As far as i've gathered, the most versatile type of proxy is a socks one.

I've got some newbish questions, answer them at your leisure:

- Routing through a socks proxy (or any proxy for that matter) will limit my download rate to that of the proxyserver, right?

- Finding working public socks proxies are harder than finding HTTP proxies (eg they are more rare)?

- Is there any software or tutorial that could help me to set up a SOCKS-proxy chain (if it is at all possible?)

Oh, by the way, thanks insomniac for the only comprehensive, non commercial and bullshit-free guide to proxies on the web so far. Saved me lots of headaches, greatly appreciated.

You are most welcome, and onto the answers:

1) This is indeed true, your downloads will only ever run as fast as the Proxy you are using can handle.

2) Finding Socks Proxies is not necessarily harder, its just more people keep their findings private as Socks are quite often a commodity which is regularly sold to spammers. Alot of tools which scan for Proxies are also not designed to scan for Socks, its just the way things go.

3) Socks Chaining is more than possible, there are alot of programs out there which do this for you, although it is quite slow. If my memory serves me correctly there is infact a program calls Sockschain you can use on Windows.

Link to the program Insomniac speaks of:

hxxp://www.ufasoft.com/socks/
or
hxxp://www.softdepia.com/sockschain_download_431.html

Description of SocksChain program from developer(s):
SocksChain is a program that allows to work through a chain of SOCKS or HTTP proxies to conceal the actual IP-address. SocksChain can function as a usual SOCKS-server that transmits queries through a chain of proxies. SocksChain can be used with client programs that do not support the SOCKS protocol, but work with one TCP-connection, such as TELNET, HTTP, IRC... (FTP uses 2 connections). And your IP-address will not be seen in the server's logs or mail headers. Key features of SocksChain:
Auto-upgrade function
More robust testing of proxies
Support of HTTP-proxies with HTTP-tunneling support
Function of proxy operability testing
Setting of Internet connection type (i.e. it is possible to specify a fixed proxy that will be the first in all connections )
Big database of proxies (a few hundreds of addresses)
Principle of operation
SocksChain transmits the TCP-call of a client program in such a way that it successively goes through a chain of proxies. SocksChain itself is connected only with the first element of this chain. That one in its turn is connected with the second and so on...
So, to track where the query was initiated from with the help of server logs is very complex. To do that, one should analyze the logs of all intermediates one by one in the reverse order. If somewhere the logs are not kept, the thread will be lost. Theoretically it provides a high degree of anonymity. But it affects the speed of data transmission as it is inversely proportional to the chain length.
SocksChain subsystems:
Proxies manager
In all variety of proxies there are 2 basic types of universal services, i.e. allowing to transmit any TCP-connections (not only, say, HTTP and FTP). Only they make a chain possible and, therefore, are useful for SocksChain:
# SOCK4 and SOCKS5 services. Their default port is 1080. SOCKS5 is the most universal service, as it allows not only establish TCP-connections but open a port for incoming TCP-connections (BIND operation ) and transmit/receive UDP-datagrams as well.

# HTTP-proxy with a possibility of SSL-tunneling. The default ports are 80, 8080, 3128. This service is less universal than SOCKS5, but by far more widespread.

Server
The server deals with processing queries of Internet-clients. Its task is to redirect TCP- and UDP-connections to a certain route of proxies. The route can be specified manually or it can be made up automatically (here its length must be specified) with the available list of proxies.
The server allows to add a few Services on different ports. Each service may have its individual route and target server. The target server is needed only if the client program does not directly support SOCKS-protocol.
SocksChain is a "Free to try" program. You can download and try it for an evaluation period.

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