If you have no green proxies, and all working ones are displayed with black dots, it means that your provider adds your IP address to outgoing requests, deliberately making it impossible to surf anonymously. Unfortunately we can’t do anything about this. (It is also possible that your provider adds your IP only to the connections on certain ports (usually, port 80 will be one of them). As a result, only the proxies on some exotic ports will be anonymous for you, and all others will be non-anonymous).
You can still use non-anonymous proxies, if you like. You can, for example, add the proxy provided by your ISP to the list and switch to it when you need a fast connection and don’t need the anonymity. A4Proxy uses the proxy which is set as default in the proxy list: right-click the proxy you like and choose “Set As Default” in the local menu that will appear. The selected proxy will be used for all communications, no matter if it is anonymous or not. Note, that the option “Use a new proxy for each request” (Proxy Options tab) must be disabled in this case! When it is enabled, A4Proxy changes proxies automatically and never uses non-anonymous ones (so, in the absence of any green proxies, that option makes it impossible for A4Proxy to work). Also, the option “Check for anonymity on each request” must be disabled as well (it prevents you from surfing through non-anonymous proxies).
Non-anonymous proxies function in a very similar way to the anonymous ones. The majority of websites, in fact, will not be able to distinguish between the two. In both cases, the connection to the website is made by the proxy, and it is the proxy’s IP address that the website writes into its logfiles. The difference is that the non-anonymous proxy will send to the site an additional information field, containing your true IP address (so-called “Client-IP” field). That field is not required from the technical point of view, and in fact it is normally never used. If the particular website has been configured to recognize that field, it will see the actual visitor’s address. However, most sites do not pay any attention to the Client-IP field, so you will be quite anonymous to them.
And you can confuse those sites that do analyze the Client-IP field by enabling the option in A4Proxy called “Simulate Client-IP” (Proxy Options tab). When that option is on, A4Proxy will generate a random number and add it to the Client-IP field in the request; in most cases it would result in the field having two different numbers: one is fake, from A4Proxy, and the other added by your ISP.
You can test all these things on a good checker page, e.g. here: http://www.rental-web.com/~azuma/cgi-bin/env.cgi Pay attention to the Remote Address, Client-IP and X-Forwarded-For-IP fields (some proxies or ISPs use X-Forwarded-For-IP instead of Client-IP field. There isn’t any difference between them, and all I said above still applies). Compare the content of the pages when you run A4Proxy in the Direct Connection mode and in the standard, non-direct mode.