Anonymous Proxy Question

[Pez D Spencer]

Ok. I understand what a proxy is and how it works. I also understand the concept of an anonymous proxy. My question is, who typically hosts an anonymous proxy and why?

What I mean is, do the servers that host an anonymous proxy do so for that specific reason? If so why would someone host a server and route random traffic through it for no apparent reason aside from just trying to be helpful to people? It makes no sense for someone to pay for tons of bandwidth like that just so they can be a nice guy and people can use their server to route traffic through. Or are the people that run these servers unaware that traffic is being routed through them? Are these anonymous proxy servers actually servers that are in place for another reason and have been hacked in some way?

So again, who typically hosts an anonymous proxy and why?

 

[kamper]

I don't know how much it accounts for, but there's definitely the motive of being able to sniff people's traffic for nefarious reasons. People have gained a fair bit of sensitive information running Tor nodes (apparently only when they act as an exit node though) and I only know about the white hat ones that publish their findings to disabuse people of the notion that Tor provides certain kinds of security. It seems possible that many nodes are gathering data and not publishing it but rather using it for profit.