Proxy services are helpful tools to get around censorship, if you find that your country , school , company , ISP or others are blocking you from accessing the content you wish to see or hear.

You may already have seen Raymond or others recommend the free VPN service Hotspot Shield : http://www.anchorfree.com/downloads/hotspot-shield/ and it is indeed a good service although it's speed is not always that great. Anything will run through it though, because it's a VPN - Your program don't need to support it.

I've have tried many more so I though I'd give you a list of the ones I have tried and do a quick review and finally give some some tips and tricks for using them.

Hopster http://www.hopster.com - A SOCKS service. The Free version is with it's 2 kb/s very SLOW.

HTTP-Tunnel http://www.http-tunnel.com - Another SOCKS service. Speed is also quite slow.

http://internetfreedom.org/ - A consortium of anti-censorship companies and organisations.
They offer :

FirePhoenix - http://firephoenix.edoors.com/ - A VPN service. I found it very hard to use and get to work on account of the fact that the user interface is only available in chinese.
Running the documentation through Google Translate helped though and I got it to work by using the middle mode of the three modes of operation it has. Speed wasn't great.
It might go better if I could read chinese.

GTunnel - http://gardennetworks.org/download - A HTTP and SOCKY proxy service. It can run traffic through the TOR network or Skype Super nodes if needed, which I found impressive. What didn't impress me what the reliability of the connection .. some object on websites wouldn't load and speed was erractic. YMMV.

Gpass - http://gpass1.com/gpass/ - A very advanced HTTP , SOCKS service , with the option to use the TOR network , Skype Super nodes and it has the ability to encapsulate other programs and send their traffic through the Gpass service encrypted or another Socks 5 proxy (not encrypted).
It's speed varies from fair to good (I've seen from 300kb/s to 2000kb/s). I recommend this service.

UltraSurf - http://www.ultrareach.com/ - A HTTP proxy service. Very easy to use. It's speed is good ( I get from 500kb/s to 1500kb/s) - It seems the service uses various tricks like serverside compression and cache to improve speed, which is a good thing. Also recommended.

Freegate - http://us.dongtaiwang.com/loc/download_en.php - A HTTP and SOCKS 5 proxy service.
Like Ultrasurf (and maybe Gpass too) it uses various serverside tricks to increase speed.
Speed of this service is Great ! - I've seen about 3000 kb/s to 5500kb/s
Recommended.

If you need a good proxy service I suggest you try Hotspot Shield , Gpass , UltraSurf or FreeGate.


Also to get the best speed possible , I suggest you only use them for the sites that are blocked to you and surf without the proxy enabled on the rest of the internet.
The best and easiest way to do this is to use the FoxyProxy addon for Firefox http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/

With it , you can set patterns using wildcards and/or regular expressions to match sites or individual files to use proxies with.
This can be used to only proxy what actually triggers the blocking of the site and run the rest of the traffic through your connection at full speed as normal.

F.x to get access to Pandora from outside the US you can whitelist :
http://www.pandora.com/*
(If you sometimes access pandora using http://pandora.com/ you need to whitelist that too)

and blacklist :
http://www.pandora.com/*.*

This proxies everything without a file extension from www.pandora.com since the location check is on the frontpage http://www.pandora.com and some of the files served from the pandora webserver without file extensions.
Album art and the music is served from content servers and not from the www server.

To get around the country-based blocking on sites like Hulu.com and ABC.com (which offers TV-series and movies for free , to US-residents only) or other sites that use flash or other plugins you need to use a VPN service or encapsulate all traffic from your browser and send it through a SOCKS proxy.

To encapsulate a program you can use Gpass or another tool like Sockscap 2.40 (free but hard to find) , Freecap (free) or Proxifier (trial)
You can then run all traffic from the encapsulated program through the SOCKS proxy.

If you can find way to avoid encapsulating the browser to use flash sites , I would love to know.
Some of the more content intensive sites would run much faster if only the blocked part was run through the proxy , which is not possible to do when you encapsulate the program.

If you know of any sites , that block or censor certain users based on location , I would like to know of them.

The ones I know about are :

Pandora.com - Blocks non-US users

ABC.com - Blocks non-US users

Hulu.com - Blocks non-US users

Gametap.com service - Non-US users see far fewer free games to choose from (No free Psychonauts
:( .. unless you use a SOCKS proxy or VPN :) )

steampowered.com - non-US users can't buy certain games and prices are higher (sometimes much higher) outside of the US.

Zattoo.com - Block users outside of certain European countries - The site offers livestreaming of european TV-channels. Finding a proxy service with a european endpoint can be hard , but I think it could be possible to find one that exits in the UK.


Also if you find yourself blocked out from sites by use of a DNS block (where the DNS server you use , refuses to resolve certain sites to ip-addresses) you can memorize and type in the ip-adress directly or use another DNS server like f.x. OpenDNS.com (much easier) - It's free too.

Don't just accept censorship. Where there is a will , there is a way.