Hi
wwasicek, and welcome aboard.
If you have an ISP limiting your bandwidth usage with any sort of caps or quotas, proxying does not help with that problem, as you will be using the same bandwidth whether your traffic goes directly peer-to-peer or indirectly peer-to-proxy-to-peer. Your ISP always knows how much bandwidth you use as every data packet you send and receive goes through them.
A firewall is a sort of doorman watching the traffic between your computer and Internet. Its main purpose is to detect and block malicious connection attempts coming from Internet. Personal firewalls often also watch your outgoing traffic which may help you to detect the activity of malicious software (trojan horses, 'call-home' spyware) running in your computer. Depending on how your firewall is configured and what p2p software you are using, a firewall may provide some protection against things like port probing but in itself a firewall cannot provide any serious privacy protection for a p2p user.
Some ISPs throttle the traffic to the standard ports used by popular p2p programs. Luckily many programs (like eMule and WASTE) allow you to choose the ports you use and thus circumvent port-specific throttling.
If you want more security in your filesharing, you need to use software like WASTE that encrypts all traffic from outsiders, including your ISP. WASTE works fine for sharing with a small trusted group of friends. Your ISP will still know how much bandwidth you use but they (nor anybody else outside the trusted group) have no way of telling what you are uploading and downloading.
I don't know
www.anonx.com so I can't comment on that. I would be quite surprised though if they would be able to provide an all-protocol proxy service with full broadband speeds for 5.95 USD/month.
- tg
