Secure browsing using a local SOCKS proxy server (on desktop or mobile) and an always free OCI compute instance as SSH server

Oracle provides several services as 'always free'. In contrast to Azure and Amazon, these include compute instances which remain 'forever' free to use. Although there are some limitations on CPU, disk, network resources, these instances are ideal to use as a remote SSH server and with a little effort a connection target for a locally running SOCKS proxy server. When you configure a browser to use that SOCKS proxy, your web traffic will be send through a secure channel (SSH tunnel) towards the OCI instance and the OCI instance will appear as your browsers client IP for remote sites you visit.

An SSH server in combination with a locally running SOCKS proxy server allows you to browse the internet more securely from for example public Wifi hotspots by routing your internet traffic through a secure channel via a remote server. If you combine this with DNS over HTTPS, which is currently at least available in Firefox and Chrome, it will be more difficult for other parties to analyse your traffic. Also it allows you to access resources from a server outside of a company network which can have benefits for example if you want to check how a company hosted service looks to a customer from the outside. Having a server in a different country as a proxy can also have benefits if certain services are only available from a certain country (a similar benefit as using a VPN or using Tor) or as a means to circumvent censorship.

Do check what is allowed in your company, by your ISP and is legal within your country before using such techniques though. I of course don't want you to do anything illegal and blame me for it ;)

R and the Oracle database: Using dplyr / dbplyr with ROracle in Windows 10

R uses data extensively. Data often resides in a database. In this blog I will describe installing and using dplyr, dbplyr and ROracle on Windows 10 to access data from an Oracle database and use it in R.