Could someone explain a few sentences what proxies are, if they are legal, and how I can use them?

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C#

Hello Codeproject,

It's me Deviant Sapphire again and I haven't been on here for a while. I've been searching on multiple websites about how to gain a couple of viewers on my livestream, and I thought I could just gain them by loading the stream in multiple browsers.

However, as I tested clearly that did not work, and I came to the logical conclusion that it had to do with my IP address, and it only adds viewers on each IP address. So, I did some Googling and found out that proxies are something I can use to do this.

Here are a couple of questions:
- What are proxies?
- Are proxies safe?
- Can I link a proxy to a webbrowser control?
- Are proxies legal?

Oh, also before you think I am going to make a bot to gain my popularity on livestreaming this is not the case. I just want to feel more confident streaming, and learning a bit more about the Internet.

Thanks a lot even for reading this,

- Deviant

Edit: Any short links to information about them and C# are appreciated.