How Do Redirection Sites Work?

Question

I've always had a question on my head about sites like Anonym.To, about:

• How do they work?
• What they are used for?

Answer 1

1. That is easy. The website acts as both a server (to you) and a client (to the target website).

2. They claim to protect user anonymity (prevent cookies, javascript and the target thinks the user is the server, not you)

At work, we find them very useful to verify that our site is viewed correctly from elsewhere. Ie, if our local servers screws locally, when can verify that it still runs remotely.

I can write you up a (very) simple example:

<?php
    if(isset($_GET['url'])){
        echo file_get_contents($_GET['url']);
    }else{
        ?><form>
             <input type="text" name="url" value="http://stackoverflow.com/"&gt;
             <input type="submit" value="Go!">
        </form><?php
    }
?>

If you run that code from some server, and navigate to stackoverflow.com, you'll notice that you're logged out: stackoverflow thinks that that server is the end user, not you!