do anything about this. Please inform us if you encounter to such a site and we will remove it from our list.
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| How can I use FREE TRIAL? | |
| You
can use free trial by configuring your browser. After you configure your
browser, you can access any of the websites written on FREE TRIAL
section without a username and password. Free Trial does not mean that
you have access to all of internet. With FREE TRIAL, you can only access
the web sites allowed by us for non-members.
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| What services do you offer FREE TRIAL for? | |
| We
only offer free trial for our HTTP proxy services. We do not offer any
free trial for IRC, ICQ, Napster, Net2Phone, Pc2Phone, Dialpad, Internet
Telephony proxies and other services we offer. If HTTP proxy works for
you, everything else would. Simply, if the FREE TRIAL section works for
you, you can use all other services as well when you obtain membership.
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| Why is my PROMOTIONAL username not working? | |
| We
occasionally send promotional time limited usernames to the folks on our
mailing list. With promotional usernames, you can access internet
unrestricted. But promotional usernames are time limited and they would
expire at the time specified on the email we send you. Therefore, if it
is expired, you would get the PROMOTION IS OVER error page from our
servers. Visitors are advised to subscribe to our mailing list to
benefit from future announcements and promotions.
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| I am a member but others are using PROMOTIONAL username. I want to cancel my membership and use the PROMOTION username myself without paying. | |
| That
is not necessary. Promotional usernames are time limited and they would
expire. Besides, any time we offer promotional membership to our mailing
list, all existing members would have their subscription period extended
by the time given to the promotional username. So in fact, you are
benefiting from the promotional offers as well just like the
non-members.
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| What if I get a membership and my ISP blocks access to you? | |
| Many of our users are from
countries where ISPs block internet access. The only way for them to have unrestricted
internet access is to use proxy services like ours. But unfortunately, these ISPs
block those services in the first place and they would have no way of accessing them.
Besides, as a service like ours go public, it would naturally be blocked by ISPs at a
later time if it is not already blocked. Therefore we have to maintain additional private
addresses in case our web site is blocked by ISPs and is not accessible by our members
from their locations. It is imperative that each member maintains a valid email address
with us during the time of subscription. Others are advised to subscribe to our
mailing list to avail latest news in case they cannot access our web site.
In simple terms, members have continuous access. They would not be affected by ISP blocking. We have plenty of proxy servers on separate networks. We rotate proxies and that is being done by nobody except us on business.
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| Why should I choose you? | |
| Because,
we are the best, we are the fastest, we are the most comprehensive. We
are the trendsetters. When we started our proxy services in 1996, there
was only anonymizer.com around and they were very slow and they were
blocked by every ISP in business. We are the 2nd company in whole
internet to run commercial anonymizing services and we are the 1st
commercial company on internet to run proxy services. We started running
proxy services when people did not know what PROXY meant. If anyone has
any other claim, let us face it. We know our business, we know what we
are doing and we are not one of those web sites popping up everywhere
offering proxy services nowadays. Try one, try all and once you are
exhausted and you are not getting what you want, you will come to us and
you will search no more. This is guaranteed. Do not believe us, ask us
for referrals. We have happy members for over 3 years now. We are the
the pioneers because no one else does proxy rotation against ISP
blocking like we do. We rock!
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| Why should i choose you again? | |
Few
of other reasons:
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| Why do I sometimes have problems connecting to your site and using your services? | |
There
are plenty of reasons why you are having problems using our services. We
implement 4 nameservers on a dual redundancy backbone therefore our
services are pretty robust. It is very unlikely that the problem is
arising from our side. Any connection originating between you and your
destination address might be affected by one of the following:
If you are still insisting that the problem is because of us, get ready for some action. If you can prove us the problem is in our servers, we will offer you a whole month of free membership. Please go to COMMAND PROMPT or MSDOS PROMPT. You can find it in START MENU - Accessories - MSDOS PROMPT or you can just go to START MENU - RUN and type command.com . On the window that pops up please type: tracert somebody.net . *NIX users can do a traceroute, there is no need to explain how. Wait for the command to finish its task and please copy and mail us the results. We would investigate your mail and let you know the results. Please do not send in fake queries as we would also check to see if there are or there has been any users using our services from your ISP at that particular time.
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| Do you cache or modify destination addresses? | |
| It
is our policy not to cache or modify the content presented by
destination addresses. You would always get the data from destination
addresses unmodified and uncached through us. It is the same data that
would have been presented to you if you have accessed the site directly.
Caching is believed to increase access times and it might have been so
for some ISPs but unfortunately, we have not seen any increase in speed
through caching on our services. It might be because our users have
diverse interests on internet. On the other hand, access time slightly
increased due to caching algorithms used. Therefore, best bet is not to
cache destination content at all.
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| Why do I need to surf anonymously? | |
| Because
it is your right to have privacy. Whenever you visit a web site, you
reveal quite a lot of information about yourself the most important
being your IP address and host name. Almost all (actually all) web sites
log your visits. This logging may
constitute a violation of your privacy, or you might not want to reveal this
information without your knowledge but you don't have a choice unless you
use a service like us.
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| What information do I reveal when I visit a web site? | |
| At the very least, web site operators will
know the hostname and IP address of the machine you use to access their site, the type of
computer and browser you are using, and the last page you were on before you came to their
site. Additionally, they may be able to determine your e-mail address and real name. See
what you are revealing at our visitor grabber section.
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| Can web sites get my home address and phone number? | |
| It
is very unlikely but some people and companies specialize in this. They sometimes can by stealing some more
personal information from your browser with Java and Active X. It is feasible that other
personal data about you could be obtained from a number of other sources
like telephony directories, newsgroups and web listings. There are many other resources
on internet and some companies even specialize
in obtaining critical data for their clients about requested persons. When
it comes to privacy, being paranoid is the best choice.
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| How does your service work? | |
| We
have plenty of services and it would be difficult to summarize their
operations here. Some services are proprietary, some are public
therefore it is not feasible to explain them all here. As far as web
access is concerned, our servers act as a middleman between you and
the documents you want to retrieve. Our server will retrieve the document from xxxx.com,
by stripping off all the headers or references that refer to you and therefore revealing
nothing about your identity, and then send the document back to you after rewriting the
document to reference all links back through us. As far as IRC - ICQ and
Internet Telephony services are concerned, our servers would bind you
directly to requested addresses through us. The end point would always
see us as the party making the request, never your original IP.
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| How do i know i am using your servers on my browser? There is no mention of you anywhere on URL. | |
| At
the bottom of your browser, there is part saying "conneting
..." . You must see our ip address or host name there. Or if this
is too much of trouble, just type in the URL box a nonexistent domain
like iieridefhgkdfuierute.com and wait for an error page. If you are
connecting to internet through us, you would get our classic black and
red errorpage with our logo on top. Besides, if you are accessing
anywhere not mentioned on our tree trial page, you would be asked a
username and password before anything.
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| Can sites get my e-mail if I don't put my e-mail address in my browser's configuration screen? | |
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Possibly. There are several methods sites use to obtain your e-mail address. If your browser sets the HTTP header variable HTTP_FROM, then omitting your e-mail address will prevent the browser from sending HTTP_FROM in the HTTP request, making it impossible for a web site to obtain you your address in that way. However, tenacious sites might still be able to obtain your e-mail address by doing an ident and/or finger on your IP address, which is sent in the HTTP header. Whether that is successful depends on how much information your ISP reveals about you in response to finger and ident requests. Somebody puts a stop to this by hiding your machine's IP address.
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| I am a member. Why do I get Authentication Failed error? | |
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Both the username and password are sensitive to the case of the letters -- lower case or UPPER CASE. Make sure you enter them exactly as given to you for your account. Make sure the "Caps Lock" key on your keyboard is off. Usually the error message is self explanatory. If it still does not work, your account is probably disabled due to username abuse. Read next.
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| Does somebody limit the use of my membership? | |
| Memberships
obtained from us are for your own personal use. Username sharing is
absolutely forbidden. Any members found to be engaging in username
distribution would be disabled without a notice (well, actually, being
polite, we send a notice!) and no refund would be made. You are free to
use your username from as many computers, places, ip numbers at as many
times as you want. There are no limitations. But if someone else is
using your username, we would know!
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| What is Enhanced DNS (Domain Name Service), new gTLD (Generic Top Level Domain)? | |
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These sites below will give "DNS Error, host not found" messages in 98% of other ISPs. This is because these domain names are New Generic Top Level Domain names and DNS (domain name service) is not provided by root servers since they are new extensions in Internet. Our servers provide ROOT DNS service for all these new domains names (like .nic, .mall, .web, .film etc) in accordance with their registry AlterNIC. You will need to configure your browser first.
(Yes you are seeing it right. Indeed these domains are ending in .web and .mall instead of the standard ones like .com or .net or .org. Click on them and see for yourself that they are just like regular domains. There are hot debates on these issues. Visit Alternic for more details)
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| Automatic Proxy Configuration is not working. Why? | |
| Automatic
Proxy Configuration does not work in the following countries: United
Arab Emirates
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| Ports are being blocked. What next? | |
| Good
question. Let us see if any ISP can block standard mail port (SMTP) 25.
We don't mind running a proxy server on port 25 or even on port 1 (tcpmux)
:) .The simple rule: There is nothing done by humans that cannot be
undone.
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| What is your opinion about censorship? | |
| That
question is not really necessary, we believe it is obvious why we are
here and what we think from what we do. No single entity should police
the netizens or the citizens of a country. A person should be free to
decide on what information he wants to get and he does not want to get.
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| What do you think about censoring governments and ISPs? | |
| We
love them! Long live censorship! Long live censoring magpies!
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| Why 33? | |
| Why
Not!
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| IMPORTANT: How much do you anonymize? | |
| IMPORTANT
NOTE: Please note as of version 4.0, our main proxy server
anonymizes only to a moderate degree. If you want full anonymity, you
will have to request it and we will assign you to different host and
port. Note that with complete anonymizing, many web sites mainly
freemail accounts like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, usa.net and membership
based web sites that mostly check the referer header to authenticate
will not work as these headers are all being stripped out. This was the
normal practice until version 4.0 but many users complained that they
are unable to use free mail services and membership based web sites.
Therefore, with version 4.0, standard behavior of our proxy server is to
anonymize moderately, not completely. Java, Javascript, ActiveX and
cookies are not blocked on the standard proxy server. Please note
that your IP address, host name and user agent is always anonymized and
never released to the sites you visit. All in all, it is a delicate
balance between anonymity and convenience. Those members who require
full anonymity, please contact us for the address of proxy server you
should use. With our paranoid anonymizing proxy server, everything is
stripped out and there would be absolutely no information that relates
to you. All cookies, activex content, java and javascript would be
blocked with our paranoid anonymizing proxy server. But as it has been
said, expect to see many sites malfunction under this setup.
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| I don't have a credit card. How can I subscribe? | |
| You
can subscribe to us by wire or bank transfer. Actually, those of you who
are really interested in protecting their privacy would choose to do a
bank transfer instead of using a credit card. Contact us for bank
details.
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| Is it true that ... | |
| No,
it is not. (Bergman's paranoia rule: DENY EVERYTHING!)
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| Why are you using small fonts all over your web site? | |
| The
font size we use is standard and can be read properly from an
appropriate distance from a computer monitor. This usually is 12"
to 18" for a 15 inch monitor. We don't see much point in using a
font size like a horse's shoe and you would not have any trouble reading
anything unless you happen to be trying to see your computer's screen
from your swimming pool.
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| Why hasn't this FAQs been split into chapters? | |
| We
believe, a member candidate has to read complete FAQs in order to get
proper understanding of our services and operations. This is crucial to
maintain a healthy future relation between you and us.
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| Why isn't there any configuration or other information for *NIX users? | |
| If
you are a *NIX user and asking this question just out of sheer curiosity,
you already know the answer. If you are a windows user, you will never
know the answer. If you are a *NIX user and asking this question because
you need help, we refuse to help you. Your should not use *NIX at all.
NOTE: *NIX collectively refers to all UNIX derivatives including but not limited to bsd, freebsd, linux, openbsd, minix, netbsd etc. UNIX is a trademark of AT&T . windows is not trademark of anyone, you can't get a trademark on public words, denotions etc. We are using small caps here so lawyers don't jump on us yet.
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| I have sent an email to ask about something and i got an auto reply saying "READ FAQs". And in capitals. | |
| Exactly
that is what it says it is. Read this FAQs. Every question answered here
has been asked us by at least 5 persons even though they have already
been explained here. Folks, times are changing. Gone are the days when a
sales person has to explain 50 times the same thing in a day to 50
different people. This is the whole purpose of internet: to make our
lives easier. We would be very pleased if you send us an email and ask
how we are, but if you are asking something already mentioned here, you
are not doing your homework properly.
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| I have more questions. What do I do? | |
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1996-2010 © Somebody Inc |
