Port 8118 Proxies in the UAE

Besides all that proxy action going down in China, there have also been numerous flash mobs of port 8118 proxies lately in Muslim countries, especially the United Arab Emirates. But don't go rushing off to the List to find any. At the moment there's only one live port 8118 proxy in there.

Here is the breakdown by country. You can see the UAE (listed as AE below) is responsible for half of the total count.


They show up in groups and then they're gone, but if you can catch one on the first or second page, chances are it's alive.

8118 is well-known as the default port for Privoxy. In my experience, it's barely in the top twenty-five ports. As a matter of fact, it was #25 last time I checked. And when I checked, there were less than 8,000 total in the database.

Of those, about 2800 were in the UAE. 96% were listed this year. Of that number, 99.7% (2675) were listed since June first, which definitely qualifies as a flash mob.

Here is the breakdown by city...


It is definitely following the population of the UAE, but then these data always do.

My gut feeling is this is a symptom of the "Arab Spring", although the UAE has seen little civil unrest on that front. Perhaps they're opening their ports for their neighbors.

Or maybe they're just downloading porn protecting their privacy with Bit Torrent, since Privoxy seems to be a common Bit Torrent helper program.

Whatever the reason, they are there (when they're there), they're fast, and they're High Anon. If you find one, you might get an hour out of it.