Someone brought the question about proxies being moral or not and while I obviously,since i run proxies, believe them to be morally neutral, what do you think?

Never considered the morality aspect in having proxies before. Well we as proxy owners meant it for good to earn income and to allow school students to access myspace in school. The morality lies in the user who does funny stuff through the proxy but then again we are the ones who allow it to happen by setting up proxies.

I take my stand as neutral too.

The morality all depends on what the user is using it for.
Some websites shouldn't be blocked, and some should.

Hmm I think Jacob is also referring to proxy web masters placing their own ads on proxified pages on 3rd party sites, like replacing myspace ads with their own ads when surfed through the proxy.

Do you guys think bill gates thought if his business was moral or not when he was first starting of, using his monopoly tactics? Those webmasters that you're referring to over at digitalpoint who have been saying it's immoral to replace your ads with the websites ads that being surfed. We should ask them how many of them have actually have paid for their copy of Windows XP (but no one talks about that because so many webmasters don't pay for their copy). It's only immoral to them because they haven't done it yet. In 2-3 months when someone releases a commercial mod for this ad replacement method, I bet most of those who called this method immoral is going to jump at the opportunity to buy it.

Your post at dp was the one that sparked this, I just think its funny how people can call things like placing your ads on other peoples websites immoral when its not even remotely illegal.

Though I was framing the question in a more general sense not just your mod, cause alot of people think proxy sites are on par with adult sites.

I think those people are the ones who haven't been successful (IMO). There has been many threads about if proxies are Illegal and no one can prove that they are Illegal. Proxies are pretty much in the same category of those video sites where the videos are hosted by websites like youtube and all that.

At the end of the day, we don't host any files and we don't break any websites TOS, that's all that matters.

Hmm I heard there are ways to block adults sites in proxies?

There are good uses for proxies actually. There are certain SSL sites in school that I need to visit. Somehow my school block certain ports like 2082 and 2086, the only way for me to access such sites is through a proxy. And that's how I got to know what a proxy is and how I could use it for a good cause Besides schools in my country don't block myspace or anything so no students in my country would use a proxy heh.

Morality and technology have nothing to do with teach other. It is what people use proxy servers for that is moral or not. If a person uses a proxy server to download childporn, obviously many would find that immoral. However, many people like myself use proxy servers for auditing purposes, and further more some people just like having the extra security. There are of course a large amount of people that use them for unsavory behavior like mass spamming or hacking, but the only thing I think we can be sure of is that it is the use of the technology not the technology itself that is moral or immoral.

A lot of people would say that large proxy networks like tor are immoral because administrators do nothing to log traffic and many don't even block traffic to porn sites. However, on the other hand, people would say that the government they live in filtering their internet is immoral, and that's what they're fighting.

Very well written Sagacious! I fully agree with what you said, nothing more to add in