Are you a paranoid like me, in a network with the internet gateway server handled by some busybody admin? Or perhaps your firewall blocked your favorite sites? The administrator decide to limit your office browsing capacity to 16kbps only? I've been there.

Luckily I have an SSH account in some servers. I assume you also have it. If you don't, you can ask SSH access from your hosting company. Or if you have a friend owning a dedicated server, you can buy him a beer and ask for some access.

Now first, fire up your PuTTY!

You probably already your connection saved. But before start opening connection to your server, let's make some changes first. Open the menu Connection » SSH » Tunnels.

Now enter the port you want to open at your computer side, in the Source port. Usually you can use high-numbered ports like 48000. And then check on the 'Dynamic'. Leave anything else intact. Click on the Add button. You will see D48000 at the Forwarded ports field.

Now let's connect to the server. I assume you already familiar with this process. Once connected, go to your browser (I assume we use Mozilla Firefox) and go to your proxy settings. Click on the Manual Proxy configuration. In the SOCKS Host, enter "localhost" and 48000 for the Port.

If there's no problem, you can start browse your favourite sites now!