As a side effect of the Iranian Student's visit to Current Events, I was reminded by R.L. of the existance of anonymous proxy servers. I presume that most Internet scams, viruses, spam, and al Qaeda chat rooms owe their origins to anonymous proxy servers. I checked out a couple of lists and was surprised by the countries that host these servers. I did some quick statistics from one page and discovered the following:

Vietnam 14
China 10
United States 5
Brazil 3
Algeria 2
Egypt 1
Italy 1
Malaysia 1
Great Britain 1
Argentina 1
Mexico 1
Venezuela 1
Taiwan 1
Sweden 1

My guess is the countries with single hits are examples of a computer that was turned into a zombie by random hackers. Those anonymous proxy servers will go away after someone rebuilds their OS or stops paying their monthly ISP fee. The two servers in Algeria could be working for al Qaeda. The 3 in Brazil and 5 in the US are probably a mixed bag (criminals, terrorists, hackers, you name it). The 10 in China is because everything goes in China, where everyone is trying to beat the system. But here's the mystery: Why is there 14 in Vietnam? What's going in Vietnam with the Internet?

Gary