Sometimes there are legitimate reasons you want to keep your surfing private which don’t involve nefarious activities or pornography. Maybe you’re shopping online while at your favorite coffee shop while surrounded by twenty-something cyberpunks’ with Linux laptops. Or perhaps you work with government or corporate information that must remain secure when transmitted over the Internet. Whatever the reason, you have a few choices. You can do a Google search for free anonymous proxies which are often ad supported and run outside the US. Personally, I find this solution sketchy. You’re trusting the web site to actually use strong encryption and not to snoop your network traffic themselves. Another option is to pay for an anonymous proxy service, such as the popular anonymizer.com. Anonymizer is a great service but it can cost over $100 per year. If you don’t want to pay for anonymous surfing your best bet is TOR (The Onion Router network). TOR is an open source project that connects you to free anonymous proxy servers through an encrypted connection. TOR is a respected and trusted source which won’t cost you a penny. Unfortunately, TOR isn’t the easiest software to configure and setup initially. But if running TOR sounds interesting, check out this article on lifehacker.com that links to an easy to follow video showing how to install and use TOR.