nanog mailing list archives

Re: Digex transparent proxying


From: Karl Denninger <karl () mcs net>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 1998 10:28:01 -0500

On Sat, Jun 27, 1998 at 06:07:57AM -0400, Rich Sena wrote:
On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Karl Denninger wrote:
The proper response to that is for the people who have the right to determine
how, and by who, their content is viewed, to deny those people access to that
content unless they can determine who is viewing the content, how often it is
being viewed, and that the content being viewed by those people is actually 
correct and up-to-date because it is coming directly from their servers.

If the web-designer "understands" how caching actually works then this in
the other issues you raise are not really issues Karl.  HTTP Cache-Control
Headers work wonders when actually used.  Caching and Proxying are out
there and being actively used whether transparent or not - it's simply how
it is - a web designer should guarantee their stats and validity and
freshness of their data by using HTTP headers correctly.

And as soon as people doing advertising actually do this, then the proxy
becomes less useful, leading proxy owners to ignore the headers so that their
multi-thousand-dollar investments in these things are not wasted and
actually HURT performance (performance for the FIRST fetch through a proxy
is SLOWER - it HAS TO BE, since the proxy must first get the data before it
can pass it on).

Not if you can't count them at all!  A transparent proxy cache reports
nothing back to the originating site, ergo, those "views" are lost and 
never reported, even by inference.

Why would you want to rely on the proxy for accuracy - would you bill
advertisers by someone else's accounting methods? No - you would take
steps and measures to ensure that your's were not circumvented by a cache
or proxy.  Usually that means you talk to your content provider and make
sure they are parsing your meta tags on the server correctly so that some
of your content will be dynamic to any cache or proxy that they will
encounter on the way to any end user on the planet.

And how do you guarantee that the proxy server is parsing the tags and not
ignoring them?

See, that's the problem.

Proxies are fine WHERE CUSTOMERS HAVE AGREED TO THEIR USE.

STEALING someone's packet flow to force it through a proxy is NOT fine.

--
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