This morning I thought I’d fire up the Google Hack and search for some new proxies.
It had occured to me that I had never done a query on “inurl:proxy.txt”, so I gave it a shot.
Every single result came back with a “This site may harm your computer” warning!
That wouldn’t be unusual for proxy sites and since this was the first time I had ever used this query, I thought I had stumbled across a gold mine.
It turns out, Google was simply fucked and this was happening to everyone, everywhere. Even Page Creator, where I jot these notes down, was huffed.
It lasted for about 15 minutes, max.
In that time, I figured out how to filter out the malware site warnings. I also found a proxy.txt file with thousands of proxies in it.
Nice.
That was a bit of a long haul. We first hit a million proxies last August, five months and a couple of weeks after the project started. Now, five months later we added another half a million.
Obviously the rate of discovery has dropped by half.
This is not a big surprise considering that ~800,000 proxies were found in a single file back in July.
In other news, some clown with a residential DSL account in Sweden recently whined to my ISP that I was using his “Web server” as a proxy.
The extent of this “use” was checking the address with one of the public proxy judges I use. This box had been an open proxy since last June.
If anyone needed to get in hot water with their ISP, it was that guy, not me. The guy’s running an open proxy, for crying out loud! I ran a Google check on the IP and found it listed at antichat.ru (it’s been off my list since the 25th – the asshole probably finally figured out how to use a firewall).
I would think he’d be more surprised to find out someone was using his open proxy as a Web server.
I blackholed his IP so it will never get hit by a resurrection run again, but if you’re interested, here it is:
85.195.15.126
The proxy was on port 80. The “Web site” is a joke. Check this link and you’ll probably find your own IP address on the “offenders” list.
Just checking in. Things have been running swimmingly. No issues to speak of.
I have been running the proxy recheck script whenever the total number goes over 900. This generally reduces the size of the list by two thirds. The survivors are usually solid performers.
New proxies are popping up every day. I haven’t had to bother with the resurrection script in over a month. It’s always been boom or bust so I think I’ll save the resurrection script for the inevitable rainy days ahead.
I have been impressed lately with the quality of Korean proxies. They are very fast these days. Five years ago, the APAC (Asia/Pacific) countries had crappy bandwidth. Now, they’re among the best.
But as usual they’ll hang around for a few days and then die off, just like all the rest.
Right now I’m using a Vietnamese proxy. Excellent performer and it’s an October 2008 vintage, so it’s been up for quite some time. There are a few gems to be found in the last pages of the list and this is definitely one of them.
Watch out for Bulgarian (BG) proxies. They are speed freaks as well. Unfortunately “cybercrime” is hot in Bulgaria so as usual, excersize caution!
