Using a Random UK IP Address Online

Some of us have been using proxies and VPNs for many years now.  Whether it’s for security, privacy or to battle against the online scourge of geo-targeting – a VPN or proxy is still your best defense. The market has changed though, there’s now little point in using free proxies as they all end up on blacklists very quickly after appearing.  The new wave of VPN and proxy services are becoming increasingly sophisticated in part due to the increasing efforts to identify and block them. There is something of a technological war going on between these services on one side and an array of logging, filtering and blocking software and hardware on the other.

Demise of the Free Web Proxy

The first casualty is arguably the simple proxy, for some time this offered a simple method of sidestepping these blocks but unfortunately these rarely work now. Even the BBC which operated a rather lax blocking regime for non-UK visitors for many years now stops proxies connecting to their online services.

In some sense it’s not surprising that proxies have had their day, they were a little too simple and ultimately often created more security issues than they solved. The upside is that the VPN/SSH services offer much more privacy and a host of security features.

Using a Random UK IP Address

This is one of my favorite features from the security program Identity Cloaker which I’ve personally used for many years. It gives you the facility to switch IP addresses automatically and rotate them.

Well one reason is it increases your level of privacy and makes it much harder to spot that you’re using a UK proxy/vpn service. For example, consider what logs look like at the ISP if you’re using a static VPN service. Although nobody can see your data, they will notice that every web transaction goes through a single server address – it’s fairly simple to see that you are using a proxy or VPN.

Same goes for your logs on any internal network, a single IP address for all your web traffic suggest that your data is being routed through a server usually a proxy. If you happen to live in a country where the government actively seek to control the internet this can be dangerous too. The use of a single VPN is not hard to detect if you spend the time looking for it. This is why it can be so useful to periodically rotate your IP address it makes it much more difficult to detect.

As you can see from the demonstration you have complete control over this feature, from specifying the exact time when you should switch servers, right to controlling which countries you switch too.  So, it’s perfectly possible to configure a different England IP Address to be assigned every 30 minutes or so.

There is a slight break in your internet connection whilst the software switches servers but it’s hardly noticeable unless you set it to change every few minutes.  You would set it to a specific country to ensure your browsing experience doesn’t change much, e.g Google would use the correct country and so on.   However for the ultimate security you should change to Any Country and a smallish rotation time for a totally random IP address every few minutes !