Welcome Bartas!

We’d like to welcome to our team Bartas, who will be taking on the roles of  technical support analyst and programmer.  We thought this would be a great time to start doing some staff profiles so that you, our beloved customers, can get to know the people behind the proxies. 

We asked Bartas a few questions as the inaugural profile. Here’s what he had to say!

Where are you from, and what’s the best thing about your home town?

Well, I grew up in a small mountain town in Colorado. The best thing about that town is it’s smallness and cuteness. It had all these nice little shops and there were only a few thousand people living there. There was this true small town feeling. I also remember spending all day jumping from rock to rock in the river that runs through the middle of the town on a hot summer day. And in the winter during the ski season, you could hear the “booms” of the dynamite the avalanche control crews used on unstable snow pack way up above the treeline.

What drew you to FoxyProxy? Were you a user prior to joining the team?

I remember using the original FoxyProxy extension for Firefox a long time ago. What drew me to FoxyProxy was speaking with Eric, the founder and CEO of FoxyProxy, and realizing that we were on the same page on many issues such as privacy in computing as well as a commitment to excellent customer service.

How long have you been interested in computer programming?

But really I first got into programming when I was 10. My parents bough me a toy computer. It was sophisticated enough to have Basic, but too sophisticated for me to understand everything at once. From then on, my driving question in terms of computers is, “How does this thing really work underneath it all?” I’m pretty handy with C (erm, pointers ftw), and I just dived into javascript.

You’re something of a baker, according to your bio. Do you have any feelings on The Great British Bake Off’s ‘Brexit’ from the BBC? (I also love baking, and this broke my heart.)

You know, I love baking, but I have to say I haven’t seen The Great British Bake Off. But now it’s on my list of shows to watch.

What’s an interesting hobby you have that people might not expect from you?

A few months back I heard about the health benefits of broccoli sprouts. I just started, but they are already germinating and soon I won’t have to pay five dollars for a handful of sprouts from the store!

Have you got any pets?

My one pet is a snuggly Australian Cattle Dog/American Bulldog. He’s really sweet, inquisitive, and loyal.

Star Trek or Star Wars, and why?

First of all as a disclaimer, I have only seen a few movies from each universe, not to mention the other media both universes have produced. Based purely on feel and my uneducated judgement on the subject, I’ll have to go with Star Trek. (this is the correct answer. – ed.) 

We’re here for you

Look, it’s a weird time right now. The world is going through some stuff and no matter what area of the globe you occupy, chances are that things are happening which are making you say ‘This is weirder than usual.’

But we’re here, as always, bringing you proxy and VPN service from across the globe and the top notch customer service that goes along with it. We have paid services, and do-it-yourself options. 

We’re here if you want some escapism and need to watch a highbrow costume drama on BBC.

We’re here if you live in a part of the world that restricts the internet freedom of its citizens.

Speaking of the internet and how private we humans are while using it, Firefox just released a privacy focused browser for iOS users.  It will probably come in handy for our friends in the UK, after their own government just quietly introduced some very heavy handed surveillance legislation.

The bottom line is, we’ve been here for 10 years with the goal of keeping information flowing over all parts of the world. We fight for Internet freedom. We advocate for privacy, free speech, free press, government transparency, sensible copyright and sensible DRM.

We’re members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy and Technology, FreePress, Stop Watching Us, and the Mozilla Foundation.

We’re not going anywhere.

We have been getting a flood of complaints about accounts not working in the last 12 hours.

We hear you!

Our servers are actually up and have been up this whole time. Our suspicion is that there is another DDoS attack on the internet causing general internet problems, like that big one that happened recently. You may have read about the recent attacks in the last week since it affected millions of people. Here is one story about it

We will keep you updated!

Updated Geoshift

Recently we unveiled our new updated geoshift extension for Chrome. We re-vamped the look as well as functionality, taking suggestions from our customers. That’s you! We love you.

Included as new features: 

• We’ve updated the design to include the country flag and full name
• We’ve made it so that the IP address for all of your accounts are displayed in addition to the server name
• Layout and design are re-vamped and will now pair better with smaller screens

It’s just as user friendly as before! All you need to do is enter your account info and our extension does the rest of the work, so there’s no need to configure anything yourself.

Let us know what you think, and happy browsing!

BBC Licensing – what you need to know

We know that many of you use FoxyProxy to stream BBC iPlayer services, and have expressed some concern over the BBC’s attempt to enforce its licensing rules. 

DON’T WORRY. 

There actually is no need to buy a license, and you won’t be asked to supply any personal information to the BBC. All you need to do when you see the dialog box (see the handy illustration below) is click ‘I have a TV license.’

Another concern has been whether the BBC can somehow how figure out that you’re using a proxy. Don’t worry, the answer is no! 

Once you do that,  you’ll be on your way to all the BBC programming you know and love, whether you’re breathlessly watching Paul and Mary judging bakes on The Great British Bake Off or catching up on Poldark’s bodice ripping adventures.

News & Foxy Highlights

A bit of exciting news: we’ve added Costa Rica to our list of available countries!

Costa Rica is home to the most magical place on Earth. The Sloth Sanctuary. 

Check out our services and choose something that’s right for you. We have paid proxy/VPN service that comes with our full customer support and service, and we also offer free downloads if you’re more the do it yourself type.

You business folks out there should also know that we offer custom plans for a whole range of corporate needs. There’s a reason we’ve been around for 10 years!

Check out some recent feedback from our customers: 

‘Rarely these days do products live up to the hype. FoxyProxy not only lives up to the hype but exceeds it beyond all expectations. Runs solid, straight out of a very easy to install package (VPN)’ – via Facebook

‘It’s been 3 months, maybe more, My Android signs in to Foxyproxy in 2 seconds, much faster than in the past. Not only that, but it has a faster transfer speed. I like what you are doing, keep it up folks. You’ll soon rule the internet proxy service.’ –  via Facebook

Gawking at Gawker

Some of you may have heard about the recent bankruptcy via lawsuit of Gawker media. Some of you may have even enjoyed it a little bit, because let’s be frank here…Gawker has made some very poor editorial and journalistic choices.

Very poor. One of those poor choices was to out PayPal founder Peter Thiel back in 2007. It’s never ok to out someone who doesn’t want to be outed, and that particular editorial decision came back to bite them in the ass recently when Thiel teamed up with Hulk Hogan who was suing Gawker Media for releasing a private sex tape.

Thiel financially backed Hogan in his lawsuit as retribution for the piece from Gawker outing him, with the intent of taking the company down. And it worked, as you know. So what does this mean for journalistic freedom when a man with a lot of money and a grudge can set out with the intent of silencing journalists (For all the bad pieces they ran, Gawker does employ actual journalists and has produced numerous pieces of merit)?

Here is a great piece on why we shouldn’t be celebrating the downfall of Gawker. From the article:

The Gawker story is just as much about press freedom and the emerging threat of millionaires and billionaires … who are financially capable of destroying journalists and publications for nothing more than shits and giggles.

In the end, Gawker was shuttered after having to approach a media giant for a financial lifeline. Granted, this really was just the final nail in the coffin, as this piece details that there were possibly many factors to why Univision chose to shutter Gawker.com while keeping the remaining Gawker Media properties running.

Only time will tell what this ruling and it’s fallout mean for the future of journalists who ruffle the feathers of the financially powerful, and that is a potentially dangerous road to go down.

Have you been playing Pokémon Go? 

If so, you and a few million of your friends have been having fun exploring, catching Pokémon, and battling it out with other enthusiasts in the augmented reality geocaching tiny monster hunting phenomenon.

Awesome! Kids and adults are running around and having fun. It’s something we need to see right now, collectively as humans, because unless you’ve been living under a rock you know that a lot of things out in the world seem a little bit awful right now.

However…because this is The Internet you should also know that nothing will remain innocent for long.

You’ve probably heard that the Pokémon Go app is pretty liberal with your privacy permissions. Some of these make sense, such as access to your camera and location services which are pretty necessary for the game to work.

Some folks have been raising alarm bells over the permissions for this game, understandably, and it’s enough to keep a lot of people from trying out the game.

Our absolute favorite on this front, however, goes to Gawker.

Pokémon Go is a Vast Government Fueled Psy-op Intelligence Gathering Conspiracy!

By now you know how much I, your blogess (is blogatrix better?) love a good conspiracy theory. And this one is a great one. Ashley Feinberg of Gawker Media does a really great and pretty thorough explanation of why Pokemon Go is actually a Government conspiracy.

To break it down, she essentially posits that the ties which the game’s creator has with government intelligence agencies will allow the government to gather data on everything from your movements to mapping the insides of buildings.

Does this sound far fetched? Some in China don’t think so. There are already rumors swirling that the game is a Trojan Horse of sorts, a plot by Japan and the US to pinpoint the locations of Chinese military bases.

It’s a good read, and well worth your time.

So what do you think, dear readers? Is it all a vast Government Conspiracy? 

Good Morning!
Pip-pip, and Cheerio

Good Morning, Friends of the Fox. 

It’s been a bit since we’ve posted here on the blog, as your blogess has had some interesting times in the real world of late. As always, I’d like to remind you about our awesome Proxy and VPN service, free software downloads, and fabulous custom corporate plans.

There’s a reason we’ve been in the business for 10 years. We’re good at what we do.

Anyway, those interesting times have meant that I’ve been in the UK for the past couple of weeks, so it could be worse. In the midst of eating as much clotted cream (Google it) as I possibly can, and doing my best to soak up the Cornish sun, I stumbled across a bit of good old fashioned internet censorship while trying to do some catching up on my stories via a video streaming site.

This being Britain, it’s polite and to the point, loading up this simple message:

Interesting, indeed.

Naturally, I followed the link to get a better idea of just who decided that I couldn’t internet surf freely. Which led me to this:

If you have a moment, take a look for yourselves. It turns out that the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has a lot of influence over what our friends in the UK can see. Over 60 sites on that list are blocked by order of the MPAA, with even more getting blacklisted courtesy of the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), and the Premier Football League. As you might suspect, these blocked sites are mostly streaming, torrents, and sports streaming websites.

Cartier has also obtained court orders against some of these websites. Yes, the jewelry company. Most of the websites they and a couple other jewelry companies have blocked are what I assume are knockoff sales sites.

But here’s where it gets weird. One of the websites blocked by Cartier is www.pasmoldsolutions.com, which for some reason redirects to a story about an online prostitution sting. The original link, or so the Google cache tells me, was www.pasmoldsolutions.com/fake-cartier-jewelry-trinity-bracelets-c-144_139.html.

What this has to do with an online underage prostitution sting from 2011, I have no idea.

Good thing for our British friends that you have us for all your proxy needs! 

50% off any purchase, you say?

YES, WE SAY. We’re so excited about our shiny new website that we’re offering you 50% off any purchase. Just use the code a-new-hope at checkout. We’ve made some changes in layout and function, making things easier all around. Have a look, and let us know what you think!

What To Look For

is the VPN using up-to-date protocols, what’s the reputation of the company and the people behind it (and their history or expertise), are terms of service easy to understand, what does the VPN protect against and what doesn’t it cover, and is the service honest about its disclosures?

FoxyProxy, in business 10 years and going strong, with tens of millions of customers served. We forever changed the way proxies and VPNs were used by creating awesome F/OSS software for Firefox and Chrome. We are all career IT professionals with decades of experience each.

No noobs here.

Aside from these factors, Campbell recommends looking at any company activism, which he says is likely to demonstrate how much an organization cares about customer privacy.

FoxyProxy donates free accounts to Columbia and Harvard Universities for price discrimination and privacy research. We donate to the EFF, FreePress, StopWatchingUs, Center for Democracy and Technology, Center for Biological Diversity, Tor Project, and others.

He also looks for a clear and unambiguous privacy policy rather than a boilerplate policy and for companies that have been in business for at least three years.

Plain English! https://getfoxyproxy.org/privacy-policy

As a final precaution, Campbell also looks for VPNs that do not use third-party systems to capture sensitive customer data. “Any VPN service that respects their customers’ privacy will self-host all systems that interact with customers, such as third-party live chat scripts, support ticketing systems, blog comments, etc. Customers often submit very sensitive information in support requests without knowing that the VPN provider doesn't have exclusive control over the system,” he said.

Yup. We use highly-customized, self-hosted versions of osTicket, phpBB, and WordPress for support, as well as a number of custom-written back-office systems, all self-hosted.

So there you have it.

People are right to question the business practices, ethics, and motivation behind companies offering VPN services. FoxyProxy has the answers you need to feel good about using our service.

Good morning!
Have you done your planting yet?  We have. It was exhausting.

Privacy at the Forefront

Citizens of the Internet (Netizens, if you will) are becoming more and more concerned with privacy, and are becoming more proactive in achieving it. Using proxy and VPN service, password lockers, and many other strategies, people are taking matters into their own hands. Internet behemoths such as Facebook seem to be, on the surface anyway, taking notice.

WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, already features some relatively beefy security measures such as end to end encryption. Now, self destructing messages may heading for Facebook Messenger, letting users decide just how long a message lasts before expiring and disappearing forever into the Great Internet Ether.

But are these measures just lip service on Facebook’s part? Very likely.

You know those cutsie little emotie-options which have replaced the plain old like button? You didn’t think those were just for show did you?

It may be old news but it bears repeating. Facebook is using those emoji and keeping tabs on how you use them, gathering every scrap of data it possibly can to keep you coming back for more. Confirming it to Mic, Facebook will be adding those emojis into the constant stream of data which it feeds the great Difference Engine which is it’s algorithm.

Some agencies, such as the Belgian Federal Police, have cautioned people to not use them at all, stating “if it appears that you are in good spirits, Facebook will infer that you are receptive and will be able to sell advertising space by explaining to the advertisers that they are more likely in that way that you will react,” the police said in a statement. “One more reason therefore to not rush to click if you want to protect your privacy”.

So, emoji at your own risk when it comes to Facebook. They are, after all, watching.