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The anonymouse browser has been improved to provide more reliable access to non-standard images and files.
Only people who have donated to ProxyBuster can now use the ProxyBuster Browser. If you want to find out how to donate, go to our donate page.
ProxyBuster now supports FTP for file retrieval requests! Submit your FTP requests the same way as your HTTP requests (through your Account page). All FTP functionality is identical to HTTP functionality.
I finished some tweaks to ProxyBuster:Browser. The changes you will see is a new framed interface (which makes rendering some pages more reliable) and per-session statistics, so you can see how many requests were redirected and how much bandwidth you consumed. The changes you won't see are some back-end tweaks to retrieving and handling content.
Note that there is a known issue with images not fully rendering. I'm looking into the problem. It is unusual as the image is actually completely retrieved by the server and sent to the client, but for some reason it is not rendering fully (in some cases).
The paging functionality on the Account page has been fixed. (Actually, I didn't realize it was broken until a few weeks back!) You can now go back and view your entire history of requests.
The logon bug has slowly been dying with successive changes over the past few weeks. With today's update I am hoping it is finally put to bed. The root cause of the problem seemed to be related to client-side caching. I have implemented caching controls on the server-side, which hopefully will eliminate the problem for most users. This issue will continually be monitored until I can be sure it is gone for good.
It's a very rough implementation, but the first release of ProxyBuster:Browser is now available! ProxyBuster Browser will allow you to anonymously browse Web sites that are bloced by firewalls, Internet proxies, and ISPs. There are some major limitations in the product at this point:
As you probably noticed, ProxyBuster is free. There are benefits to donating, which you can read about on the FAQs page or on the Donate page. To give you a good idea as to how much your usage of ProxyBuster costs (based on an average bandwidth cost of $2.00 per gigabyte), your account page now includes your balance sheet: a summary of your usage in bytes, its approximate cost, and your donations to date. There's also a convenient donate button... :-)
Back-end changes were made to the request engine. The major change users will see is less stuck queues. Over the past few days, the request engine would get stuck trying to process a request that was very slow. Now, requests that do not download in a timely manner will time out. If you see a request that failed due to a timeout, it could be because the site was unavailable, or the connection to the site is too slow.
We added authentication support, allowing you to use ProxyBuster to retrieve files that require a username and password. Note that this password method works with specific types of Web authentication, and does not work with cookie-based authentication (used by Yahoo! and many others) or Microsoft Passport authentication.
If you submit a request that fails for some reason, additional information is now provided to help you figure out what went wrong. Whatever response was received to initiate the failure will be displayed on the request status page. Typical errors are related to authentication (forbidden), bad URLs (bad request or not found), and Internet latency (timed out).
We added links to an alternate base64 decoding utility on the FAQ and request download pages. Thanks to Ural for sending us this link (and for working with us on implementing this functionality in the first place!). This alternate utility can be found at http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/base64.
A third option for retrieving files has been added - Download with base64 encoding. This option encodes your file using base64 encoding. Once you download the file in this format, you must decode the file. Many decoders are available for many different operating systems. We offer a decoder which you can download at http://www.proxybuster.net/uudecode.zip (our version works on computers running Microsoft Windows and the Microsoft .Net Framework).
We've also teamed up with Techieville, the techie's starting point! Techieville has given us a message forum to use. If you have questions or comments, go to the ProxyBuster Forums, provided by Techieville!
A user informed me of an error retrieving files that may be related to his proxy/firewall looking at the HTTP headers and content-type field. To try working around this, two download links exist when your file is available. They will read as follows:
The first link will have <content-type> replaced by the actual value for your file (such as application/zip, image/gif, and so forth). If this fails, try the second link, which tells your Web browser (and thus your proxy server) that the file is a plain text file. If this works I'll keep this change permanently.
Some nice updates to the query engine to better optimize the flow of requests. Also, note one thing - there was a bug where expired requests were repeatedly labeled as available, so if your available request is unavailable, it's really expired. This also skewed the average request wait time below greatly, so don't take that number to heart at this time. This situation should resolve itself in the next 12-24 hours.