Neil Harris wrote:
How about doing SSL via a non-standard port, which will miss the proxies _if_ the transparent proxying simply uses packet filtering at the network side to detect proxyable traffic?
From reading between the lines, it seems AOL does _not_ use packet filtering; they've just configured their standard browser to use their proxies by default. This means that:
* Installing a different browser bypasses the proxies.
* HTTPS bypasses the proxies.
* Changing the browser configuration _might_ bypass the proxies (unless they've locked it down somehow; I don't really know).
* Using a nonstandard port for HTTP does _not_ bypass the proxies.