Is there any trustworthy program that will change the ip address for when not using a vpn ? Something like https://filehippo.com/download_free_ip_switcher/ which is safe no ads or spyware. i am not saying this one has ads spy i do not know
To change your public ISP-assigned IP address -- that is, the IP address that Internet sites see traffic coming from -- you must use some sort of proxy that forwards stuff. VPNs are rather like routers, in that they use network address translation (NAT). SOCKS proxies handle all TCP traffic, but not UDP, ICMP, etc. Common examples are Tor and SSH. HTTP/HTTPS proxies handle just HTTP/HTTPS (doh), and can easily be added to browsers as configuration options or extensions. HTTP/HTTPS proxies often leak original IP addresses in headers, so you must take care to check. As I understand it, neither SOCKS proxies nor VPNs leak original IP addresses. An advantage of SOCKS and HTTP/HTTPS proxies over VPNs is that there's far less overhead, and establishing new connections is much faster, so it's easy to change apparent IP address quickly, using large proxy pools. Using proxychains, you can switch rapidly among random chained combinations of SOCKS and HTTP/HTTPS proxies. You can also spoof originating IP address, entirely locally. But that won't allow responses to reach you, because there's no return route. But for DoS attacks, that is a feature, and not a bug.
Interesting, are there any decent (paid) proxy services that can be used just in the browser - for light privacy purposes....defeating IP geo location for example.
Windscribe is great as a browser extension - actually connections are generally better than their desktop client.
SOCKS5 proxies should handle UDP too. According to specs, correctly implemented SOCKS5 proxy should handle also UDP which in turn enable things like remote DNS lookup.
Yes, maybe it's something in the Tor network itself that does not handle UDP... Because if correctly implemented, Tor SOCKS5 proxy should pass UDP without hickup because by definition SOCKS5 proxies don't care what protocol/data/etc passes throught them. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS#Comparison_to_HTTP_proxying "....however, SOCKS proxies can also forward UDP traffic and work in reverse, while HTTP proxies cannot. " and "The SOCKS5 protocol is defined in RFC 1928. It is an extension of the SOCKS4 protocol; it offers more choices for authentication and adds support for IPv6 and UDP, the latter of which can be used for DNS lookups." EDIT: I digged deeper and the only exception that Tor makes for supporting UDP seems to be the case of UDP DNS and even then the links below hint that Tor actually converts UDP DNS request to TCP-ones internally before spitting it out from the exit. https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/7oizra/why_tor_doesnt_support_udp/ https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/469 EDIT2: And it does make sense, well kinda...because UDP is unreliable, unordered transport protocol, easily vulnerable to MItM, spoofing and other stuff so TCP was better choice.... EDIT3: Somewhat related, it took 14+ years for Mozilla to fix Remote DNS leak bug when using SOCKS5 ... jeez! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=134105
Yes, I recall some explanation about why Tor specifically doesn't allow UDP. Because it was more easily traced, I think.