I live in a country with a large national firewall. In order to get to subversive websites like wikipedia, I need to go through a proxy server.

My current method is to grab proxy servers from proxy4free.com and test them one at a time in firefox. This takes a long time.

I'd like to make a program that pings restricted websites through a series of proxy servers, and updates the results, giving the proxy with the fastest ping rate first.

The program should have many other features, but auto pinging through the proxy is the starting point. anyone have an idea of where to start?

Would it not be easier (and possibly better) to just use tor and privoxy? Check it out here: http://tor.eff.org/index.html.en. There are pre-built .rpm(s) for Mandriva.