Bit newb on this. What happens if I use a proxy? Does that interfere with other things in my system...I don't know...operation of cookies or recognition of saved passwords. I suppose they are all related to the website address. Is there a way to mask your own IP address, but show a changing one to the outside world?
using a proxy still exposes your cookies and many proxies use the X-Forwarded-For header, so your IP may be exposed anyway. Tor is the only decent way to hide your IP (site you connect to see a different source IP), other than a VPN/proxy service. you may use privoxy to hide your cookies also.
proxies are an intermediary step between your IE/Firefox/Safari web browser and the web servers your browser usually connects to. IE's proxy setting will affect how some other applications on your PC connect, they will try and use the proxy too. But if you have Firefox the proxy you setup in firefox will only be used by firefox.
I use Flock browser and sometimes Avant. I think they are both IE based, so presume a proxy would work in the same sort of way as Firefox. How does google prevent people from hiding their ip, then clicking all over competitor listings on adwords? Or is this one of the problems with adwords?
google prevent click-fraud by using a tracking cookie, at the very least. I can guarantee they will have electronic fingerprinting, so hiding your IP will not be enough, IE will leave a breadcrumb trail for them to pick up in the form of http-referrers, user-agents and etc. I reccomend using Firefox if you are concerned about privacy.
I'm not a webdev expert though. Hopefully someone else can answer your question better.
How does google prevent people from hiding their ip, then clicking all over competitor listings on adwords? Or is this one of the problems with adwords?
I've given this a little bit of thought myself. You could write a Perl script to manually construct a request (randomizing agent strings etc.). Shouldn't be too hard to simulate a users browse pattern. By requesting a new TOR route for every fake user you could effectively make it look like the requests were coming from all over the world.
Pay-per-click has been open to click-fraud since day one. However, a specialized knowledge would be required to perform this to any degree of scale. I don't suppose the threat is significant enough to herald a change in policy (i.e. pay-per-sale).
Interestingly enough, there have been cases where people browsing through TOR have been warned (by Google) of an infection on their machine, probably due to the sheer amount of traffic coming from a particular exit node. This would imply they weren't aware of the TOR network. However, TOR is not clandestine and publishes a list of exit nodes (it couldn't work, otherwise) so it's quite possible to mitigate against this particular attack vector if you're inclined.
There are other free proxies out there though. If nothing else, there's no way of knowing whether a click was genuine or the result of a botnet. Personally, I hope a technology emerges that does cripple this ad model. Might give the domain-hogging cyber-squatters a kick in the nuts.
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